2015 and 2016. I visited near two dozen dealers in their shops and homes. Was on the whole a pretty miserable experience except for the gear itself. Audiophile vendors can be a lunatic, insane and dogmatic bunch. There’s so much dogma, ideology and downright bias to wade through you have to sit through a lot of irritating guff. You have....your tube fanatics who think that anything made after 1960s is useless, the vinyl fanatics, the Japanese hifi fanatics who poo poor valves and vinyl and idolise Esoteric or nothing, the dealer that obsess about Japanese silver point to point and has never heard of room correction and room treatment but will bang on about capacitor sounds, the lunatic subjectivists that swear by CD demagnetisers and can hear difference in cable lifters, the ones that scoff when you tell them you heard a piece gear that you like that they don’t sell, the autistic dealer ice cold aloof and rectilinear that struggles to speak at KJ West one, the dealer that will ONLY play their favourite tracks, the car sales man who now knows everything about DACs better than the digital engineers, the dealer that keeps you waiting for an hour despite making an appointment at KJ West One, the dealer that rolls out the sales patter and points out why your ideas on what you are looking for are all wrong wrong wrong and he knows best really he knows best and he will tell you that he knows best, the Nottingham “scrumpdiddlyumtious midrange” dealer for whom it’s all about the valve midrange, the valve midrange, the valve midrange, the valve midrange who insists you need to spend at least £30k on each component before you can get going in hifi otherwise it’s all “prosaic”, the dealer who helped record a few records for x,y and z and now knows everything about recording and mastering, the Beryllium dealer, the paper cone and whizzer dealer, the high efficiency dealer, the class A or nothing, the valves have to be in the cartridge feeding the tone arm powered by valve, on turntable powered by valves and transformers, with tubes everywhere anywhere and all over and transistors are Satanic, the antisocial and near psychotic Zanden Audiofresks dealer in South London dealer who started shouting at me when I asked how I go about arranging a demo....I could go on and on. Clucking bells, give me strength.