Are we music lovers or gear lovers?

You are so right on. I fear that we can get lost in all of it and listen to the gear and NOT the music.
I learned that lesson and have really found the joy in listening this year - to the music and I am most pleased. It is like meditation to me and I just came out of a 6 hour trance this evening. I am listening to music that I never would have before. But I think that it is because I have my system in a place that I REALLY like and now only focus on music and not the next upgrade. Like anything, there's a balance to be found.
Thanks for the thread,and hey, your girlfriend is very observant :)
Angela

The name is Audiogon.

Compared to audio, music is risk free, easy and prevalent. I am sure people have their own music outlet outside of this site that already caters to their taste. An example is the audiophile-taste music discussed here (e.g. P. Barber, Cowboy Junkies). I talk to my friends about music. But they are not in to audio, so I talk here about that. I like gear and good sound, so I talk at audio sites for that. The level of music talk here is appropriate. If you back-seat the gear and good sound, it wouldn't be audiogon. Go find a musicgon.

I've seen people ask why people who love music don't get more excited about equipment! Here are my thoughts on why I don't post about music on this board:

1. I've always thought of this forum as one for audio gear more than music and treated it as such. Maybe that's just a self-fullfiling prophecy. I guess I think about it like this (and I'm exaggerating my point): I care deeply about my family, and I'm sure everyone else here cares about theirs too, but we're here to talk gear.

2. If I want to talk about music, I can always call up a friend. None of those guys care about audio equipment or even "remastered" versions of an album, and I've learned better than to preach the church of audio gear to them. I check in here to find others who care about these things.

3. A bulletin board can be a good resource for information about gear. It's not as a good resource for information about music. People can communicate about what cables are better in a way that they can't do about music. Think about how much more stock you take in a stranger advising you that cable X will sound better than what you currently have or that the DCC version of a recording sounds better than the regular CD version, versus that stranger advising you that if you like Billie Holiday, you'll love Diana Krall.

4. People discuss music on a bulletin boards in a different way than they do on the outside. With friends: hey check this new band I found ... wow, that's good stuff. On a board: who are the top five most influential female acts of the '60s? It's just a different type of exchange about music; personally, I'm not intersted in the latter style.

5. I just saw some live music tonight. Great fun and great band, but I don't feel a need to get other's opinions on it. If I hear a new tube amp at the store tomorrow, I'm more likely to want to hear other people's opinions on it and would post here.

We're both. Audiogon principally provides a place to buy and sell hardware and some software. It also provides (luckily for us) a forum where we can exchange information that may be useful in creating our own collections of hardware and software. On the 'new today' list today there were 261 classifieds for gear and 32 for music. Obviously the members of the Audiogon communitiy principally use this site for gear and discussion of gear. Personnally, I turn to Amazon for software since I can navigate their extensive database of classical music (all that I buy and always CDs) and read both editors' and buyers' reviews of specific CDs as well as listen to excerpts. And you can buy either new or used software on Amazon. The combination works for me.

FYI, AA has a music forum. Check it out here:

http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/music/bbs.html