My HiFi stories
Discovering music a second time — Part 2
My HiFi stories · Part 2 · Read Part 1 →
But the really interesting thing about this whole development is something else: the more intensely I return to HiFi, the less it is actually about HiFi for me.
It is about the music.
That may sound contradictory at first. You spend time on amplifiers, DACs, speakers, cables, power supplies and the right positioning — and eventually, those very things become less important. At least while you are listening. Because when it really works, the speakers eventually disappear and only the recording remains.
And that is exactly where something has changed for me. I listen differently today. When a recording suddenly creates a real space in front of you, you begin noticing things I never used to think about. Why is the voice standing exactly there? Why does one instrument seem far back and another very close? Why is a voice suddenly doubled? Why can I feel a bass even though it is not particularly loud?
In the past, I would probably just have said: sounds good.
Today, I want to know: why does it sound like that?
Space Oddity: hearing two places
One of those moments came with a piece almost everyone probably knows: David Bowie’s Space Oddity from 1969. Major Tom has long been part of pop culture. Peter Schilling revisited the character in 1982 with Major Tom (völlig losgelöst), turning it into one of the great songs of the Neue Deutsche Welle.
In Bowie’s song, the story begins with communication between Ground Control and Major Tom. And of course, even before, I had heard that something came from the right and something from the left. It is not as though I had suddenly started hearing with one ear. 😉
But on a really good system, something different happens: you no longer simply hear left and right. You hear two places.
Suddenly, that communication between Ground Control and Major Tom becomes spatial. The voices are not simply somewhere in the stereo panorama. A scene emerges. That was when I first properly stumbled over the idea that a mix is not there only to make a song sound good.
A mix can tell a story too.
Where do I place each voice? Very close to the listener, or further away? Left, right or precisely in the centre? Where is each instrument? How large is the space around it? What happens when that space grows or shrinks during the piece? How far apart are two voices?
Of course, you can simply listen to Space Oddity and love it. I did for decades. But when a system reproduces those spatial details clearly, you eventually begin wondering why someone shaped a recording exactly that way.
And for me, that now often begins a little journey. Who produced it? How was it recorded? Who mixed it? Was what I am hearing done deliberately? Why is that instrument standing exactly there? What did the producer want to achieve?
What is the song actually telling me?
But eventually, a second thing joined that curiosity.
Today, I do not only want to understand why a song sounds the way it does. I also want to understand what it is actually telling me.
That sounds rather obvious at first. Songs have lyrics, after all. But looking back at my youth, I spent surprisingly little time really exploring them. Of course, I knew parts of the words, sang along and, above all, had a feeling for a song. But I did not research why it was written, what story lay behind it or what the musicians were trying to tell us.
There was no internet, after all. You had the record or cassette, perhaps a booklet, the radio and music magazines. And some things you simply did not know.
Take Genesis, for example. I have been listening to some of these songs for more than 40 years — and today I realise that I sometimes did not know their actual stories at all.
Mama: a laugh takes on another meaning
Let us take the Genesis song Mama from 1983, with Phil Collins on lead vocals. Even then, I found the song dark, oppressive and somehow unsettling. But I had no idea what Genesis were actually telling us.
It is not about a mother, as the title might suggest. The band described the idea as the story of a young man projecting a kind of mother fixation onto an older sex worker. He seeks a closeness she cannot give him, and that desire increasingly becomes an obsession.
Knowing that, you suddenly hear a song you have known for decades differently again.
And something else takes on an entirely different meaning too: that strange laugh from Phil Collins, which I already found incredibly distinctive back then. That almost crazed “Ha-ha-ha…”
For that laugh, Collins had drawn inspiration from The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. But knowing the story of Mama, it suddenly feels like more than an unusual effect. To me today, it sounds as though the character Collins embodies in that moment is increasingly losing control.
I had known the laugh for 40 years. Only now am I discovering what it might mean within this story.
Tonight, Tonight, Tonight: a feeling from back then
Then there is Tonight, Tonight, Tonight. Another Genesis song I have known since my youth. Again, I did not really know what it was about at the time. Even so, that recurring “Tonight” already felt strange to me. It always gave me this feeling:
Tonight. Perhaps for the last time.
I probably could not have explained why back then.
Today, I know the song is about drug addiction. About someone desperately seeking the next fix while also wanting to escape that cycle. Suddenly, that “Tonight” takes on a very different weight.
But what fascinates me almost more is that my feeling back then apparently was not so far off.
I had not analysed the lyrics. I did not know the story behind them. I knew nothing about what the musicians had been thinking as they created it. Yet apparently the music had told me something of it anyway.
Perhaps that is one of music’s great abilities. A story is not only in the words. It is in a melody, a rhythm, the way someone sings, a sound — and sometimes even where a voice stands in the room.
When words, music and sound come together
That is exactly where these two things come together again for me.
With Space Oddity, I discover that even a voice’s position in space can be part of a story. With Mama, I suddenly understand why that laugh unsettled me as a teenager. And with Tonight, Tonight, Tonight, I realise that a song apparently gave me a feeling back then whose actual story I only understood decades later.
Since then, it has happened more and more often. I put on something I think I know inside out, and suddenly hear a detail I never noticed before. Then I become curious. Who produced it? How was it recorded? Why was it mixed this way? And finally: what is this song actually telling me?
Suddenly, words, music, recording, production and sound belong together for me.
And a song I may have heard a hundred times really becomes something new again.
By now, that is almost as exciting to me as discovering new music. Sometimes perhaps even more exciting. Because these old songs contain something a new release cannot have: my own memories.
I still know when and where I heard some of these pieces. They played on cassettes, later on CDs, some on my Sony Walkman. They belong to particular times in my life. And today, I sit in front of a completely different system, hear the same song — and discover details and stories in it that passed me by entirely back then.
The song has not changed. But the person in front of it has.
HiFi brings me closer to the music
Perhaps that is now the loveliest thing about my rediscovered HiFi hobby. Of course, I still enjoy optimising something, building a speaker or finding out whether a change is actually audible. And my system will probably never really be “finished”. 😉
But that is no longer what matters most.
For me, HiFi is not a matter of being a technology nerd. Quite the opposite: it has brought me closer to the music again.
I constantly discover new artists and albums today. At the same time, I rediscover music that has accompanied me since my youth.
And sometimes, that second discovery is almost more exciting than the first.
What remains with me
The same songs, a different way of listening
The songs are still the same. But I listen differently today.