I did not grow up poor. We did not march 6 miles each way to school and back. We, thank goodness, had food on our table, clothes on our backs, and we had a 1955 2 door Oldsmobile. We did not live in the lap of luxury, but we were well taken care of as far as essentials were concerned.
That being said, all of us kids worked from an early age. In my case that was 12 years old. My main areas of expertise were snow shoveling in the winter, leaf raking in the fall, grass cutting in the summer and of course the ever present ‘paper’ (newspaper) route.
The best part about the paper route was that growing up in the city my route was three very tall apartment buildings, which could be navigated by taking the elevator up to the tenth floor than dispersing the papers as you walked down to the lobby. I remember having 88 apartments on my route. With tips the paper-route rewarded me with about 10 dollars a week. Not bad for a twelve year old in 1958!
We were not given an allowance the way many kids were, instead we earned our own money and were allowed to do with it ‘pretty much’ what we wanted. What I wanted more than anything was a grey and black brand new RCA phonograph that I had seen in one of the department store windows (Gimbels). By the time I was 14 I had saved over 60 dollars and was raring to go. Took the number One bus, changed for the number 3A, got to the store, walked up to the counter, pocket full of cash and decided this was the big day.
The guy behind the counter was ‘cool’, he showed me a model that could play 78s, 45s, and and even the 33s. All you had to do was change the spindle for the 45s, click a level on the side for either 33 or 78, put the record or records, (you could stack your records to play one after the other) and there you are. Entertainment with a capital E!
I loved that machine. It did it all, and with a little of the left over earnings I bought my first batch of records. Heaven on vinyl….
Skip ahead to last month, a friend of mine is a stereophile…let’ s call him Bo. He is a nut for hi-end audio equipment. I asked him what a great stereo system might run. I suggested perhaps 5 grand. He looked at me and laughed. That’s when the fun began. He pulled out some of his audio magazines (Stereophile actually being the name of one of them) and we went straight to the ‘gear section’. That was when I realized like many things in this world the audiophiles had gone stupendously Nuts…with a capital N!
Let’s begin with speakers. The sound you hear is what most of us think defines the quality of your system. The top end here was the YG ACOUSTICS GEMINI. They are 215 cm tall (7 feet), weigh 455kg (1,000 pounds) and here is the big part…if you want a pair, they will set you back 900,000 Euros. I will not compute that into dollars but you’re looking at around a nice tidy sum of one million balloons. Don’t fret, that’s for the pair!
Now that you are on your way to building your system, let’s go to the turntable. Most of the experts we spoke with thought that the KLIMAX LP 12 was tops in the field. It will set you back a bit over 31 thousand greenbacks. Come on, you can handle 31 K…after all it’s a lovely turntable!
Let’s move to amplifiers. These bad-boys can be costly to say the least. The number one amp in the known universe is the Pivetta Opera Only. This monster will turn out 120,000 watts, sits eight feet tall and is a hefty 3307 pounds. The price? Well, that’s another story…2.2 MILLION (But at this point who is counting!)
We could go on and on but if you have all the dough of a Russian oligarch you will spend a little over 3.8 million dollars. Of course you can go cheaper, but hey, if you’ve got it…spend it.
One final thing to remember, Gimbels does not handle these systems and unfortunately they are out of business so you can’t even get the 49 dollar beauty I had.
But you can always pony up the dough, or get an inferior system or do like all us old beatniks do… stream music on your iPhone 8
