For me, being an audiophile and being a music lover are two distinct (though obviously related) things. It's that way in my other hobby, sailing: there are people who mostly work on their boats, and people who mostly sail. Like sailing, listening to music is an adventure, with its own unique world of thoughts and emotions (and equipment, and costs, and dangers, and standards, and best practices).
I build my own tube amplifiers, braid my own speaker cables, etc. The skills and knowledge needed for this have nothing to do with music. Thus when I am sizing a resistor, or spending weeks trying to beat down hum, I am not thinking about how Kiri Te Kanawa pauses for just the perfect number of milliseconds before she pardons the unfaithful Count. These are very different things although, clearly, doing well in one area lets me enjoy the other even more. What it means to me in practice is that I have no sympathy or understanding for people who try to get their home audio system to re-create something approaching the experience of a live performance. This is so far from being achievable so as to be a meaningless goal. A couple of nights ago, I was listening to the Orchestre de Paris playing Mahler's 6th at the Salle Pleyel. This is not the world's greatest band, but I remember thinking that the quality of the live experience is light years away from anything that a top-end system could reproduce (much less mine). I'm not sure why this is so, but I suspect it results from the fact that the sound in a concert hall is produced by dozens (?) of square meters of active generating surfaces (strings, sounding boards, drumheads, etc), and in my living room all I have is a few dozen of square centimeters-worth of speaker cone. I guess my point is this: caring about music and caring about equipment are mostly separate preoccupations. A person can legitimately (and to varying degrees) do one, or the other, or both. moshulu -- moshulu ------------------------------------------------------------------------ moshulu's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6811 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32378 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
