Has Your Hobby Changed?

Yes, retirement can be seminal in enjoying your system. It has been for me… five years retired and fifty years of being an audiophile. I had started on moving from a very resolving system to a musical one about ten years ago after having season tickets to the symphony for many years. Retiring gave me the time to really listen to my system and drive me to really accelerate my investment in tube gear (Audio Research) and Sonus Faber. After doubling my investment in gear… my system sounds incredibly better than my earlier detailed system (I called it my reference system because I could instantly tell every thing about the venue and mastering (( looking back… this condemned the sound)) ). 
 

While I used to get bored with my reference system after 45 minutes. I have to tear myself away from my current system after three hours each day. I finally got the balance right between musical and detail and can enjoy my time listening as long a time as I have.

Gear is fun.  Music is life.

I tend to go through 2-4 year cycles:  get into a music genre, then optimize my system for that sound.  Then deep dive into genre.  Then bored with genre, explore something else, then optimize the system.  Repeat.  Music is always first but I can get pretty deep into the tech.  Learning Linux to make Roon work reliably was a deep dive…

I retired and move to a mountain cabin, completely off the grid.  My city system will not work with my cabin's solar/battery power system.  I have a small system up here but rarely us it. Most listening these days is with phones and iPhone.  Yes, I miss a lot but I love my isolated mountain life. Odd turn of events, in the near future I may get to hear my old stuff again, the caretaker of my old city house may be moving and I may just have and opportunity to get it out of storage. Note: Old System: B&W 801S3, VTL 450MKII, Mcintosh C2500 and TT.

My hobby started out as a DIY music production thing, but more recently I've found myself really interested in the tech itself and I hope to one day have a proper sound system set-up.

I am still very interested in the musician side though, and a lot of my purchases come from that angle. I just bought a used Edirol R1 recorder to try and break away from recording and playing everything through my laptop. Still need to invest in some better speakers though.

@baclagg congrats! Great place to be!!! You took great care in putting together that system and tuning the room to complete the setup. It looks great and I bet it sounds excellent as well! Enjoy!!!

@mikelavigne congrats! have a long and healthy retirement!!!