It should go without saying that two of my great passions in life are 1) music and 2) the high‑fidelity reproduction thereof. But although I’ve written in the past about how much visual stimuli affect our perception of sound, and although I make frequent allusions to the importance of good design, I never really put as much thought as I should have into the role my eyes play in my enjoyment of hi‑fi.
Until, that is, I found out that Yvon Provencher—one of my favorite readers—is blind.
Of course, that’s not why he’s one of my favorite readers. He’s one of my favorites because he asks challenging, pointed questions that force me to use language that maps to specific anticipated experiences or meaningful differences, rather than lazily reaching for applause-light vocabulary words such as “inner detail.”
If memory serves me correctly—and at my age, it might not—I think I finally realized Yvon is blind when he asked me some pretty sophisticated questions about Dr. Sean Olive’s research, and I replied with two different frequency-response curves: one absolute, one normalized to the over-ear Harman target curve. He thanked me kindly for the graphs and just as quickly pointed out that they’re useless to him. And ever since that day, every time I’ve interacted with my stereo system, I’ve thought about what it would be like to do so if I suddenly lost my vision. Because, of course, being a writer, I have to make everything about myself.
I’m only slightly joking.
At any rate, Yvon can’t tell you what it’s like to go blind. “Apparently I lost all my vision when I was a baby,” he told me over the phone. “I have no recollection of that whatsoever. So, basically, my life has been as a blind person as far back as I can remember.”
I made all of the normal assumptions that far too many sighted people make about blind people—that the lack of eyesight gave him super hearing, which led to interest in hi‑fi and probably gave him listening insights beyond those of most of my readers. He laughed and quickly set me straight on that.
“The thing about hearing better is actually true, in a way, if you were born blind. If you acquire blindness later, there are some things that are harder to do.”
There’s a bit of a language barrier here because Yvon is primarily a French speaker with excellent English skills, and I only speak Alabamian. My knowledge of French is pretty much limited to Miss Piggy, “Frère Jacques,” and a handful of phrases I’ve picked up from watching Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain so many dozens of times that I’ve lost count. But squinting at the transcript of our call, I find it pretty clear that what he’s describing when he talks about his experience of sound is a sort of echolocation or something like it.
And yet, Yvon rejects the notion that his blindness or his reliance on sound in any way contributes to his audiophilia. For him, it really started with a love of music. “Even as a child, I really enjoyed music, but when I started school—a school for the blind here in Quebec—I was more formally introduced to actual music theory and piano lessons, which I took for a number of years.”
Like most of us, Yvon’s musical identity really started to form in his teens.
As a teenager, music became a social symbol and I was a rocker. That’s who I was. This was in the ’70s, and you were either a disco freak or a rocker, and I was a rocker, which meant I was into the standard rock fare that was playing on our local radio. I’m assuming that would be very similar to what was played on the radio in the States, perhaps with more British stuff and Canadian stuff. At any rate, I latched onto Rush, and they became a major component of my identity. I got a lot from that band and still do, actually. But it was more than Rush, of course. Music just had a central role in my life.
At this point, my imagination was running wild trying to visualize Yvon physically interacting with whatever gear he was using to listen to Rush in the 1970s. Charlie Daniels’s evocative turn of phrase, “diggin’ on the radio,” leapt immediately to mind. It seemed simple enough to twist one knob until rock music came out of the speaker and another knob until it was loud enough to purify the soul. I thought about all the times I changed stations on the radio in my ’78 Camaro without taking my eyes off the road. But I didn’t get to ask about the accessibility aspects of FM radio before Yvon leapt straight into the ’80s and the cassette revolution.
“I got into the Walkman, you know, and the little earphones we had at the time, which had no bass whatsoever, but that was fine. We didn’t know any better. It was no problem. But then I got into hi‑fi audio, just out of love of music. And like a lot of people, I got sucked into the snake oil by salespeople who maybe knew better or maybe not, who knows? But I ended up buying a lot of stuff I didn’t need and learned as I went along.”
At this point, I assumed we were talking about some real physical media. Probably CDs. Maybe LPs? I couldn’t help but ask how Yvon interacted with his physical media collection as a blind audiophile. He replied:
Before we address the era you’re asking about, let’s back up to the Walkman era, where we had piles and piles of tapes. You know, this was the time where you bought some stuff, but also you recorded stuff off the radio or made a tape of somebody else’s LP, and so I had all kinds of tapes around, and I could recognize a lot of them by feel—TDKs, for example, had a very distinctive feel about them so that you always knew those were TDK tapes. That was also true of the boxes.
