By Why do we own an audiophile system? In the early days of the hobby, music was the most important media in the world. If you have read David Hepworth’s Never a Dull Moment: 1971 The Year that Rock Exploded (buy at Amazon) (or watched the adaptation on Apple TV which is even better – yes, the six-part miniseries was better than the book), you are quickly reminded that the year that Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin died and The Beatles broke up was actually the starting point for so much more in music, be it women’s voices in pop via Carole King’s Tapestry (learn more) or music with a message via Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (learn more) or the origin point of Hip-Hop with Gil Scott Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (learn more). 1971 was a big year in music, and it drove our hobby for decades to come.
Another book that audiophile voices like my friend and former editor Dennis Burger were inspired by was Status and Culture by W. David Marks (buy at Amazon). This recent and popular tome looks into why things in the modern world today become trendy and popular, to be overly concise in my book report. Music, and tangentially audio, was popular in the 1970s, powered in part by the post-Vietnam Baby Boomers. In the early 1970s, week after week, more and more stunningly good (and creatively/socially important) music was lining the shelves of the local record stores, thus the draw to bring home that latest Steely Dan or Pink Floyd or Eagles record was quite strong.The desire to hear that music sound its studio best was what gave birth to the commercial success of the audiophile industry.
Today, the motivation to own an audiophile system is less Boogie Nights and more health and well-being-oriented.
Stress and Anxiety is a Major Problem For Today’s Youth …
My father is currently a professor at NYU. At almost 80 years old, he drives his Maserati SUV from near Princeton, New Jersey, up the Turnpike to Manhattan to teach kids in NYU’s Music Industry program as he did before at my alma mater, The University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. He reports to me that the biggest issue facing today’s music-loving youth is stress and anxiety.
These amazingly talented and bright young women and men are often addicted to their devices like so many people today. In my father’s weekly hour-and-a-half-long class, there are no phones allowed. One of the two classes he teaches is called “Stress and Anxiety in the Music Business,” which is wildly popular. These kids are smart (and, often but not always, wealthy) enough to study at a Top 25 college, yet too many of them aren’t happy. Their parents can be disconnected from their lives. Social media is an ever-present negative force. Blue light devices dominate their lives. Yet these kids thrive on, love and really embrace music. Why?
Music is an emotionally powerful creative outlet. Music, in all forms, speaks to our souls. It can emote beaming love or agonizing pain. It can poetically tell a story of hope or despair and somehow make us feel like everything might be better. Music offers hope to not just this younger generation, who are so badly in need, but to all of us. Having music as a part of our lives, regardless of age or generation, is a positive element in life. Many of us try to eat healthy. Some of us try to get our 10,000 steps in every day. Imagine the power of doing 10 minutes less of posting on Instagram and spending that time listening to, say, some chill Miles Davis? Stress simply dissolves. Blood pressure can be reduced by as much as 10 blips on the diastolic measurement in mere minutes. Music can be an ever-present positive force in our lives if we make it a daily part of our health regimen.
What Music Do You Listen to When You Are Down?
2025 was, without question, the worst year of my life. On January 7, 2025, I saw the Palisades Fire (learn more) destroy my home, my community, my finances, and eventually my marriage and family life. They say you need to have lived the blues to play the blues – well then call me “Jerry 12-Bar” (how Goodfellas is that nickname?) because, friends, I have now officially lived the blues. I’ve seen the people who I loved the most turn on me from the pressures of life. I have been forced to lose millions of dollars from batshit crazy decisions that I can’t change or stop on my own. Perhaps worse yet, in 2025, I went without any kind of meaningful audiophile system until about October. Music helps me to cope with the trials of daily life, and 2025 was filled with them. Having my rise-from-the-ashes-of-the-fire new audiophile system working and sounding great is the engine behind my comeback story.
When you are down, it is funny what music you often gravitate to hearing. With my heart broken, there were certain songs that I just couldn’t listen to for a while, as they were just too painful. “It’s Too Late Baby” by the aforementioned Carole King is one of them that took a little while to be able to digest. “Just Once” by James Ingram and the almighty Quincy Jones is another painful one. The feelings of failure and sadness were too much for me. Don’t get me wrong, I know these acute feelings will eventually subside but, in the now, they are just too much.
