Is this about music or equipment? Am I crazy or am I such a wise man lol.?

Dear friends,

I love your recent analogy to the cars – it explains so much.

We all have the different categories of cars – Grand Turismo, Rally, off the road etc.

And the owners are passionate about these cars. The only difference between the car owners and us (Audio lovers) is IMHO that the car owners realize the limitations of their machines. They know the limits – none of them would attempt to take a 4X4 machine to compete in Nürburgring.

For them it’s obvious and they respect the limits, so clearly translated to “our” world by Angela Yeung (please see @deep_333 post with a link to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXMU-zRq_c) that we don’t.

Maybe we are not that flexible in our opinions and forgiving?

Maybe we are stuck in this equipment warfare? I don’t know.

Last night I listened to my system and I’m fully aware that with regards to the powerful full scale orchestral music my system is not “there”. Maybe it’s at 60% (although as we know per percentages if we take out dog for a walk, per percentages each of us got 3 legs lol.).

In the moment of compulsion, I was thinking about getting another set of speakers, switches and other gear to be able to switch my DAC (or in the future another DAC) to the system able to “recreate” the powerful sound of the orchestras.

And I realized that it’s not worth it.

Should I switch to another system corresponding to type of the music that I am attracted to at this moment or should I accept the fact that my system sounds as it does, and it’s not perfect?

I can’t imagine the stress of switching the systems, to achieve the “perfect sound”. Listening to my play list and running to switch to another set of speakers?

To look from Angela Yeung’s perspective, it’s quite easy – just move to another room and another system and you’ll will get the “the perfect sound”.

Not all of us got this luxury of switching the systems – we are all attempting to get a good system that makes us happy. And this is all about it.

The stress of switching the systems would totally annihilate the pleasure of listening to the music for me. This interruption is like with sex (please translate this to your liking – I’m afraid that this post will be deleted lol.)

Of course, my first point was – how much money we spend on the “media”, meaning the music recordings in whatever form, versus the cost of equipment.

I’m very happy for this discussion – I hope that we all accept our systems as a tool to listen to the music. And let’s follow the approach of the car lovers – there are different cars for different roads and there are NO CARS that will be good for all the roads.

It’s all about the pleasure.

Cheers my friends.

Huh, I change equipment to enhance the music.  The issue can be what do you change to improve the musical enjoyment.  If you don't know what you are doing, it can be expensive and frustrating.

It is certainly primarily about the music. No equipment has as profound an effect on the sound as a new piece of music played over it, regardless of format, regardless of quality.

I am a psychologist and my first job out of graduate school was doing research in an Air Force flight simulation laboratory to understand what features of the real world flight environment were critical to pilots. The aim was to simulate only those features critical to pilot performance and ignore those things that weren't even if they were "realistic". Indeed, the scenes were not necessarily realistic in an absolute sense, but they were completely effective for the tasks that pilots needed to do. I have done similar research with acoustics and with auditory tones in products, The point is that simply trying to replicate the measurable qualities of music won't necessarily give you the best perceived sound quality and might lead you down a path of optimizing things that aren't very important to the listener. And how do you know what is important. Ah, that's where I come in. I measure perception and correlate it with physical metrics to separate the wheat from the chaff.

 "Baby, you can drive my car
Yes, I’m gonna be a star
Baby, you can drive my car
And maybe I’ll love you
Beep-beep-mm-beep-beep, yeah! "

Slow down!

Life long love of music drives/drove me to get great sounding realistic playback.

And the getting into and improving playback is fun. Some kvelling* over one’s system is ok with me. (I love stereo porn too.)

Yesterday I jumped up and danced (good thing our identities are obscure) to Vulfmon "Hapejji I" or maybe it was "Boogie Man" That’s the power of getting sucked in and wanting more. My kids told to me to check out Vulfmon. On it.

*(In Yiddish, kvelling (from the verb kvelln) means to feel or express immense, swelling pride and joy, especially over someone else’s accomplishments, like a child’s success, often to the point of bursting with happiness, but without the negative connotation of bragging. It’s a deep, heartfelt delight, like a parent gushing, "I’m kvelling over my son’s graduation!". I’m kvelling of my stereo.