A short story which is also a quasi goodbye post

(Music: the lovely 1984 recording by Arthur Moreira Lima of Ernesto Nazareth's Brazilian waltzes and tangos. A disc I bought in another life at a used CDs' stall and am never ever tired of. Even on hi-fi systems.)

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One.

Well I had this iPhone 5 given to me by my wife. I never thought of using it for storing music, even though I am what you anglophones call a commuter and spend time on trains and Metros. Instead, I love taking hot baths and trying to stop my mind and go back inside some maternal womb - as Woody Allen said, anyone's womb. So one day, while at the phone with a member here, my iPhone slipped into the hot, soapy water. Nothing could save it. It was lost and I had to think of another one.

Having seen and appreciated an Asus Zenfone 2 ML551 of a friend, my wife was so kind to give me one. It lasted six months until one day it fell face down on the ground and the touch screen was so compromised that it was useless to think about repairing it. It seems I have a bad karma with cellphones, but this is only the beginning of the story. I had bought a similar cellphone for my wife because her iPhone 4 was a) small, b) couldn't be updated or upgraded anymore and some apps already were announced as soon no more working on it. So, to cut a short story shorter, I took her 64 gigabyte Zenfone and bought her a smaller, more agile one.

Now, you find yourself with a cellphone with 64 giga store capacity and what do you do? You start thinking about putting some music in it. At first you think of just something you love specially to listen to while commuting, in the cold morning when you sit in a train and everybody around you is either cladded in black trendy clothes and is sucked into the screen of his/her smartphone or is a flock of faculty youngsters laughing at professors or discussing upcoming exams and talk loud and laugh but at least are not zombie-faced lost in a 5.5" luminous coffin. So I started thinking about how to do it, but my phone is Android and my Mac is a Mac and they will communicate properly much after Israel and Palestine will have found some agreement. But in the end, I did it: with a small app for the phone called Double Twist and its corresponding app for the Mac. I couldn't resist the ease with which I could transfer all my music from iTunes [never ever talk bad of iTunes: it's almost perfection in the absurdity of computer worlds] to Asus, and ended up with all of it in perfect order, with artwork and an absolutely unsuspectedly good pair of earplugs on my trips to the city of Milano which, in spite of Nigel's courteous admiration, is a repellent, anxiogenous rat-hole only devoted to money making and personal exhibition.

All my music on the Asus is either mp3 auto-rips from Amazon, AACs bought from iTunes or AACs rips from my own CDs. Not only we're not talking Hi-Def here, but we're talking that compressed thrash that Michael Fremer, the God of Audio, states he's able to recognize while sleeping in the midst of a metallurgic factory in full activity compared to any non-compressed format. Well, this morning I was listening to some of that thrash (David Chesky's The girl from Guantanamo, a nice musical poem for soprano and small orchestra, a piece I used to hear infinite times when it was trendy at my friend's audio store and he played it on systems costing like apartments [for people that actually lives in apartments costing like stereo systems]) and I realized that I had never heard it so well. The voice was beautiful, true, the stereo perspective wide and realistic, the acoustic instruments (mainly pizzicato strings and woodwinds, plus an occasional hand clap), the bass deep and controlled, the treble clean and airy and believable. I na word, everything I had always hoped to find in a system and have struggled (and spent, the f*uck with it!) to obtain. Even the mp3 of Smoke on the water, that I played on the way back after seven hours of teaching, just to bring back some irreverent fun into that twilight hour of the day, sounded perfect: the riff was rich, the drums was drums, and I could hear the pick work on the bass entry, like if it was not a rough recording of an overrated piece of thrash of 45 years ago but a good, enjoyable and believable piece of irreverent, funny rock, well worth listening.

Two.

At home, I wanted to play some more music. I was hungry with that same fun and quality enjoyment. But my Royal stereo – Naim's CDX2, SN, two extra PSUs, NAC A5 and Ovator S-400s – couldn't come close to that experience; it was just flat, aggressive, modestly detailed, a zero spatial plastic reproduction. And I knew (what most kind guys here seem to be completely unaware of) that no setup and no tweaking on this unlucky planet could have changed that sound into something listenable, enjoyable. My 16/44.1 CDs sounded like I had some problem in my ears. And the problem in my ears is that it is a stereo system inside a domestic room: something that will never be able to work properly, under any circumstance. To me, this is now a given fact, a plain truth. A system, and a costly one, is HDMI: a hoax, a disappointment and a mission impossible. No responsible, no-one  guilty, nothing I didn't know before; but a simple acknowledgement that all efforts are vain, are money down the toilet: stereo systems will never sound as good as an mp3 inside a good pair of earplugs from a decently designed telephone. Speakers in a domestic environment cannot cope with the infinity of acoustical, unmanageable issues; spatial details get lost in the real space but are preserved in the perfect rendition of two things inside the ears; and, the most humiliating thing of all, although I have tried headphones costing around €1000, no one sounded as good as the free pair of plugs I got with my Asus. And the iPhone4 I was almost tempted to ditch is, perhaps, even better. iTunes is not perfect, but a tad clearer and luminous than double Twist.

Three.

So what am I doing here now? I have no advice to give anyone anymore, I am not interested in upgrading or spending and I know that each day, when I feel a tickling, pleasant itch to buy some new box or cable, it is not anything else than an induced need leading me nowhere. So, with the rock-solid conviction that most of what I wrote until now will sound like drunken bulls*it to most (well, I am not drunk), I have nothing left to say than good night to everybody, not knowing if we'll ever meet again on the congested, delusional, sometimes unreadable pages of this loony bin.

Cheers

M.