The night that sparked a career in audio began with a system he'd built for friends comprising 15-inch Tannoys driven by the latest Quad 33/303 amplification. Signal source was a Thorens TD124 with SME3009 tonearm and Shure V15 cartridge. The music that evening was a Bach organ composition. Imagine what that experience meant to a young bloke who'd left school at fourteen to swot in a factory? Here I was with people who drank wine, read books and listened to music on equipment that even I knew then was a universe apart from the radiogram we had at home. This was the good life and I wanted in. Above all, I wanted to meet this music writer called ‘'Bach''. John explained later that the latter might be hard to arrange, given the great man was now God's composer. With John's help we bought a Peak transistor amp and Garrard semi-auto turntable. John supplied a pair of detachable speakers that were originally part of a reel-to-reel tape deck. By the time I finished my degrees, I was well and truly discovering the unsurpassed beauty of Quad, Radford and Leak valve amps, Spendor and Quad speakers, SPU cartridges and sprung suspension turntables including the Ariston RD11 and Linn LP12.


The newspaper job followed a short time after teaching Politics and English to Years 11 and 12 students; and stints in a couple of hi-end hifi stores. After I retired from the newspaper, I spent a couple of productive years as the CEO of The Australian Hi-Fi Association. More recently, I became the audio editor for Stereonet. These days I work as the national A/V Editor for a Sydney-based media company called 4Square Media. Throughout my obsession with audio, my amused non-audiophile friends keep asking me why I beaver away fine-tuning assorted cables, racks and equipment. I keep telling them the same thing I tell any non-audiophile: "Friend, the equipment isn't the point of it all, music is." It sounds like and is such a pompous cliché, because it is to any non-audio veteran.


Hearing Joni Mitchell, early Dylan, Van Morrison or the late Beethoven string quartets on a boom box is good enough for them. Or so they'll tell you with a certain amount of benevolent malice. The good-natured hectoring of assorted relatives and close friends is a byproduct of being an audiophile. Like politicians, it's something to be endured with as much good humour as one can muster. Still, the reoccurring question "why?" ought to lead to an exploration of our audiophile credentials. Why indeed do we do the things we do for the sake of this glorious hobby of ours? Seen from a distance, we must all seem slightly addled. The question was asked another time. My polite inquisitor happened to be the deeply talented Melbourne Herald Sun's music reviewer and fellow journalist, Nui Te Koha. "What does audio equipment do for your experience of music", he asked? Indeed. What is the defining relationship between music and audio equipment, for me? Instead of my well-rehearsed five-minute justification of Peter Walker, Arthur Radford and Saul Marantz's place in the pantheon of all that's holy and good in the history of 'great' hifi, I found myself mumbling the word illumination.