Am I having an affair with my SET monos, or are life-long relationships possible?
Ok, this is one for the "Deep Thoughts" files...and I am asking a much more cerebral (and emotional) question than one focused on specific equipment. Get a good strong coffee (or wine or scotch), put on some of your favorite genre's best material, and close your eyes to ponder this one please. For those interested, I'd love your thoughts and experience...
In very short summary, I'm very curious if, as a hetero male (any male? any person?), there is some innate chemical makeup in us that will never let us be truly satisfied with our systems, no matter how good they are? Will we fall in love with something we find and hear, only to have that feeling of emotional euphoria dull and fade over time (maybe it's years?), pulling us back to the point of wanting "more" or "better" regardless of what we've already found? Is the constant pull of "new," "better," "more" something that will always eat as us, no matter how long and far we go in this "sport"? Even if we find what we think is emotionally the "end game," will that disappear for us down the road and we'll slip back into the trap?
I was moved to the point of all-day emotion by a system I heard a few weeks back. I drove home several hours in what honestly was a dangerous state of distracted driving because I was so moved by what I heard. There was a 30 second period where I laughed myself to the point of tears because I couldn't even remember what state I was in...seriously. Weeks later, I'm still thinking about it how that system made me feel. I've spent every waking free moment I could find putting plans together for how/when/where I could put this system in my life. In parallel I got my first pair of really nice SET monos, which I have been burning tons of midnight oil listening to whenever I have had the chance...I felt I needed to give great SET a try before I went full-into a different technological direction (the tech is not important to this thread, so I'm purposefully not mentioning any of the pieces or brands). The SET amps in my current system are providing me glimpses of the emotional pull the music was giving me that day in "THE SYSTEM," but I'm still a long way off from what I heard and felt that day.
I hope this question resonates with some of you...and I hope each of you gets to feel that much emotion from some system somewhere sometime, if you haven't already. They are out there. I had read about them, many times, and believed they existed (I wanted to believe they did?), and now I truly believe it. Perhaps you already own such a system...I truly hope so for your sake and the sake of your friends who get to listen with you. And if so, do you think your love is life-long, or do you think it will fade over time and you'll be back in the sick game with the rest of us?
