And just to provide some supporting evidence for The Greatest's inclusion in this thread, I give you Exhibit A:
Considering he's on vacation and he appears to be making a cassette from that turntable, he probably doesn't have his main system with him.
Technically that's a "mono," not a stereo! Crumb and I have a mutual friend (also a 78 collector), and he's stayed at Crumb's place in France a few times. I actually got to meet Crumb at our friend's house in Pennsylvania back in the '80s.
Musicians see themselves as the source of the music, so a saxophonist might spend thousands chasing the "right" mouthpiece, guitarist goes nuts for their effects boxes, but paying more than the bare minimum for stereos is crazy to them because no matter how much one spends it will never produce the. music as they understand it. Most musicians don't have make much money and what money they do have they rather spend on their instruments. Also, I think musicians tend to process music more as a language rather than as a sound. Perhaps an analogy: if you have a second language but are not quite proficient, you usually need to hear it as clear and undistorted as possible to make sense of it, but if you are a native speaker you can understand even the most garbled transmission.
That's the way my stage musician brother was. Major $$ for very specific types of different musical equipment but just a cheapo CD player was 'good enough'. He rarely ever, actually never, listened to any music anyway. He just had his basic portable CD player for hearing parts of songs, mostly guitar parts, structure, whatever. The CD player was just a 'tool' for him. Part of the job.
Jerry is the man! What an interesting person in music history. He gets a lot of face time in this video about Martin guitars.
Mats must have a day job or other income source. None of the 10 or so times I have heard him were at gigs that could paid much money. On one of his visits to New Orleans, he borrowed my friend Hart McNee's Selmer Mark VI baritone for the gig--the action was considerably looser after Mats' full on assault playing!
