This weekend I completed a lifelong dream: designing and setting up an analog HiFi vinyl sound system. The equivalent of a coming of age story but for your thirties. I can’t describe how happy I am and how insane the speakers sound. I’d argue it also looks absolutely fire. Vinyl is allowing me to recover a sense of place and slack that streaming made me lose.

In collecting music

Music is an integral part of my life. My grandfather introduced me to jazz, my mother to rock and my uncle to electronic. Hence, I wanted to build this setup since I was a kid, a sick sound system was a hallmark of being an accomplished adult. Collecting music itself is a passion of mine. The first albums I recall having my mom buy for me were Millennium by the Backstreet Boys and Aaron Carter’s, Aaron’s Party (Come Get It). I guess when you start at rock bottom the only place to go is up.Joke’s aside, I could make an argument for why Millennium is actually a great album. For Aaron, unfortunately, nothing seems to have worked according to plan :( Technology went on and iTunes became a thing. Way before getting an iPod, I already had a solid collection from my mom’s CD rips as well as MP3s my friends shared with me. I spent HOURS organizing my music library. Back in the day, finding a square non-pixelated image of an album cover was an endeavor. Everything changed with Spotify. I go into a lot of details and rants about music consumption here. TLDR or a summary if you can’t read Spanish: convenience and access are terrific but we’ve lost something in the way.

Based on this dream, I had been collecting vinyl records for a while. In 2018, I went on a backpacking trip to Asia. In Tokyo I purchased my first two: Nature by Fumio Itabashi and Bombonera EP from Airbus, an obscure Japanese jazz fusion band that you won’t be able to find in Spotify. Taste can certainly be refined. The why I would buy this heavy and very not practical form of media during a backpacking trip escapes me. Sometimes you gotta do things just for the lore. Since then, I’ve slowly been building up a modest collection, buying one vinyl here and getting another one gifted there. However, neither me nor anyone I knew had a turntable to actually play them. In my mind the goal was clear: when my life felt stable enough to commit to a full sound system not just a crappy suitcase record player I would make my dream a reality. Very recently, I received spectacular news that basically guarantee my peace for the upcoming years.

Designing a HiFi sound system

Now, buying a turntable and designing a sound system are two extremely different tasks. Yes, you can simply throw money at the problem, but where is the fun in that?You’ll spend the money regardless. HiFi setups are expensive af. For a true high fidelity (HiFi) system, besides the turntable you need a pre-amp, meters of RCA and ground cables, an amplifier and some serious speakers. Your bluetooth speaker won’t cut it. But more importantly, these things are massive and warrant a bit of a home renovation. For our flat, this meant getting stern feedback from my wife. The first design involved this gorgeous Glue & Lagom cabinet, locally sourced from a guy here in Austin.

Although it fitted well with our hanging planters, such large speakers in the middle of the living room made exactly zero sense. Moreover, what about the extensibility of the system? Shouldn’t we be able to use the speakers for watching movies and for throwing parties? Also, yeah my diagram looks fine but it would have looked incredibly crowded. My wife made me realize this mistake before I committed a grand for the cabinet. Not only is she an incredible thinking partner, but she also has objectively better taste than me. Can’t stress how amazing she is. The second design involved placing the speakers next to the TV and giving both the turntable and the vinyls some room to breath.

In this setup, no decision was left to chance. The challenge was figuring out how to wire two 8 meter (25ft) long RCA cables though a door and across the room without it looking fugly. The second challenge involved my wife having to accept two 7 inch speakers becoming a central piece of our living room.

The end-to-end process took me about a month, it involved researching, understanding the difference of phono and line levels, a supply chain procurement of specialized speaker stands and the building, particularly around cable management, by far the worst part but the most satisfying. Who needs TikTok brain rot when you can get the same dopamine hit organizing wires? For those who care, my full setup is:

• Turntable: Fluance RT85 Reference High Fidelity, with a Ortofon 2M Blue Cartridge that’s so sensible that every speck of dust can be heard. I might have to convert my living into clean room.
• Pre-amp: Fluance PA10 High Fidelity Phono. I hate that a pre-amp is needed, but once you understand what analog signals are, you’re like, ok yeah that makes sense.
• Speakers: Klipsch The Sevens (OGs) with their respective 24” KS stands. I’m absolutely in love with this product, seamlessly allowing us to switch between streaming from our phones, the TV where you can hear Walter White’s desperation and the turntable.
• Cabinet: Modway Render Mid-Century Modern 37”. Despite sounding fancy, this is by far the simplest component of the design, sourced from Amazon and assembled in the USA by yours truly.

