Clean and Sober Stoner is Changing
If you’ve been following the blog or the YouTube channel lately, you’ve noticed a shift. The riffs are still here, but we’re spending a lot more time looking at the gear that delivers them. Specifically, we’re talking about headphones.
Some might see this as a pivot away from the music, but for me, it’s actually a return to it. To explain why, I have to take you back through about twelve years of moving trucks, “mad scientist” wiring, and a few hard lessons about recovery and obsession.
The Marine Life Constraint
My obsession with high-end audio didn’t start with headphones; it started with the “Wall of Sound.” I was a speaker guy through and through. I was obsessed with the Ohm Walsh sound—those massive, omnidirectional towers that fill a room with a holographic presence. I owned the Walsh F’s and eventually moved to the Micro Walsh Talls.
But life had other plans. For years, I was married to a Marine officer, which meant we moved every two years. If you’ve ever tried to pack, ship, and recalibrate a high-end stereo rig every 24 months, you know it’s a nightmare. The breaking point came when we landed in an 800-square-foot house in Monterey, California. There simply wasn’t room for the towers. Or the receiver, or the amp…
I had to find a way to keep the music without the square footage. I drifted away from the Audiogon and spent more time on
The “Mad Scientist” Phase and the HE5LE Disaster
My first successful step into the modern world of headphones was the Grado SR225i. They were the gateway to headphones for me—raw, gritty, and perfect for the heavy underground. But then I made the biggest mistake of my audio life: I bought the HiFiMAN HE5LE—an open-back planar magnetic headphone with a notoriously low sensitivity of 87.5 dB, an impedance of 38 Ohms, and a frequency response of 10Hz to 60KHz.
These were “beasts”—massive, inefficient planar headphones that required a ridiculous amount of voltage and current to actually move the drivers. To get these even to begin to sing, you needed at least 2 to 4 watts of power per channel. Back then, a headphone amp capable of delivering that kind of juice cost over $1,000, which I didn’t have. In an act of total audiophile desperation, I actually bought a speaker tap and wired the headphones directly into the speaker outputs of my home receiver. I was a mad scientist trying to jumpstart a tank with a lawnmower battery. Eventually, I gave up and sold them, retreating to the “safety” of my Grados.
Recovery and Obssession
As I spent more time on Head-Fi, I “learned” more and more about headphones. The reason I put that in quotes, is I got sucked into the whole subjective side of the hobby. Don’t give me wrong, I love that side of things, and at the end of the day the reason I listen two headphones is the subjective experience. But, that side of things also comes with a price, sometimes a very hefty price. You start obsessing over the latest DAC, trying to find synergy between the amplifier and the headphone, and the most dangerous thing of all: cables!
Seriously, people spend a ridiculous amount of money on headphone cables. I agree with that to a point, and I’ll make a video about it down the road, but it reaches the level of insanity when you buy a $700 cable to put on a $200 set of headphones. Some elements of the community can wax on poetically about how the specific zero oxygen copper interacts with the silver strands and increases bass response and sound stage. It is a rabbit hole into madness!
Thankfully, my time in the Navy involved Basic Electricity and Electronics (BEE), and within a short amount of time, I realized what they were going on and on about had nothing to do with the electrons running through a cable. Electrons or electrons, and unless the cable is made out of some seriously bad material with absolutely no insulation, they really don’t have much of an effect. Really.
About 5 amps and 3 DAC’s later, I started participating in equipment tours and chasing the next “big thing”—like the 3D-printed MrSpeakers Alpha Dogs (which I later had upgraded to the Alpha Primes)—I started to notice a pattern.
By 2018, I realized I was spending more time listening to the headphones than I was listening to the music. I was analyzing graphs instead of feeling the fuzz. I had to deliberately back off and reset my relationship with the hobby. It made no sense to me to spend, at times, $1000 or more while ignoring the very reason I use headphones to begin with. Instead of buying more headphones, I bought Roon, opened a Bandcamp account, and started enjoying music again!
The original intent of Clean and Sober Stoner was to combine my love for personal audio with my journey in recovery. Headphones were a massive benefit to my sobriety, but they were also a risk. In the recovery world, we talk about “replacement obsessions.” Anything taken to an extreme can become a threat.
The Doom Charts Deluge
That reset led me to the Doom Charts once I started writing about the Heavy Underground. I stopped buying gear and focused entirely on curation. My library was built on years of ripping CDs, and suddenly I was hit with a deluge of unbelievable music coming out of the heavy underground.
It was fulfilling, but it eventually led to a new kind of burnout. By late last year, the sheer volume of content was overwhelming. I was neglecting my actual career, and I wasn’t letting albums “breathe” anymore. I was listening to so much that I wasn’t enjoying any of it. I almost walked away from the channel entirely.
The “Slow Down” Mandate and the Stonerphile Vision
Thankfully, I didn’t walk away. Instead, I decided to get a grip on the pace. I needed to slow down. I needed to let the albums envelope me again.
I also realized that I had been neglecting some incredible gifts. My girlfriend—a “newbie doomer” herself—had bought me several sets of headphones over the years that I had barely touched because I was so stuck on my “benchmarks” (the HD 6XX and AirPods Max). One of those was the HiFiMAN Ananda Stealth (review coming soon). When I finally sat down with them, they were a revelation—one of the most shocking discoveries I’ve made in a decade.
That’s why the channel looks different now. I noticed a gap in the market: no one is covering high-end headphones from the perspective of stoner doom, sludge, or heavy rock.
I have a dual mission now. First, I want to show the audiophile world that the heavy underground—bands like Sergeant Thunderhoof or Faetooth—has seriously well-recorded music with layers of technical nuance. Second, I want to talk to my friends in the doom scene. It breaks my heart to see someone spend thousands of dollars on rare vinyl and then listen to it through a $100 set of plastic headphones.
You are missing the “Stonerphile” experience.
Stonerphile
I see a lot of problems with the standard, professional headphone reviews on YouTube and in print. Don’t get me wrong, they are way above my weight class. However, even the most basic “headphones 101” video tends to go over a lot of people’s heads, and they tune out. Headphones are an indescribably complex ocean to navigate, and sometimes the most authoritative sources are unable to explain things without resorting to clinical jargon, or fitting so much into the video that it becomes overwhelming.
They also don’t reference stoner/doom, which is my primary music of interest. And if you’re reading this, I’m willing to bet it’s yours, too.
There’s also a little bit of unintentional snobbery, if I’m being generous. Rock music in general isn’t treated like an audiophile genre (and for at least 80% of recordings, for a good reason). But in my experience, it takes an exceptionally experienced and skilled engineer to properly record our music. The music itself might be an affront to most audiophiles, but capturing the visceral experience is no easy task when you’re dealing with a down-tuned guitar, an overdriven bass, and a drummer who’s going completely nuts all over the place WHILE trying to capture the vocals. It’s not easy!
And THAT’S what I want to focus on for the most part. Finding those unexpectedly awesome recordings, or dusting up some old classics and showing you why they are worth hearing on a set of planar magnetic headphones and a reasonably solid amplifier.
I’m taking the little bit that I know, and I’m going to learn a lot more. It’s good to be back on Head-Fi. It’s good to be watching headphone YouTube again. But this time, we’re doing it for the fuzz, man.
Stay fuzzy. Stay present!
