One Step(-up) Beyond!
The first audiophile I met lived near a sewage treatment plant on the outskirts of Moscow. It was a few months after the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1992, when I was a college senior, and I recall walking with my father to his home past block after block of the identical dingy white tenements that encircle most Eastern European cities. Pasha (that’s what I’ll call him) lived in one of them. A friend of my father’s, he turned out to be a wiry character in his early 40s with a toothy smile and the darting eyes of a collector. He led us through his sparsely furnished, rundown one-bedroom apartment; in the kitchen, his wife Marina (that’s what I’ll call her) sat with their toddler in her lap, watching a tiny black-and-white TV stacked on top of the refrigerator. She didn’t say hello. Like every one of Pasha’s wives and girlfriends, she would leave him. I realized why Marina and the baby were spending their weekend in the kitchen when Pasha took out a key to unlock the living room door. He had decided to protect his family and hi-fi gear from each other, but unlike most new fathers, he did this by putting a lock on the living room and keeping his family out.
The awfulness of that detail was still winding through my brain when we stepped inside. Unlike the rest of the apartment, the room was spacious and reverently tidy, the walls lined with records. Pasha told us proudly that he owned a first pressing of every Elvis Presley LP and took a few out to show us. He had inscribed his initials in small, neat handwriting on the labels, as if to make sure that if the records were stolen or ran away from home, they could be reunited. A pair of ancient Austrian speaker cabinets—each taller than us and loaded with a Tannoy Black 15" coaxial driver—dominated the room. Some mid-1950s McIntosh electronics and a Michell GyroDec occupied the stand between them, connected with fat, industrial-looking cable that Pasha said he’d sourced from an acquaintance who worked at a top-secret military installation.
My mouth must have made an O when the music
