A curious and gradual thing has happened to my music listening over the past 20 years.

Many years ago, music listening was an active part of my life. I’d make time to find new music I liked, to play it loud on worthy equipment, to share it with friends, and most of all to enjoy it.

Then life evolved. More and more my music listening became a background activity often done in my home office. My nice (but large) audio equipment was gathering dust in the living room, and instead I was using entry-level mass market gear chosen mostly because it fit the small space I had available. “How much different can speakers this small be?” I thought.

A couple weekends ago I had an epiphany. I realized I had all but stopped listening to music. I rarely enjoyed what I heard in my office. It sounded “fine”, but there was no spark of life, no excitement, no emotional impact.

I finally realized I had to do something to reverse the tide. I needed some better speakers. It had been 20 years since I seriously auditioned speakers, and while I enjoyed that process back then, I realized there was no way I could commit that kind of time to it now. Even if I could, it just felt like it would be too painful.

Outlaw fans and owners of these speakers will already know one part of the end of this story. These Outlaw bookshelf speakers are a phenomenal, flabbergasting step forward in how good music sounds compared to what I had before. I was shocked by just how much a difference it was. It was immediately obvious from the first second from hooking them up and the smile on my face kept building as I found myself eagerly listening to long forgotten tracks. And it turns out that some of that new music isn’t so terrible after all. I still don’t quite understand/believe how two products that look so similar on the outside can be so dissimilar in what they deliver.

Not having listened to any other competing models, I can’t vouch for whether these are slightly better or slightly worse than other speakers in this class. But this time around, that really wasn’t the main point for me. The reality is that if the price of entry included having to find the time and patience to go through an exhaustive speaker auditioning process, I wasn’t going to end up with any speakers at all. And soon enough I just wasn’t going to be listening to any more music period.

What made this work for me was being able to trust based on word of mouth that if I took a chance on Outlaw, I’d be very likely to be getting a good value on good quality speakers for their price and class, I could try them myself in the one location it counts (my listening location), and if it all went wrong I could send them back. I ended up getting more than I bargained for in that I hadn’t imagined just how much better these could be.

So in summary -- THANK YOU Outlaw for doing business the way you do. Its going to make a big difference to me over many happy months and years to come.

If there’s anyone else out there realizing that you’ve been doing more and more of your listening on smaller speakers, and that you’re not enjoying what you’re hearing — please do yourself a favor and try these speakers. I wish I had thought to do this years ago.