One of the things that always amazes me about the hi-fi cult is how unrepresented it is in culture at large, at least in American culture today. Things that seem so iconic as to be almost banal to those of us in the cult – Wilson speakers, VPI turntables, Nelson Pass-designed anything – are virtually unknown to your average Joe and Mary Earbuds.
I think this is the main reason many audiophiles of a certain age have such nostalgia for the 60’s and 70’s, a time when the idea of the “hi-fi” exploded into a profitable marketplace propagated by the advertising gods as an essential feather in the lifestyle cap of The Stylish Man.
(BTW it’s funny that the other insular male-oriented cult to which I belong – for those of you who don’t know this about me I have a dual Boxing/Audio cult passport – has a similar nostalgia for the same era. Big fights in exotic locales with epic titles – The Rumble in the Jungle… The Sunshine Showdown… The Thrilla in Manila. George Plimpton and Norman Mailer writing their bylines for Playboy, coming straight from their joint review of a Linn turntable…)
The dearth of mainstream audiophile representation doesn’t stop me from looking, however, and every now and then I catch a glimmer. The last that I can remember was Ryan Gosling’s jazz pianist caricature in La La Land learning to play what in my memory was a Miles tune (believe it was a two-eye Columbia pressing) using an AR the Turntable.
La La Land came out in 2016, so it’s been a good three years in between audiophile pop culture sightings for me, but the drought was broken last night when I took my daughter to our local theater to see the new murder mystery romp, Knives Out. About midway through the film there’s a transition to some classical piano and then a very tight shot of a McIntosh CD player. I’m not familiar enough with Mac gear (or CD players honestly) to know which one, but oh man there it was – a gratuitous three or four frames of an iconic American hi-fi brand in a fucking Lionsgate production directed by a guy whose day job is ruling over the biggest franchise in the galaxy. That’s the big-time baby. Go check it out. Bloody good film too innit. Better than La La Land.