Twenty years ago I was working for a small cable company on the West Coast, and one of the perks of my job was getting to read the Discovery Channel Magazine every month. I don’t mean that the company had paid for my subscription (which would imply that somebody beyond my immediate boss knew I existed), or that the Discovery Channel wanted me to have one (which would imply that someone at the network knew I existed); a free copy of the Magazine’s dead tree edition was sent to every cable system that carried Discovery, and since I was the only one in the office who cared about it, I was the one who read it. I can still remember coming across an article about extreme high-end stereo equipment, and being astonished at the idea of a system that cost more than a decade of my salary, made up of components that each cost twice what my car did. Imagine how surprised I would have been to find a single component selling for over $150,000 USD…
You can find the stats (and asking price) here, if you want to, but the item being offered for sale is a belt-drive turntable, or what we used to call a record player back when there still were such things as vinyl records. There follows a couple of pages of technical descriptions and explanations of why you might want to spent the equivalent price of a small house on a record player, and why this one would totally be worth it, but I had already stopped reading after the price was revealed. I have enough trouble understanding why you’d be willing to spend that amount of money on any consumer product in the first place; I can’t begin to imagine why you’d spent that kind of cash on a technology that has been obsolete for at least two decades now…
Now, the point has often been made that when your disposable income (the amount you can spend without regard to any of your financial obligations; money you could just throw out the window if you wanted to) reaches a certain point you can do whatever you’d like with it. If paying $3 for a latte is trivial for me, then the argument goes that paying $300 for a bottle of wine would be just as trivial for someone making a hundred times my salary, and if paying $150 for an iPod is a modest expense for me, paying $150,000 would be an equivalent expense for someone making a thousand times what I do. The company may not sell all that many of them, but if there are any obscenely rich people out there who like vinyl records (some of that elusive 1% we keep hearing about, I suppose) there’s no reason to believe that they couldn’t purchase one of these units. A much better question is why you would want to…
Even if you can somehow afford technology of this kind, vinyl records are almost extinct; you can still find the occasional example being offered for sale in essentially pristine condition, but even with the utmost care, the disk will never sound quite the same once you’ve played it, and will eventually wear out. Granted that this particular turntable appears capable of reproducing the most distortion-free sound possible from this particular medium, it will also reproduce all of the scratches, warps and skips contained within the disk – and getting pressings from decades ago in perfect condition will only grow more difficult with each passing year…
I don’t mean to suggest that people shouldn’t have hobbies; I’ve met people who collect 8-track tapes, and my grandfather told me about an acquaintance who collected wax cylinders for an Edison “talking machine” music player well into the modern era. I’m only saying that if you are purchasing one of these devices for any purpose other than demonstrating to people how much money you have and how little you care about it, you’re kidding yourself. And if you’re just trying to show off your wealth through wretched excess, there’s a $200,000 bottle of scotch you should probably look into…
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