You know, as a blind person, you have to come up with different ways of recognizing what’s around you. And so you become very sensitive to subtle cues. Does this box have a little notch or not? If it does, it’s probably a TDK; if not, it might be a Maxell. Maxell tapes had a texture unlike any other tape. So if you were feeling for something that was recorded on a Maxell tape and it didn’t have that texture, then you knew that wasn’t the tape you were looking for.
With my vinyl collection, I had to label those with Braille, because there were albums I couldn’t recognize by feel alone. Some I could. The Song Remains the Same had a very specific feel to it. I knew it by hand. I didn’t have to label that one. But not all of them were like that, so I had to use Braille labels—not just the jacket, but also the record itself—which side was which. And, of course, when CDs came out, I had to label everything, because they all felt the same. Nothing was distinctive anymore.
The bigger problem with CDs is that with the CD player, you have to remember the order of the buttons—like, where’s the Stop button? Where’s the Play? So, you know, I’d go into a store—and I still do it—and ask the salesperson, “OK, you’re going to take me through the order of buttons on the front of this machine.” And they’re like, “You’re going to remember that?” And I said, “You bet I’m going to remember it. I don’t have a choice.”
Like most hi‑fi enthusiasts of our vintage, things started to evolve for Yvon in the new millennium, and not merely due to the changing tides of technology. Although I guess you could call the World Wide Web a technological revolution when it comes to hi‑fi journalism.
I discovered SoundStage! at the end of the 2000s and was reading Doug Schneider’s stuff regularly, and he was talking a lot about things like “neutrality,” and I thought to myself, “What the fuck is neutrality?” I’d never heard anyone talk about audio like this.
But slowly, I think I became a better consumer of audio gear. I read the second edition of Floyd Toole’s book and started following his stuff, so I learned from there. But at the heart of it all, music was still music, and that was the thing that drew me to audio and fueled my obsession with better sound.
At the same time, of course, audio was becoming more connected, less physical, less tactile, less tangible. Also at the end of the 2000s, Yvon bought his first iPhone, along with his first Mac, because of the accessibility features Apple was building into its ecosystem, and started ripping his CDs to iTunes. At this point, I started asking some very ignorant questions about specific features, because I’ve played around with the accessibility tweaks of the Apple ecosystem in an effort to help my dad, who has macular degeneration. But it was apparently becoming clear to Yvon that I wasn’t getting the bigger picture.
“This is going to be a lecture,” he said without a hint of apology in his voice.
“I’m here for it. Lecture away.”
In terms of computer technology—and I’m including phones—accessibility refers to the ability of someone to use the devices autonomously, first and foremost, without needing to resort to assistance from others. That means using the keyboard on a computer, by and large, because how would I know where to point a mouse? In terms of the iPhone, it’s a touchscreen and they worked out a system where we still use gestures, but the gestures don’t do the same things they would if you had the accessibility features turned off.
Now, specifically for a blind person, in order to be able to use devices like that, you also have to have a screen reader that is aware of what’s onscreen and “translates” it into a form that is usable by a blind person. So it reads what’s on the screen, and not in a descriptive way; the software will just take what’s on the screen and translate it into audio.
If it was just language, that’d be fine. But of course, most of the functions in a piece of software are either buttons or check boxes or lists or drop-down menus, and so your screen reader has to be able to tell you that you’re on a menu or you’re on a list. You’re reading a table. You’re on a button, and the button is this. So it has to have a label so that you know what the button does. If it doesn’t, all your screen reader will say is, “Button.” So you know you’re on a button, but you have no idea what the button does.
In terms of software, what Apple does is integrate the screen reader into the OS directly. What this means is that in theory—not always the case, but in theory—whatever software is integrated into the OS should also be easily visible to the screen reader. And Apple does a pretty good job of that.
If you’re dealing with third-party software, though … You know what? I’m going to name a name, because this is a major beef for me. I am absolutely unable to use Roon. And I wish I could use it, but the screen reader is completely oblivious to Roon. It’ll tell you you’re in Roon, and that’s pretty much as far as it goes. So I wrote to the folks at Roon and asked if they had any plans to make the software accessible. The answer that came back was no. Flat-out no. And that’s a major piece of playback software that I would love to explore. It does all kinds of neat stuff.
