What makes you Passionate about Audio

[Ricardus]

My dad always had a nice home stereo growing up, and that kinda rubbed off. Heathkit stuff he built and other brands as well.

 

[mps]

I have also spent way too much time customizing my Logitech Media Server (formally squeezebox) setup around my listening habits, with many plugins, detailed tagging, custom menus, and occasional Perl hacking. My current project is to use a custom playlist to hear how classical music has evolved by listening to all of my classical music in order of composition. I’m up to the early 19th century and expect it to take another 6 months.

 

[Sgt. Ear Ache]

Basically, I'm a geek. I love tech gadgets. That ends up mostly being about computers/videogames and audio gear for me. Some of that is inspired by a grandfather who was a real propeller-head geek himself and always had all sorts of cool toys including a full fledged photographic dark room and a huge model train table in his basement in the 70s as well as being a very early PC adopter (Apple IIe). I tend to go deep with the tech gizmos - for instance I don't just "play videogames", I also have been into emulation for more than a decade now and was seriously into DOS tweaks and whatnot in the 90s (not to mention programming PCs in the 80s) etc etc. I also love and play (guitar) music. Contrary to some people's experience, for me the move into the digital/streaming realm has made things exponentially easier. There was a period where I resisted and stuck with physical media but that's pretty much done now even with dead tree books. The convenience is just too powerful. I still have a bunch of shelves full of books and a couple dusty boxes ful of cds and lps but I haven't bought more than a handful of books in the past few years. I don't have to have pristine transparent sound for my music listening, but I do value that as imho the ultimate circumstance for "serious" listening. So I can totally enjoy just banging out the tunes on a bluetooth speaker much of the time, but when I really want to focus on and get lost in the music I like having my two big setups (headphone and loudspeaker) that I know are pretty much getting the recording and only the recording to my ears.

I get an enormous kick out of the fact that I can carry around with me in a small little bag an entire huge entertainment media ecosystem wherever I go. A kindle Fire HD8 that has a library of reading material and a library of emulated classic arcade and console videogames on it, an old PS4 controller that works fantastically with it, a good bluetooth speaker and a set of nice wireless headphones, a DAP full of thousands of tracks of music, a couple back-up battery packs...days worth of entertainment even without an internet connection or a power outlet. If 16 year old me could have gained access to that bag his head would have exploded. I often lament the fact that my grandfather passed away just as smartphones were coming online. He would have loved this stuff.

 

[Slayer]

I first became infatuated with audio at the age of 13, when I stayed at a relatives for a family reunion. My older (18) cousin had a system that blew me away. So, saving my money from working at a grocery store on the weekdays, and a trucking company on weekends. At the age of 14, I purchased my first system (still miss it today).
Music became my medicine and to this day, it's still the best form of pain relief that I can use every day without any negative side effects or chemical dependency.
Next to clean water, hvac, I believe music is one of man's greatest invention.

 

[JayGilb]

I grew up in a house with a decent stereo and thousands of albums and 45s. My dad was a musician and song writer, so music was always playing somewhere in our house.
I began to tear apart and attempt to put back together electronics by age 12. My ratio of tear down to reassembly and functionality has got better over the years.
My career in electronics is due to being surrounded by equipment from my earliest years and a father who was patient and understanding.

 

[Apesbrain]

Listening to B.B. King's "The Thrill Is Gone" just now and for the first time realizing that there are strings in there!

 

[computer-audiophile]

Spot on. Today trying to listen to music often ends up being an exercise in IT support. I feel like most of the second half of my life has been wasted on IT support so I resent that listening to music is like that now. Organizing audio files on computers, servers, networks, phones, tablets, streamers, ... and most of that needs rebooting from time to time, if not active debugging. What a drag. And then when there's a pause in a piece of music because a network buffer ran dry, it's infuriating. And I didn't even mention the abysmal user interfaces on the apps. Omg they all suck so hard.

Hooking up a CD player to an amp and speakers was something I did once when I changed apartments. And then I just had to put disks in.

Yes, I am also a victim of these time-eaters. They often inflict a narcissistic wound on me when I don't know exactly what's going on.

Fortunately, I grew up in a time when not everything was digital. So I could still come into contact with real things and nature and acquire manual skills. As soon as computer technology came along, I was naturally fascinated by it and began to work intensively with it. At the beginning, still with mainframe computers. I built my first private computers myself, at the time when Steve Wozniak was doing the same in his garage. When I see today how many young people are really extremely focused on small screens and essentially let cheap apps guide them through their daily lives, I'm even happier that I know another time and other possibilities. I still buy real books, and I subscribe to newspapers, so I don't just read everything on the screen.

 

[Multicore]

Yes, I am also a victim of these time-eaters.

