What are your Eureka Moments in this Hobby?

Hearing the Quad 57’s/Futterman H3aa’s OTL monos/Marantz 7 tube preamp at Doug Kesara’s house in Harrison NY in  1978! Phono cartridge was a Panasonic strain gauge. Turntable was a Thorens TD125.  After listening to this system I was determined to acquire a similar setup! Decades later I have!

@peter_s 

No conspicuous omission on my part, but I probably didn't express myself clearly enough.

Let’s imagine three people:

One connects to technical performance in their system — they have a connection to sound. I’m emphatically NOT claiming that "listening to music" is somehow superior to listening to sound. Why would anyone judge what someone does for pleasure? If someone gets deep satisfaction from the technical challenge of optimizing a system sonically — that’s entirely legitimate. I have no interest in policing motivations.

The second person loves music and wants a good system to deliver it. They want to forget about the means (technology) and just enjoy the end (music) as soon as they can. Again, no judgment. People love what they love, and if they prefer to separate means from ends, that’s their preference.

The third person has no connection to music or sound; they’re not engaged in a listening activity at all. They’re doing something else: collecting, status-signaling, engineering appreciation. I don’t judge this either, but they’ve exited the category of audiophile listening.

Your objection uses the third person — someone who isn’t listening at all — as evidence that "listening to sound" and "listening to music" are opposed activities. But this conflates two distinct types: the first person (an audiophile focused on sound) with the third person (not an audiophile at all). Those are different categories.

My point is subtler. When I’m actually listening, the supposed opposition between attending to acoustic properties and attending to music is false. I cannot attend carefully to musical meaning without attending — maybe not focally, but to some degree — to the acoustic phenomena that constitute it. 

When I listen, sometimes the music is the focus and sometimes it’s the sound, but both are always there. The ability to control what is focal is an achievement of listening practice. The inability to control that is a kind of dysfunction that I often see audiophiles complain about.

@lewl28 +1 on that feeling. I'm content, happy and for now, solidly off the upgrade wheel. I've found my lane. 

@hilde45 I think it is true that you did not explain your insight clearly. In your original post, you discussed a false dichotomy between the music and the sound elements. Your post expressed that false dichotomy as a general truth, but in fact, it is a truth for you. Your second post illustrates that dichotomy as a real (true) one, and in fact adds another endpoint. I think what you’ve written about your own realization makes a ton of sense, and I agree with it. But it seemed to be expressed as a general truth, whereas in fact, it’s a personal truth. And I do agree, that all three endpoints of enjoyment can be expressions of defensible motivations!

@peter_s 

Thanks for the thoughtful comment — it’s helping me clarify what I’m actually claiming.

I’m puzzled by the distinction between "personal truth" and "general truth" here. When I say "attentive listening to acoustic properties and attentive listening to music are the same activity under different descriptions," I’m making a claim about the structure of perceptual experience and how it gets formulated, generally. It’s as if I said, "It is hard to balance on a ship in a storm." That’s not just how it is for me, but for anyone like me (most of humanity). 

If what I was reporting was an idiosyncratic psychological state, if it was truly "just personal," we’d have no shared language to discuss it. The fact that you understand the claim and can engage it suggests we’re operating on the same wavelength -- both physically and mentally.

I suppose my question to you would be what is the difference between a personal truth and a general truth?