Just because some truly great love songs were “too soon” doesn’t mean that there wasn’t music that truly resonated with me in my emotionally dark times. There were a few that got played over and over again on the Burmester audio system in my new electric Mercedes SUV (a newer/used car for the first time in 13 years that helped put a smile on my face in dark times, too). One of the songs that brought hopeful tears to my eye was “Let It Be” by The Beatles. This is (reportedly) an anthem about the breakup of one of the best bands in musical history. The end of my marriage of long duration felt the same way. The burning tone of George Harrison’s guitar and the richness of the musical layering gave me that church-like belief that there would be happiness again. I just somehow knew it, even if I couldn’t see it. SSRIs (drugs like Zoloft and Lexapro) are powerful, but I found music more potent.
I have always been a huge fan of Peter Gabriel, both as a member of Genesis in its progressive era, as well as a solo artist. The song “Solsbury Hill” is allegedly about leaving Genesis and going off as a solo artist. Diving into the unknown is a scary proposition. I remember when I sold HomeTheaterReview.com and AudiophileReview.com in late 2019 and wondering how I was going to “get a job” for the first time in my life. What I didn’t know was that COVID-19 was 100 days away from happening and the world would change in the most frightening and unexpected ways. Yes, I eventually got an executive-level job with a $46,000,000,000 a year company, Thomson Reuters. Not long after that, I became deathly ill with diverticulitis and eventually had a foot-and-a-half of my colon removed/re-sectioned at Cedars Sinai a mere five weeks before my second son was born. These were dark times that pushed not just me but the people around me to their limits. One of those was the realization that I badly missed working in the audiophile world. My roots are here, dating back to my sixteenth birthday back in Abington, Pennsylvania. Put all of the Publisher and CEO stuff aside – I am and always will be a stereo salesman from Philly. “Solsbury Hill” is a song that resonated with me in my darkest times because I am sure Peter Gabriel couldn’t then envision what MTV was going to be like. He couldn’t see what the commercial success of his SO album (learn more) would be. He likely couldn’t see that, years later, his Real World Records label (learn more) would shine light on the creativity of World Music from every corner of the globe. He was staring into the great unknown as I was at the end of a 24-year, generation-long marriage. I can’t tell you how many times I drove up and down Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, California, while exiled from our home in Pacific Palisades just clinging on to hope that somehow days would get better. Thankfully, they would. Music and audio were there to remind me that the path was more clear than it seemed at that exact moment.
Love songs aren’t the only tracks that can lift your mood and give you hope. Not by a wide margin. “Freedom” by Rage Against the Machine was likely the most-played song in my T+A Solitaire (read my review) German-made wireless over-the-ear headphones while sitting on the beach looking at the Pacific Ocean, seeking answers for questions that I never wanted to have to answer. Being married to someone who is autistic and who kept the diagnosis from you is a hard pill to swallow. When working with the New York Times best-selling author of the book Faster Than Normal (buy from Amazon), Peter Shankman, to learn how to communicate with a loved one with autism and to then be simply ignored and dismissed is a whole other level of angry and/or disappointed. When you factor in that there are young kids who deserve to have a loving family to grow up with, you can see my anger. While “Freedom” is a political statement about the government and Indigenous tribes, the vibe of the song still appealed to me in those dark times. In REBT psychography (learn more – relational emotive behavioral therapy, created by Dr. Albert Ellis), we talk about “activating” factors that lead us to irrational thoughts and feelings. Just knowing how things were triggered in me helped me to move on. The lyric “anger is a gift” also resonated with me in the early days of grieving the death of my marriage. I was plenty angry at the time and, with enough volume, I “musically appropriated” (yes, I just made up that term) a song about Native Americans into one that was a voice of hope for me and my future. The rage that Rage sang led me to hope that things would get better. Guess what? They did. And again, music helped me get there.