Fortunately, I grew up in a time when not everything was digital. So I could still come into contact with real things and nature and acquire manual skills. As soon as computer technology came along, I was naturally fascinated by it and began to work intensively with it. At the beginning, still with mainframe computers. I built my first private computers myself, at the time when Steve Wozniak was doing the same in his garage. When I see today how many young people are really extremely focused on small screens and essentially let cheap apps guide them through their daily lives, I'm even happier that I know another time and other possibilities. I still buy real books, and I subscribe to newspapers, so I don't just read everything on the screen.

I learned to program computers in the 1970s. My mother taught me. She had been doing it since the late 50s. She taught me on a Nascom computer that me and my dad built with a lot of careful soldering.

 

[computer-audiophile]

I learned to program computers in the 1970s. My mother taught me. She had been doing it since the late 50s

Yes, it's interesting that initially quite a lot of women programmed and operated computers, but that changed later. I was once at an event in a computer museum where I was able to talk to such old ladies who worked on an early Zuse computer, for example.

The first large computer I worked on was a Siemens 2002 at the Astronomisches Recheninstitut in Heidelberg.

(Sorry for off topic)

 

[computer-audiophile]

I think if I were young today and starting over with audio, it would not have become a passion. The handling is completely different, the circuits are extremely miniaturized and what the software does can at best be guessed at, there is no longer a haptic and visual appealing user experience. I apologize for being so old-fashioned, but I also still like to drive my car myself.

 

[HarmonicTHD]

Measurements, Graphs and Test Tones.

I see myself out.

 

[Keith_W]

For me it has always been about the music. I grew up listening to music on tinny headphones with my Sony Walkman, then graduated to computer speakers. Tape was very low-res, and I always struggled to hear what the musicians were doing through that muddy sound. That more or less started my obsession with clarity and transparency as the most important audio virtue above all else. So when CD came along, I was delighted.

I spent most of my years in this hobby as a subjectivist. To me, clarity and transparency was something you recognize when you hear it. These days, I think that clarity and transparency are the result of several factors - very low noise floor (the low SNR of tape did a wonderful job of muddying the sound), an even frequency response, lack of distortion*, and lack of excessive ringing. (* Even then I am not so sure about that. I have been adding distortion back in with the help of @pkane's PKHarmonic or an Exciter VST plugin and I find the results tonally pleasing, and not lacking in clarity).

I also love learning, and there are so many things to learn about audio. I could write a list of all the things I am trying to learn and where my knowledge is deficient (but improving, thanks to ASR). I concentrate my study mostly on things that are actionable and will make a difference to my audio system - like DSP, room acoustics, crossover tuning, and so on. Just like I only take measurements of things that are actionable. I don't bother measuring DAC's and amps because once the purchase has been made, there is nothing you can do to improve its performance short of selling it and buying something else.

I have dabbled in every type of audio because I need music every day, no matter what I am doing. Thus, I have a home audio system, a pair of nice computer speakers, a Bluetooth speaker in my kitchen, a headphone setup, IEM's and a DAP for commuting, bone conduction headphones for swimming and cycling, and a custom car audio setup. About the only thing I have not explored is home theatre and 5.1 setups, because that is theatre and not music.

 

[egellings]

MUSIC of course, technology is a pain. That's why come here to have you guys do the work for me. But there is a lot of talk about accuracy and not enough about music. So I stream for that.

For some the technology is not a pain; it's fun, especially if you DIY. If you find tech a pain, then by all means don't get involved in it. Just enjoy the music it provides.

 

[computer-audiophile]

For some the technology is not a pain; it's fun, especially if you DIY. If you find tech a pain, then by all means don't get involved in it. Just enjoy the music it provides.

People who are not interested in technology at all are unlikely to be found at ASR.

 

[Timcognito]

Just enjoy the music it provides.

Sure, but one wants it to reveal all that is there, so tech is involved, at least analyzing it. I am an ME so I look at cars differently than those who just want to drive them and are passionate about driving, they too must investigate the technology to gain ultimate satisfaction.

 

[egellings]

People who are not interested in technology at all are unlikely to be found at ASR.

True.

 

[sergeauckland]

I think if I were young today and starting over with audio, it would not have become a passion. The handling is completely different, the circuits are extremely miniaturized and what the software does can at best be guessed at, there is no longer a haptic and visual appealing user experience. I apologize for being so old-fashioned, but I also still like to drive my car myself.

Very much this for me. With valves, you can see the electrodes and heaters, you can see them working. With SS, that was the first thing to go, but at least with single then dual layer PCBs, one could follow a circuit. Now, with multilayer boards, miniature surface mounted components and software driven products, how it works and component level faultfinding is much more difficult, if not impossible. One can't DIY a streamer from scratch, at best adapt something ready made like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.

The progress made in low cost and greater reliability has come at the price of the hobby. Sad but inevitable.

S

 

[egellings]

Hearing Quad ESL57s. I never knew stereo could sound like that. I’ve had them for 30 years and still feel that way

Those 'stats have see-through sound.

 

[Mojo Warrior]

Music

 

[maverickronin]

Is it really anything other than the content whether that's straight music or games and movies?