Before the hi-fi, a PlayStation 3

Before the McIntosh, before the Wilsons, before any of it, my source was a PlayStation 3. CDs, Blu-rays and files from hard drives, all through a games console. I tell it without embarrassment.

For over a decade I ran AVRs, Yamaha, Denon, Marantz, mainly for home theatre. I had a separate CD player and my father's Technics turntable plugged into the receiver, and the receiver did the amplification for stereo too. Then the first digital platforms arrived, and I listened to Apple Music through an Apple TV.

Cables, I didn't think about them at all. At all. No budget, no ratio, no research, and no idea that a source could be anything more than the box that played the disc. If it looked decent and came in a nice box, it was good enough.

And I loved the music. That is the part I refuse to rewrite now that the rack looks very different. The songs I fell for on that system were the reason I went further, not the other way around. Nobody starts this hobby because of a cable.

I did not need a reference system to love music. I needed one to hear everything the music had been carrying all along.