The one song that truly killed me is a true classic and audiophile gold, but so painful to listen to. Made famous by Bonnie Raitt and covered fantastically by George Michael, “I Can’t Make You Love Me” is the dagger that stuck in my heart. Now, the ultimate cover jam on this song is done by The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (not to be confused with the Husband Formerly Known as Jerry – I am still working on what my symbol looks like, you need to give me some time, people, unpronounceable symbols don’t just grow on trees), which come from his self-indulgent Emancipation triple album. It doesn’t take to the first chorus for the pain to get real. “I can’t make you love me if you don’t/I can’t make your heart feel something it won’t …” It is hard to type (or hear) the words. There is a famous unattributed poem that has really been meaningful to me lately that talks about life offering “moments, chapters and forever.” It was this poignant song that showed me that my marriage was a chapter – not a forever. That was a tough pill to swallow, but one that I needed to take. Why? Just because someone doesn’t love you anymore doesn’t mean that you are not lovable. Music teaches this lesson in ways that painting, poetry and even film just can’t seem to always do with the same emotional power or effect
Happy Days Are Here Again …
No, I will not put a YouTube.com link to the Happy Days TV show theme, but I can report to you that happy days have returned on a few key places in my life. Hope of an amicable divorce ended on Christmas Eve 2025, thanks to my soon-to-be-ex, but hope of a bright, loving and affectionate future had presented itself as a reward for me having the guts to remain emotionally open. Feeling pain is better than feeling nothing, I have learned. When you are capable of feeling extreme emotional pain, you are also capable of feeling amazing joy. The ability to shut off your feelings is way scarier than dealing with less-than-joyous feelings. That I now know.
The loving partner that I have had through every moment of these confounded, challenging times was not a wife – it was music (my new girlfriend is pretty great, I will admit). To any of my readers who might be going through tough times or who know somebody getting a little roughed up by life’s circumstances, I couldn’t more strongly recommend to you to encourage them to embrace music. Go into your listening sessions without an agenda. Listen to whatever you want for as long as you want. Use streaming as a way to hear and feel all sorts of songs from any and every musical genre. Don’t feel bad about appropriating songs to mean what you want them to mean. Look up songs on the Internet if you care what others think a song means, but often it doesn’t even really matter. I will never forget listening to Howard Stern interviewing Paul McCartney as I drove from Pacific Palisades to the San Diego airport to get a rare meeting to renew my all-important Global Entry Pass. In the interview, Stern was pressuring McCartney about what Beatles songs meant, and McCartney basically said that they are designed to mean what you want them to mean. “Freedom” and “Let It Be” are really good examples for me. I had to feel the pain and the anger to get to the place that I am heading now – and that is a good place.
While my divorce is not final as I sit here typing, I do know that I am owed a whole bunch of alimony (you read that right) that will go not just to going to continue to fund the kids’ college fund, but it will also hopefully fund a few of my future audiophile upgrades (A VPI Avenger turntable has my name on it, thank you Matt!!!). Preamps, DACs, non-EQed cables, new loudspeakers, killer subwoofers – everything. Music is the soundtrack to my life. Music is always there for me when I need a lift, when I need to see the path forward. Music isn’t some vapid purchase like a Malibu-trendy 1990s restored Range Rover Defender 90. Music offers real value. Music speaks the truth. Music gives us hope.
While family life will be unexpectedly different going forward, I have already made meaningful strides in my personal life that I likely wouldn’t have had the need or fortitude to do without this trauma. No drinking for two-and-a-half years (I likely never will again) was a start, but dealing with childhood issues to make me a better, more open, more vulnerable person has helped, too. None of these things could have been done at this level without music in my life. So, when somebody comes over and jokes about the money that you invested in your audiophile system – feel free to share with them my story. When a young person is feeling down, lend them a pair of good headphones and let them find their positive path through music. Music is just that powerful.
Thank you for letting me share with you such a personal story.
If you would like to share how music has helped you through tough times, we will post your comments in our moderated section below.