So I use Apple Music instead, not because it’s the greatest software in the world. It’s not. It still has some problems. But it’s the easiest to use.
Of course, I don’t review software or operating systems. I review hardware for the most part. So while I had Yvon’s ear, I had to ask him how I could make my own reviews more inclusive with regard to accessibility needs. I asked him specifically what sorts of features and functions were important to him, and whether that was all a function of his blindness, or if some of it was simply a matter of personal proclivities.
It’s a bit of both. My first criterion is: can I use the damned thing? My second criterion is neutrality. Gear with a touchscreen or app is problematic, of course. But also, apparently there’s a lot of gear coming out now where the buttons are just touch-sensitive. And maybe they light up as your hand approaches. But I need mechanical buttons—not merely so I know I’m pressing a button, but also so I can orient myself spatially.
So that definitely affects purchasing decisions. When I read SoundStage!’s review of the NAD M33, I wanted to buy it. I would have bought it. But I cannot use it. It’s all touchscreen. So I ended up with a Bryston integrated amp instead, because Bryston is just so damned mechanical; it’s perfect for me.
At this point in our conversation, I couldn’t help but think about my own reference gear and why I chose it. The NAD C 3050 integrated amp, for example—one of the things that appealed to me about it, in addition to the VU meters, was the source-select buttons. When I walk over to my rack to drop a platter on the turntable, I don’t even have to look down at the C 3050 staring me straight in the crotch to select the right source. My finger is almost magnetically drawn to the correct button after a split second of subconscious orientation. So, in some sense, accessibility is simply good design. Or, I should say, in many cases human-centered design enhances accessibility almost as a byproduct. Yvon had ideas about this too.
Another consideration is: can I completely operate the gear with the remote? Sometimes not. Sometimes what you’ll get is, there are buttons on the remote, but you have to program them and you do that through an interface, and once that’s done, then you’re fine. But that original step of programming whatever into that button can be impossible if you can’t see.
Now, if we’re dreaming, if a company could come up with a way of being able to program a device through the use of either Google Assistant or something like that, then that would be a workaround for me, but at the moment, that’s not really available, and if it was, it would probably be the really big mass-market manufacturers like Denon or Yamaha. But a more specialty manufacturer such as Bryston? First of all, I’m not sure that they see the point of doing that. But then, of course, you have to either use something that’s been developed by someone else, or you develop your own, and you’re going to be spending some money on this.
The way voice control is developing, down the road there might be an option where you wouldn’t need to actually use a touchscreen to program all the things you then control with your voice, where you could actually just tell the device what you want. But we’re nowhere near that. And AI agents either aren’t knowledgeable enough in terms of accessibility guidelines or just go on their own and make shit up. You still need to double- and triple-check what it’s putting out because sometimes it’s just garbage.
That led to a lengthy digression about AI that I won’t even summarize here, as my October editorial would make that redundant. But once we had that out of our systems, I pulled Yvon back to the topic of accessibility, especially with regard to visual impairments. And full disclosure here: when I’m conducting these sorts of interviews, I often ask very pointed, direct questions that don’t make it into the final edit, if only because they’re a little too on the nose. But I’m going to transcribe exactly what I asked next, because Yvon took it in a direction I didn’t expect him to.
“Why should my readers care about accessibility?” I asked. “What would you say to them to make them care if they don’t already? Because far too many people these days simply don’t care about a problem until it affects them or their kids.”
Yvon replied:
I want people to think about this. What happens if you no longer have access to your passion for whatever reason? Think of it like this: as you get older, chances are you will develop, unfortunately, sight-related problems. Or mobility problems. As you get older, just … your body sort of gives up on you. How would you feel if that kept you from listening to what you want to listen to in a way you want to listen to it?
And that’s something manufacturers need to keep in mind. Our population is skewing older. So if you want to keep your customers, then make sure you understand that you’re dealing with a bunch of people who are accustomed to using your products. As their bodies change, you want to make sure that they’re still able to use your products.
When you design with accessibility in mind, you design for inclusion. If you choose not to, you are saying, in a way, to those of us who can’t use your products: “We don’t really care about you.” Is that something you really want to say to your current customers who may be starting to have various impairments? Or to potential new customers who would like to enjoy your products or services?
Because those people still have the same passion.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
