The first 3 items on that list I can waffle on about but the only thing of any worth that I did come up with for any of them, that I think is a pretty good tag line, is:
"I don't eat animals because I love them more than I love the taste of them"
And that is precisely why I stopped eating meat. I have never put something so succinctly before, hence the need to share. I did tell a flock of sheep and a herd of cows that we can be friends because I no longer eat them, on one of my longer runs (I just wish that I was making that up).
Valves is the final word on that list and we're talking beautiful analog valves, the sort of valves that transport you to another place, the sort of valves that recreate music from the Gods, the sort of valves that take 5 minutes to warm up before you can use them, but the wait is more than worth it.
This is a usual "Mark" story, one that involves less money than I would usually fritter and as a result required less excuses. Let me illustrate that point. A few years ago I was on a customer site in darkest Surrey. I finished the meeting, left the customer and went to the cash point. I was particularly chuffed to see that a big sale had closed that month and my salary looked very good that day. I turned around and opposite me were two shops, a hifi shop and a coffee shop.
Glancing in the windows of both, I saw a huge chromed and grey monstrosity emblazoned with the legend, Gaggia, a name that was to become the synonymous in my household with unreliability, but that is another story. It was a beans to cup coffee machine. Given that this is more than 10 years ago, it predates the popularity and acceptance of expensive coffee as served by the likes of Costa Coffee and Starbucks. At £600, I bought the machine. Now the journey back gave me time to think of reasons for spending such a large wad of cash on something so frivolous, by the time I got home I still had nothing. So I set the machine up and before a question could be asked (such as how much was that huge, ugly and shiny beacon of a coffee machine), I made a coffee for the family. It was amazing and despite the fact I would never buy another Gaggia, the coffee was so good, it was far better than the coffee you get off the high street now. By the end of the night Elizabeth and I were buzzing, high on caffeine, 6 or 8 cups in, and these were 3/4/ pint cups. I had the shakes and felt a little ill, it was that bad. Anyway, the coffee justified the cost luckily for me, and Elizabeth is a far bigger coffee drinker than I am.
I digress, I took a jaunt down to "Richer Sounds" and asked what valve amps they had and they only had a puny little thing called a "Fatman Blu". At less than £200 I wasn't interested. I have a real hifi at home, one I inherited from my Dad. It has a Linn record deck, a Nad pre-amp and a Quad 405 power amp as well as hand built British ProAC speakers. An antiquated system but with a hell of a sound, true hifi. I asked the sales chap if he had anything dearer (how pretentious is that, as if sound quality and cost go hand in hand. In my defence, I had done some homework and the going rate is around £500+ for a valve amp). Anyway, I wasn't in the market to buy, I was simply putting out feelers. My next question is the one that doomed me. Listening habits have changed dramatically, my children listen to music from their phones and to a certain degree, so do I and the most convenient way of doing that is over bluetooth so I asked if he had anything that I could connect to my existing system and that led into a conversation about the "blu" in Fatman Blu. Now Richard, my sales guy did a great job and managed to get me into the listening room and then the amp did its business on me.
It looks good, it is small and is a hybrid of solid state and valves and at 28W per channel, has some power (my Quad is 100W) but it was sitting there and streaming low quality mp3 files from my phone that did it. They sounded wonderful. I realised there and then that I needed this little amp in my life and so did my children. I could see my youngest sitting in the front room, doing her homework whilst streaming background music from her phone. I could see myself hooking my record deck into it and streaming from my phone and enjoying the sheer pleasure of music, the warmth of the valves, lying across the sofa in the dark, watching the warm glow of the valves while something ambient plays, soothing and delicate, punctuated with a screaming guitar solo, or maybe not.
I got the amp home, hooked it up and my biggest concern was the ability for this piddly amp to drive my massive ProAC speakers, yet they did and they did it well. My youngest daughter has spent 3 evenings just listening to music with me, no TV. We sprawled out across the sofas in the dark and passed my phone around and streamed different songs from it. How many 16 (nearly 17) year olds will do that with their Dads? My eldest has asked, if/when I replace this with my dream amp, can she have it. And finally, my Dad has listened to it and it amazed him that something so small and cheap, can have such a good sound. It has made mp3 files sound like hifi, it has filled in the many flaws of that format and presented a sound that is good to the ear. It probably won't compete with a £500+ valve amp but I'm not convinced that the difference in cost will be worth the improvement in sound quality, which I think will be minimal.
So my advice to anyone that wants a decent sound at a budget price, go and buy a Fatman Blu. If you're at all like me and a bit of an arse, it would be very easy to let something like this slip past because it doesn't match your ideal, the fact is that nothing will ever match your ideal but this amp comes close to it and also matches an ideal I never knew I had.
Thank you to Richard at Richer Sounds in Milton Keynes.
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