I got home tonight after a
12 hour day of busting my ass for the IT company I work for and sat down in the
single chair in my dedicated listening room and turned on Dido’s “Still on My
Mind”. As I sat there listening with the
lights off, I thought about the fact that the majority of the people in this world
will never get to hear anything close to this kind of sound and I get to hear
any track, at any time, at any volume I choose.
Please don’t think that I am bragging about my system as I know that the
majority of you have systems that put mine to shame. I am attempting to express how very grateful I
am that I got into this amazing hobby, especially with all the crazy things
that are happening in our world today.
As a lurker on this forum
for a couple of years, I have read the great majority of the posts. Some with a chuckle, some with great awe and
some with disgust. We all enjoy an
amazing hobby that allows us to escape from the realities of life right in our
own home.
My system consists of a
Devialet Expert 250 Pro, Dynaudio Contour 60 speakers, a pair of REL S510
sub-woofers, AQ William Tell speaker cables, an Uptone Audio Etherregen, SOTM
ethernet cable, AQ Tornado power cords, an AQ Niagara 1000 power conditioner,
GIK acoustic room treatments and an SGC i5 Sonictransporter running Roon with
5TB of hi-res recordings and streaming Tidal and Qobuz. Once again, I am not bragging, and I am not
looking for any comments about how good or bad my system is or could be. My goal is to give you some perspective about
how lucky we are to be “audiophiles” in this crazy world.
When I sit down with a
glass of scotch and put on whatever it is that trips my fancy that night, I can
easily put the world out of my mind in under 5 minutes. Listening to what I think is an incredible soundstage
and how I can be transported so quickly to the artist’s location is sometimes
beyond belief. The best is those nights
when you audibly mumble “holy sh-t” after an especially dazzling track.
We are a very lucky group
of people to be able to sit down with our system that we have built with our
own hands and hard-earned money. To
think how much time we have spent reading forums and reviews as well as the
never ending tweaking. Who would have
thought that moving speakers ¼” would make that big of difference?
So, who else out there is
grateful that we have these amazing systems in our homes and it would almost be
welcomed to be quarantined for a couple of weeks?
