paulraphael
Active Member
I'm a writer (copy / content / UX etc.) and a visual artist (photography). I make more money with the former, get more attention with the latter.
Some hobby-ish things: running around in the mountains ... I used to do a lot of alpine climbing, and now do more hiking and trail running. Music ... I learned bass guitar when I was 29, and played in a quite terrible band in NYC; now I mostly jam occasionally with my girlfriend or mutual musician friends, or with famous dead people on the stereo. Food ... I used to run an underground restaurant in Brooklyn; now I consult pastry chefs and shop owners around the world on ice cream science and recipe development.
I got interested in audio when I was a teenager and my big brother became an audiophile. I'd go shopping with him and listen to stuff at boutique-like shops that felt like shrines. Remarkably, this affliction has saved me gobs of money over the years. I developed a taste for things I couldn't afford, and a distaste for what I could—so I just never bought anything, save for the occasional self-consciously unpretentious boom box or equivalent that I'd find second-hand. By the time I had a real income and could afford a real stereo, I'd lost my obsession with it, and so didn't go crazy.
Since then I've been humbled by many, many ABX tests. I'm also an amateur science junky, which makes it awkward to talk audio with most people in most corners of the audio world. And my dabbling in music-making has led to dabbling in recording and mixing. I find that using a DAW, even if you barely know what you're doing, is incredibly illuminating. Stuff that I used to attribute to magic I now see as the result of baked-in eq, or room acoustics. I learned that it takes a lot of distortion to get my attention, but just a wee bit too much energy between 2khz and 5khz, and my ears are unhappy.
Anyway, thanks to the pandemic, I've been getting reacquainted with my somewhat neglected music collection. To do this I needed headphones, because everyone's in the living room / dining room / studio / my office / her office basically all the time. Shopping for headphones meant learning about them—and then headphone amps, and DACs, and fletcher-munson curves , and fourrier transforms .... and now instead of procrastinating over there (or there, or there, or there ... ) I'm here.
Some hobby-ish things: running around in the mountains ... I used to do a lot of alpine climbing, and now do more hiking and trail running. Music ... I learned bass guitar when I was 29, and played in a quite terrible band in NYC; now I mostly jam occasionally with my girlfriend or mutual musician friends, or with famous dead people on the stereo. Food ... I used to run an underground restaurant in Brooklyn; now I consult pastry chefs and shop owners around the world on ice cream science and recipe development.
I got interested in audio when I was a teenager and my big brother became an audiophile. I'd go shopping with him and listen to stuff at boutique-like shops that felt like shrines. Remarkably, this affliction has saved me gobs of money over the years. I developed a taste for things I couldn't afford, and a distaste for what I could—so I just never bought anything, save for the occasional self-consciously unpretentious boom box or equivalent that I'd find second-hand. By the time I had a real income and could afford a real stereo, I'd lost my obsession with it, and so didn't go crazy.
Since then I've been humbled by many, many ABX tests. I'm also an amateur science junky, which makes it awkward to talk audio with most people in most corners of the audio world. And my dabbling in music-making has led to dabbling in recording and mixing. I find that using a DAW, even if you barely know what you're doing, is incredibly illuminating. Stuff that I used to attribute to magic I now see as the result of baked-in eq, or room acoustics. I learned that it takes a lot of distortion to get my attention, but just a wee bit too much energy between 2khz and 5khz, and my ears are unhappy.
Anyway, thanks to the pandemic, I've been getting reacquainted with my somewhat neglected music collection. To do this I needed headphones, because everyone's in the living room / dining room / studio / my office / her office basically all the time. Shopping for headphones meant learning about them—and then headphone amps, and DACs, and fletcher-munson curves , and fourrier transforms .... and now instead of procrastinating over there (or there, or there, or there ... ) I'm here.