San Francisco

In college, 25-ish years ago, a carful of us Fort Lewis kids went on a San Francisco road trip. It was amazing. It was one of those lifetime trips for me. Not sure what makes a lifetime trip. Great experiences, great friends. Maybe more than that, it happened at a time when things were changing and I was learning about life and how things are or could be. Times like that — inflection points — are powerful. In geometry an inflection point is a point on a line where it goes from curving in one direction to curving in another. Perfect.

We drove from Durango to San Francisco and basically roamed the streets for a couple days. We stayed at a couple of Hostels and hit up a bunch of attractions and whatnot on the way. One of the hostels was the Fort Mason hostel in the Marina district of SF.

Well, a couple months ago I decided to go to Burning Amp, a hi fi nerd meetup type thing with lots of home-mad gear to listen to, and a couple of legendary dudes giving talks. I’m super psyched to meet Nelson Pass. That dude is one of a handful of inspirations who have really gotten me fired up to come up with the BHL stuff. Nelson is all about simplicity and elegance. He is one of those guys who takes a component — like a transistor — and starts from nothing to build it into an amplifier or preamp or whatever. He adds the fewest possible additional components to make the amp function, then builds from there to improve performance. As soon as there is a hint of diminishing returns, he stops and calls it good. I am obsessed with simplicity in audio because of this sort of approach and Nelson Pass is the master.

Check out his Pass DIY site.

Anyway, I’m here is SF for this whole Burning Amp ting, and I’m staying at the same hostel we stayed at 25 years ago. And I’m feeling the inflection point.

Unrelated: Thanks Benj for the well-timed kindness. It’s hard to stay motivated to write blog posts when it feels like nobody cares. Thanks for letting me know that someone reads this garbage.