Hello Boys & Girls !
I've been on the audio/HiFi aural nirvana treadmill for over 20 years now & in fact my very reason for doing electrical engineering was so that I could understand what all those specs mean ! ;-)
Little did I know, that a lot of the specs ( especially when it came to loudspeakers ) had very little correlation to what a system/piece of gear would sound like. I've been seeking that elusive aural high that you get in a - not smoky any more - jazz club ever since.
And I have to admit that some of my biggest disappointements involved listening to stratospherically priced gear @ ultra hi end shops.
My reasoning was quite simple - even if I had mega bucks to blow, from an ethical perspective alone I could not justify spending $100k's on a soundsystem, but nevertheless I wanted to know what these systems actually sound like.....nowhere near as good as the reviewers waffle on...
It has taken me many years to differentiate between the sound of the gear & room/acoustical interaction
The last 15 years have been particularly painfull, as I've witnessed in shock & horror the rise & rise of mp3 masochism. And don't even get me started on the iTunes phenomenon.... millions of tracks ! all of them absolutely wortless & completely devoid of any emotional engagement!
If anyone else thinks that I'm a mad man, I'ed love to hear from you - if this sounds familiar to some of you, I'ed love to hear from you even more !
I've been on the audio/HiFi aural nirvana treadmill for over 20 years now & in fact my very reason for doing electrical engineering was so that I could understand what all those specs mean ! ;-)
Little did I know, that a lot of the specs ( especially when it came to loudspeakers ) had very little correlation to what a system/piece of gear would sound like. I've been seeking that elusive aural high that you get in a - not smoky any more - jazz club ever since.
And I have to admit that some of my biggest disappointements involved listening to stratospherically priced gear @ ultra hi end shops.
My reasoning was quite simple - even if I had mega bucks to blow, from an ethical perspective alone I could not justify spending $100k's on a soundsystem, but nevertheless I wanted to know what these systems actually sound like.....nowhere near as good as the reviewers waffle on...
It has taken me many years to differentiate between the sound of the gear & room/acoustical interaction
The last 15 years have been particularly painfull, as I've witnessed in shock & horror the rise & rise of mp3 masochism. And don't even get me started on the iTunes phenomenon.... millions of tracks ! all of them absolutely wortless & completely devoid of any emotional engagement!
If anyone else thinks that I'm a mad man, I'ed love to hear from you - if this sounds familiar to some of you, I'ed love to hear from you even more !
thank god for the nutters...
Yo Ian !
You're an englishman living in california - you must be mad & that goes without saying
But I can tell you that Sydney appears very conservative in a lot of ways & the last time I went to the local HiFi society meeting, I nearly fell asleep! It seemed full of geezaz ( well about 2 dozen actually @ that time & the club has maybe 100 & a bit members in all in a city of 4 million ) who appeared to be 100% occupied justifying one another behind the reasoning & validity behind spending thousands of dollars on loudspeaker cables & interconnects ! I mean unless you fork out $500 for an unbalanced interconnect cable they treat you like a pleb !
Now that's what I call truly MAD !
I did meet a few reasonable people there, but all in all it felt like trip to Syberia in the middle of winter
& don't get me wrong here, as despite me EE background, I can also hear the differences in cables, even power cables - which puts me @ great odds with the rest of the EE crowd, however in a vast majority of the cases I can see the reasons behind the physics involved & it's not black art/magic as the vast majority of the commercial cable vendors eulogise & I've actually met some of these peddlers & could tell you real stories about how & what products they started their businesse & you'ed **** yourself laughing!
Do you know any freaks in Sydney? It seems impossible to search the forum for nutters like me based on a geographical proximity
What's the new platform that the forum's migrating to ?
I hope we can meet one day - I am planning to shoot-up to the states one of these days, prefferably after you introduce accountability & capital punishement to the finance industry heads that have created the economic mess that we're all in - I think you can guess, I've worked as an IT dog in that industry for a while ;-)
Yo Ian !
You're an englishman living in california - you must be mad & that goes without saying
But I can tell you that Sydney appears very conservative in a lot of ways & the last time I went to the local HiFi society meeting, I nearly fell asleep! It seemed full of geezaz ( well about 2 dozen actually @ that time & the club has maybe 100 & a bit members in all in a city of 4 million ) who appeared to be 100% occupied justifying one another behind the reasoning & validity behind spending thousands of dollars on loudspeaker cables & interconnects ! I mean unless you fork out $500 for an unbalanced interconnect cable they treat you like a pleb !
Now that's what I call truly MAD !
I did meet a few reasonable people there, but all in all it felt like trip to Syberia in the middle of winter
& don't get me wrong here, as despite me EE background, I can also hear the differences in cables, even power cables - which puts me @ great odds with the rest of the EE crowd, however in a vast majority of the cases I can see the reasons behind the physics involved & it's not black art/magic as the vast majority of the commercial cable vendors eulogise & I've actually met some of these peddlers & could tell you real stories about how & what products they started their businesse & you'ed **** yourself laughing!
Do you know any freaks in Sydney? It seems impossible to search the forum for nutters like me based on a geographical proximity
What's the new platform that the forum's migrating to ?
I hope we can meet one day - I am planning to shoot-up to the states one of these days, prefferably after you introduce accountability & capital punishement to the finance industry heads that have created the economic mess that we're all in - I think you can guess, I've worked as an IT dog in that industry for a while ;-)
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