By Rod Easdown
Many years ago I worked at a small public relations company and every Friday I’d take a stack of movies home and come back on Monday mornings with a synopsis of each one, to be printed on the jacket.
My job was to convince the browsers in the video shops that this movie was the one they were looking for. It was terrific fun. There were never enough adjectives in this business.
After my first attempt, in which I had described a puppy as a puppy, my boss called by my desk and explained why this would never do. Puppies were not puppies; they were loveable, wet-nosed puppies. Kittens were always fluffy and playful, action heroes always had an acute sense of what was right even if it wasn’t always legal, and Adam Sandler always gave touchingly sincere performances.
And part of what I enjoy about hi-fi is that this industry has always been a powerful driver in the creative use of extravagant adjectives.
Take American headphone maker Audeze, for example. It offers a vegan leather option for its ear pads.
Vegan leather? I was confused. Isn’t all leather vegan? I mean cows provide leather and cows eat grass along with the odd bit of baling wire, ergo leather is vegan.
Nope, I wasn’t thinking it through. Leather involves cow skin and skinning a cow is not exactly an action of which vegans approve. But how do you get leather without herding cows onto the ferry across the old River Styx?
The answer is that vegan leather isn’t leather at all, it just looks and feels like it. Audeze uses what it calls microsuede, a faux suede made up of polyester microfibre that is non-toxic and available in black or brown thanks to environmentally safe dyes. I guess Australians would call it Clayton’s leather.
Don’t assume that the vegan leather option was a quick and easy development; this is hi-fi.
“Care and diligence was applied to finding the perfect non-leather material fit for our headphones,” the folk at Audeze declare.
“The ear pads of the LCD series headphones are specially designed to create a lifelike natural sound. Re-creating this with a non-leather product turned out to be tougher than we expected.
“After several revisions, we believe we have a non-leather ear pad that is an excellent replacement.”
But vegan leather is not the finish of things. The LCD3s are made of zebrawood harvested from the forests of Cameroon and Gabon.
Your zebrawood LCD3 headphones are therefore available with ear pads in either standard Italian lambskin leather or, at an extra charge (of course), vegan leather. And given that LCD3s retail in Australia for $2779, you’ll hardly notice the extra cost at all. Who knows, somewhere in Italy a lamb may even be grateful.
Um, make that a soft, frisky lamb.
