I just brought a deep-dish pizza back to Fairfield from Chicago. A five-hour drive. The pizza is in my freezer, sold to me partially cooked, so when I serve it to my friends in a few days, it will be fresh, with both perfect taste and texture intact.
I realize that’s a lot of trouble for a single meal, but believe me, it’s worth it!
Growing up Italian in Chicago, we had a lifetime to learn about pizza. My first one was a thin crust from a little shop that didn’t even have tables, so we had to bring it home to eat it. With its tasty toppings and chewy crust, we were spoiled from the start. Thick-crusted deep-dish pizza wasn’t popular at restaurants for another decade, so we got to compare all the local joints serving thin pizza. Eventually, with five kids in the family, cheap frozen grocery-store pizzas snuck into our diets. Most were pizza in name only, having mediocre taste.
As we entered our teens, the deep-dish restaurants began filling Chicago and suburbs. That’s when the serious experimentation started. Gino’s with its thick yellow cornmeal crust, Giordano’s with spicy ingredients, and (my current favorite) Lou Malnati’s, with a thinner cornmeal crust and a tall dam around it. These were works of art.
I still take my pizza seriously, and most people I know have a favorite pizza. If I find that they’ve never had a world-class pizza, I feel bad for them for having to put up with less than the best.
And this brings me to music. A while ago, I helped a man who had just bought a little-used audio system from a local resale store. He needed me to fashion some replacement wires for his speakers that had improperly been cut off. I was happy to help, but I saw that with the shoddy quality of those speakers, I could have improved his sound brilliantly with the cheapest speakers that I had in my store. He was excited about what he had just purchased, so instead I offered him all his money back on the wire that I had just supplied toward anything better if he ever wanted to upgrade.
I know there are many people out there who have never “tasted” a great audio system. However, if you could form an opinion on pizza by getting out there and exploring, you could easily upgrade the performance of your audio just by getting out and doing some listening. Any real audio shop will be happy to take you through an extensive listening exploration. Once you’ve heard what kind of differences there are between speakers, amps, and all the other components of a system, you’ll know what is important in any system to make it feel real to you. At that point, the system can be tailored so that it fits you and you’ll happily enjoy it for many years. And as an extra benefit, a well-designed system will last many times longer than something cheap.
As you begin your listening journey, keep in mind the impact or “kick” you feel from a speaker. Clarity, smoothness, richness, and effortlessness vary greatly between speakers, and without listening to some well-recorded natural music, you’ll never know what combination of ingredients makes your system sound more natural and real to you. Even an accurate representation of kick can be too much or too little, just depending on the individual’s tastes.
When two or more speakers play in a room they create an image of the event, but some are better at it than others. Again, one person’s pleasure can be another’s pain. It’s all about what is right for you.
So, please, get out to a real audio store and start your journey. The tasting is all free and the benefits give joy for a lifetime. I’m always trying to second guess what someone will like when they first arrive. I’m often wrong. You can’t even size yourself up before you listen.
I know many of you love pizza like I do. Just remember how easy it was to form your own preferences once you put in some time tasting and comparing. Let music tell you what to buy, not an article or a sale. Learn how to trust your own ears.