Anyone in this hobby lonely like me and wish they could “hang” with a fellow audiophile?

Yeah, I get where you are coming from. None of my friends are audio nuts, certainly not in the way that I am. To them, anything that plays music gets treated like an appliance, like the refrigerator. The complexity of most home theater gear is intimidating and I think turns many people away from digging down into the weeds and trying to understand it. To a lesser degree I think the same thing applies to a 2 channel system. I love the music and love to sit and listen. I also just enjoy interacting with the equipment, as well as doing the occasional upgrades, to make the music play. Having friends who appreciated a good system and sharing a listening session with me would be nice. This would usually mean finding someone who shares your particular taste in music, and that makes it a bit more challenging. There are no audio enthusiast groups in the area that I am aware of, and having lived here most of my life, I think I would probably know about one if it existed. Living in central VA there are no dealers close by anymore. The closest thing to a dealer is Crutchfield in Charlottesville and that is nearly 2 hours away. Hardly close enough to casually drive over and hang out. Used to have 3 local shops with a variety of gear available, the only thing local now is Best Buy and that is hardly what I would call a dealer. 

@orenstein 

Under your userID is a place to create a virtual system. It is easy to post photos and is set up to ID your components. It simple there. It is very hard to post photos to threads. 

I’m a Member/Director for the AudiophileFondation.org, we have meet-ups and zoom events so you can join the community. We have a happy hour every Friday at 5 pm PST that is free to the public.

@ghdprentice : first I've been able to respond re Pgh, for some reason, the @ call out didn't work and I was on the road on a driving event. 

Yeah, the 'Burgh was pretty bleak. It wasn't so much the black soot (tales post-WWII were that a white shirt in town had to be changed by noon) but by the '60s, that got cleaned up. I do remember getting fierce headaches in the tunnels into and out of the city-- leaded gas? I dunno.  

It vibed like The Deerhunter. Nonetheless, Opus One on Smithfield, the main drag where Kaufmann's was (he commissioned FallingWater and the Richard Neutra house in Palm Desert) was a serious high end refuge-- from double KLH 9s with Marantz tube stuff to ARC and Linn, early if not first demo of the Dahlquist, etc. Tasso Spanos, the owner had a good ear and marvelous taste. That's where I first encountered the "high end" that was not brute force. 

I used to go back when my parents were alive, no more. I gather that these days it is one of those renewed cities with good housing prices, there are more food options and it isn't quite what it was. (I don't want to diss the 'Burgh, but also don't feel the need to defend it especially when I lived there-- I hadda get out-- moved to NYC and life was harder but better for me-- that was the beginning of my career). 

I’m a Member/Director for the AudiophileFondation.org

@mountz 

The URL AudiophileFondation.org does not work.

Did you mean AudiophileFoundation.org?

Thanks!