How it begun
If you love music as much as I do, there was eventually a point in your life, where you start to be an audiophile. I wonder, from my judgment today, can I still use the A-word, without having others jump to the wrong conclusion?
Let's see in a more or less brief series, which I would like to share with you, of my transition in listening to music and trying out equipment. We will be covering the time from when I was at the age of 12 years until recently. Maybe you had similar experiences or like to share some of yours?
A bit of background: As my native language is german, I hope the text will be fluid and clear to all readers (thanks to spell checking and dictionaries!). At least I hope, you enjoy reading as much as I did writing this!
I didn’t know when it was starting to be a thing for me. When did I begin to care about how something sounds, how did I define good quality?
To determine good from bad you have to see, what are bad quality and the grey areas in between. A very subtle process, biased by largely subjective opinions.
I have a childhood memory, of what perhaps could have been the start of my process. It is me in the late nineties recording nearly everything to a music cassette recorder through a microphone. My brother showed me how to use the play/rec buttons. It was incredibly low volume, the noise was louder than the actual recording. Maybe this was the first time, I was confronted with the signal-noise ratio (SNR). Later on I did spot an "audio output" labelled connector in the front panel of the TV and again my brother was helping me with provided cables and connection. As this time, the old DIN-pin connectors were still in use, it was not a problem that the TV was probably 10 years old. Looking back eventually my brief insight on standardisations, as cables seem to cross fit a wide variety of devices for a long time. Now back in the recording business, I taped dialogues from my favourite VHS movies and listened to them before sleep with a walkman and headphones.
While spending more time listening, I began to find interest in music apart from, let's say, appropriate audio for minors. My Siblings were children of the eighties, so I had access to a collection of Vinyl, MC, CD and even 1/2" reel-to-reel tape filled with music from Kim Wilde, Michal Jackson, A-ha, Soft Cell, Dead or Alive, Cyndi Lauper, etc. You get the idea.
So again it was my brother, who introduced me to his stereo. That the CD was sounding always clear, Vinyl was cracking and sometimes fluttering. So was the tape. But nothing of that bothered me then. I was just listening to music and enjoyed it.
In the following part, I will be writing about my firtst own gear.
