Technology

From Forbes:

Nintendo announced today that the Switch had broken 10 million sales. An astonishing number, given the Wii U before it, analyst projections being much lower, and the holiday season still to come. The Switch has been a hardware success story only equaled by Nintendo’s software success stories between The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey both released this year.

To put that sales figure in context, I wanted to go back and see how it stacked up to other current and former consoles. As it turns out, it’s among some of the best in recent memory, as you might expect.

As a bonafide vinyl junkie and dyed in the wool stereophile, I have seen my fair share of gizmos, tricks, and gadgets come down the pike that promise to “remove veils from the listening experience” and “open up new windows in the recordings.” While some did work to a degree, many were a bunch of hooey. Some only delivered a minute portion of what they promised. So to say I have become jaded about such things would be a fair cop.

Now, as a vinylphile, I will be the first to stand on the soap box to state you have to keep your stylus clean if you want to maintain your records and continue to get the best out of your cartridge, which in turn will continue to give you listening enjoyment.

I am reminded by dialog spoken by King Osric (Max Von Sydow) in the movie “Conan The Barbarian.”

When King Osric needed Conan to rescue his daughter from Thulsa Doom, upon dumping out a bag full of jewels and offering them to take all they wanted, he says,

“ There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle, when the gold loses its luster, when the throne room becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

So it is with me in my audiophile time of life, where what matters most to me now is not high power, not large heavy pieces of equipment, not stacks of individual components, nor even high and flighty names. While I freely admit all those “jewels and gold” did, at one time, matter to me; I have had Krell, Audio Research, Martin Logan, Duntech, Focal, Oracle, SME, Koetsu, Convergent …the list goes on and on.