I think that this topic is very subjective without any one answer. For me, the golden age was in the late 50s with push pull tube amplifiers that allowed the change from horn to dynamnic speakers. I was just a boy when I built my first tube amp from a kit, you can talk about the merits of point to point soldering buy my first couple attempts was pure neighborhood soldering. I went on to build speakers(again from a kit, bought the enclosers and tried to match drivers and crossovers). It's not that the equipment was that good compared to the present but at that time it was such a large leap from low output amplifiers and colored horn loudspeakers.
When is the golden age of high-end audio?
When is the golden age of high-end audio? When and where is the exaltation of music by the component and the component by the sound, the exaltation of buying and consumption through the sumptuary spending of high-end production? Whatever the subjugation of high-end audio to the management of capital (but this aspect of the question--that of the social and economic impact of high-end audio--always remains unresolved and fundamentally insoluble), high-end audio always had a more than subjugated function, it was a microphone held out to the universe of great music, great orchestras, great conductors, it was for a moment their glorious imaginary, that of a technical one, but an expanding one. But the universe of high-end audio is no longer this one: now it is a world that is both saturated and involuted. At some point, high-end audio lost both its triumphal imaginary and, from being in some sense a glorious microphone and playback device, it passed in some sense to the stage of mourning.
There is no longer a golden age of high-end audio: there is only its obscene and empty form. And high-end audio advertising and marketing is the illustration of this saturated and empty form.
Gone is the happy and displayed high-end component, now that it is suddenly like a man who has lost its shadow. Thus the high-end store these days closely resembles a funeral home--with the funereal luxury of the component buried, transparent in a black light, like a sarcophagus. Everything is sepulchral--white, bnlack, salmon, marble. Built like a tank--in deep, snobbish, dull black. Total absence of colors.
So, I ask you, when and where was the golden age of high-end audio. What individual component, in your opinion, is the testimony of a triumphant artistic-technical industry that was at its apogee? Why not save this golden age from decomposition? Later the historians and maybe our grandchildren will rediscover it, at the same time that they discover a culture that chose to bury it in order to definitively sell its soul to the devil, to bury its seduction and its artifices as if it were already consecrating them to another world.
There is no longer a golden age of high-end audio: there is only its obscene and empty form. And high-end audio advertising and marketing is the illustration of this saturated and empty form.
Gone is the happy and displayed high-end component, now that it is suddenly like a man who has lost its shadow. Thus the high-end store these days closely resembles a funeral home--with the funereal luxury of the component buried, transparent in a black light, like a sarcophagus. Everything is sepulchral--white, bnlack, salmon, marble. Built like a tank--in deep, snobbish, dull black. Total absence of colors.
So, I ask you, when and where was the golden age of high-end audio. What individual component, in your opinion, is the testimony of a triumphant artistic-technical industry that was at its apogee? Why not save this golden age from decomposition? Later the historians and maybe our grandchildren will rediscover it, at the same time that they discover a culture that chose to bury it in order to definitively sell its soul to the devil, to bury its seduction and its artifices as if it were already consecrating them to another world.
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- 20 posts total
- 20 posts total