I recall an episode of Mash where this happened:
Frank Burns asked Hawkeye "Why do people take an instant dislike to me?"
Hawkeye replied "Saves time Frank".
Do you agree with John Atkinson (and me)?
Point 1: In the recent thread entitled ’How much is too much to spend on a system?’, I contributed this comment: "The hi-fi shouldn’t be worth more than one’s music library." I said that half-jokingly, a wisecrack that I knew might be disagreed with.
Point 2: In the 1990’s I became a regular customer at the Tower Records Classical Music Annex store in Sherman Oaks, California. The store manager knew a LOT about Classical music, but also made no secret of his distain for audiophiles, whom he viewed as caring more about the sound quality of recordings than their musical quality.
Point 3: In the early days of The Absolute Sound magazine, the writers occasionally mocked audiophiles who had a serious high end system, but whose record collections merely consisted of a small number of "demo" discs. Those audiophiles collect records that make their systems sound good, rather than assemble a system that makes their records sound good.
I make the above points as a preamble to the following:
In the past few months I have fallen behind in my reading of the monthly issues of Stereophile that arrive in my mailbox. Yesterday I finally got around to reading the editorial in the January issue, written by John Atkinson (filling in for current editor Jim Austin, who is recuperating from surgery, I believe). The final two paragraphs of the editorial read as follows:
"Back in the day, I did an analysis of Stereophile reviewers’ systems. The common factor was that all the reviewers’ collections of LPs and CDs cost a lot more than their systems. The same is true of me, even in these days of streaming."
"Isn’t that the way it should be for all music-loving audiophiles?"
Well, is it?
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I always collected a lot of recorded music. Still do to today. I always knew I had spent much more on the music than the stereo. Even if you add up all that I spent on equipment during my life, it is dwarfed by what I spent on recorded music. Hell, I have been buying music for 60 of my 68 years. My guess is that it would be flipped if I were starting out today. I would most likely be streaming and probably less focused on the systems. Systems are just not as interesting today, more of a commodity. Rich
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The size of the physical music collection is completely unrelated to how much someone should spend. This is true especially today where the absolute best quality a human could want is available via a stream. Few people want huge record collections and we have learned that vinyl has less range than most CDs or good streams. Thank goodness we have learned that MP3 is garbage... well, some of us, not the younger people however, some still don't get it and don't care. I recall a time back in the late 1980s that friends got into playing "full digital recordings" on CD of things like the 1812 Overture to show how the pure silence went to crazy levels with the cannons as a measure of the system. I still have these same friends :-) They also loved the demo discs, and listening to their hardware, but their main music genre was popular rock bands of the time. One of these guys had, and still grows his music collection, and had some of the old equipment in use to this day. It's still great. Others with absolutely incredible systems beyond my means have a limited collection of physical media, or even digital files saved. Talking about basing the system cost on the size of the collection would never make sense, but nowadays it's like talking about how much a fish should spend on a bicycle. |
@billstevenson My son is a young audiophile. The only music he owns on recorded media is what I’ve given to him. With current trends, that's not likely to change. I have no idea what I’ve spent on cds and vinyl. And 8 track tapes and cassette tapes. I’m sure it’s a lot less than my gear. |
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