The setup came out incredibly.Kudos to my friends Santi and Ro who helped a lot I wish I could teleport you, the reader, to my couch so that you could experience how nitid and clear it sounds. With a setup like this you also understand how much Spotify is ripping you off. Music sounds horrendous when you compare it to better services like BandCamp. Last, I’d also argue my renders look quite similar to how it turned out. I might have to brush up my perspective skills but this guy can still do technical drawings.

Recovering a sense of place and slack through vinyl

Audiophiles tend to be pedantic, arguing whether you can actually listen the difference in gold-plated wires. However, I swear you can truly hear Robin Pecknold’s perspiration in my copy of A Very Lonely Solstice. Perhaps I am hallucinating. But, I really don’t care. This is my system. The value comes not only from the music but from the challenge it was in designing and building it. From curating a worthy music collection. From the delayed gratification of waiting pretty much all my life for this adult achievement. These are the feelings of place and slack that we’ve lost with streaming, as Coco Krumme argues in her book: The False Promise of Optimization.

In an optimized modern world convenience and access are king. The act of consuming physical media is heresy, vinyl are not efficient. You have to stand up and flip it about every 20 minutes. If you don’t care for them, they will eventually scratch and your music will be lost, as well as the $20-50 USD that each one costs. If, God forbid, you touch the grooves when you pull it out of the cardboard packaging, you’ll be cursed with 7 years of bad sex. Streaming gives you access to almost all music in the world basically for free.Still not my Bombonera EP copy - how about that? Why on earth would you choose vinyl? Besides the audio quality, the inconvenience of the media is exactly the point. The physicality makes you interact with it. It’s not only the record but the art but the tastefully designed booklet. Moreover, analog signals are literally spellcasting; it’s runes etched in plastic. The original sounds vibrations are copied in a groove of a vinyl, you’re just playing it back through a microscopic needle that generates an analogous electromagnetic current. This physicality gives you and your music a sense of place; an acknowledgment of where the things come from.Carrying over 15kgs of vinyl back from a second trip to Japan also helps remind you of it.

The streaming experience is so seamless that it also takes away the slack. When there are no constraints and you can have everything - what do you choose? How many times have you found yourself just pressing next until you reach that same hit song you’ve been listening to for the past 5 years? Time warps like a black hole when you’re playing a vinyl. It’s so inconvenient and damaging to your vinyls to skip a song that it forces you to listen to the whole album, including all those songs in the middle that aren’t singles. If you don’t like them, you’re screwed. However, it is ultimately cultivating your sense of taste. It’s like eating your greens until you develop a flavor for them. Repeating a thing you don’t like over and over, forces you to understand why you don’t like it. On more than one occasion, you’ll ultimately realize you actually like those songs. Vinyl forces you to be aware and mindful of what the artist intended. This feeling is the slack. Who cares how long it takes for the record to finish? Just listen and enjoy. Let go of the control and rejoice in the magic of re-discovering music.

Once my setup was finally complete and no cable was in sight, the first record I played was the Japanese ‘25 yellow-flame vinyl edition of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. I might have teared up a bit when the drums come in during Shine On Your Crazy Diamond - it hit very differently this time.

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Post script and my record collection

Last unconnected thought that I couldn’t fit anywhere: collecting vinyls is analogous to Pokemon for a certain income bracket. When your friend brags about their Mexican edition of Led Zeppelin III from 1970, you raise them your first edition of Discovery from Electric Light Orchestra with its original obi, a paper band that Japanese editions use. However, this activates their trap record, a first edition of Seychelles, by Masayoshi Takanaka, you’re completely done, you can’t compete against that. Searching and finding rare vinyls is addicting. Heck you could even argue a case for using it as financial hedge. I’m still looking for this limited edition of Daft Punk’s Discovery, but I’ve not been able to find it for less than a $1k.

Anywho, below is my record collection, sourced from the greatest social media page of all Discogs.

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