True, JRD, besides, no one has reinvented the wheel and there are classics and classics sleepers around! Cheers, |
Well spoken Chashmal!
Wonderful!
Cheers, |
Sure is, Mark! Love your wry humour! but I'm sure you'll soon be back in there again. Time heals wounds and checkbooks! |
Yes, it does not look good. We're a bit behind here, as in everything, but there are the same signs here written on the wall. Mind you, the one, two high end stores are still making good business and HT is only beginning to hit the market now in a more serious fashion. The big record outlets have seen no vinyl for decades either. But I'm still hoping that the bug that bit us once is contageous.... Cheers, Detlof |
I think the gap between the best you may have at home and the sound of real music ( and if you are a true music lover, you will be intimately familiar with it) can be the mother of adiction. Its like the fable of the donkey and the carrot suspended in front of its nose.....so close...and yet so far, but you keep on running ....and the merry-go-round goes round and round. The answer to get off it is a simple as it it tough and like most things in life ( marriage for example (-; ): Resign yourself to what you've got, make the most of it and enjoy it to the fullest. |
Dear Greg,
Proposition wholeheartedly accepted. I've lived in both states and know the truth which lies in your statement. |
Great post Pbb, if I may say so! |
True,true Greg, well it was through the Goldmund and also through the souped up Sony 777 and indeed, as you suggest, this experiment stopped me from pleasing my dealer!
Cheers, |
I have an old Threshold Stasis amp from the mid seventies, which at that time set me back less than three thousand bucks new! I took it up from the basement and connected a pair of Quads to it through inexpensive wires and an old Krell KBL from the eighties. The combination sounded great, even to my spoilt and not quite inexperienced ears. Now if that is not food for thought......I'll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions..I've certainly drawn mine. It sure slowed down my merry go out and update! |
Trebleclef, we must be brothers in arms! The Quads are the centre of my system as well, I hunt after good music on Lp and CD, I'm having fun and in the course of the years, to borrow a phrase of Sean's, have turned from audiophile to music lover. Interesting your remark, that the hobby might die out with us. Here I am less pessimistic than you seem to be, because surely there will always be folks ,who love music and who will try to recreate it in their homes, like we do. |
Tubegroover, isn't happyness the main thing? And the drive for perfection is a noble endevour, is it not? And if we do not make our loved ones unhappy or harm them with what we are doing, why shouldn't we? Mind you, and I've been at it for over 35 years, there comes a point, when you will reconcile yourself with the fact, that you will NEVER be able to simulate real, live music in all its wonderful entirety and that you can leave your system more or less as it is and just enjoy the music. What helps here, is the realisation, that really old gear, like the Threshold Stasis amps of the seventies, or the AR 79 tube amp, not to speak of the 120, that wonderful Quad 57 or the ML 25 watter, class A monos still hold their own, when compared to modern gear. There have been huge advances in loudspeakers, but comparing the old stuff to modern designs, I doubt a bit, if really essential breakthroughs in electronic designs have happened. Possibly my ears are just sentimental and I'm indeed using modern electronics, but I find the differences are not that huge to really be "blown away". What has changed though, is our perception of recorded music and our way to describe it. We have developed a vocabulary, that was not around fourty years ago and if we apply it to vintage gear, I at least have found, that it is not doing badly at all. Cheers! Detlof |
Tubegroover, if your only regret is the cost, then actually you belong to the more lucky ones. If you can afford it, why not spend it. Life is too short, to castigate yourself, unless you are of fundamentalist disposition, where your rewards will be in heaven. Wether we're a bunch of compulsive neurotics or on a noble quest depends on your point of view. I personally think that Papa Freud was right, when he said, that the essentials of a healthy life were the ability to work and to ENJOY oneself. I'm probably a bit longer in this quest of ours than you are and my experience is - also after listening to many megabuck systems, costing several hundred thousand bucks - that there comes a time, when "improvements" happen only in very tiny steps, the cost of which is entirely out of proportion. Happy Listening! Detlof |
Trebleclef, your points are hard to refute and in terms of sociological assessment probably more than correct. Looking at it that way, it is indeed a pessimistic picture. Here in Europe, people still flock to classical concerts and to opera, how much of that is social snobbery and how much true love of music is hard to say. Youngsters act much the way here too as you describe, but if you go to the local recordstores, they are ususally full of young people, but also here after the quick electronic fix, the demand for classical music has severely declined. However, I'm still hoping, that we are not a breed, that is dying out. Cheers , Detlof |
Nice simile, Clueless, but I'd rather say through a thin layer of jelly-pudding, especially on big orchestral music. |
Yes, especially with a tonno e cipolla pizza! |
I must be doing something wrong, 'cause when I use it, I can't tweak it, and when I've used enough of it, it tweaks me. This leaves me all perplexed. Has that to do with the ongoing battle in these pages between subjectivists and that strange brotherhood of EEs, whoever they might be. Aliens? Please enlighten!
Sincerely clueless, |
Heck, I'm touched,almost to tears...your kind words warm my heart. I truly miss your great minds and souls. I'll be back from time to time. I'm not always online, you see, going through places, where the internet cannot be reached.
I'm travelling, sold all my gear and bought myself an expedition vehicle....on another quest, counting my years, it will be the last one of my life...
Let the music always touch your souls. Signing off for now,
Detlof |
Well, here I am back for once, not for the hobby, but for the people and friends I shared this hobby with for quite a number of years. Yes I dropped out, partly because of outer circumstances, but more importantly because I became more and more convinced, that my fascination with equipment overrode my love for music, which I initially thought this, my quest was all about. As time went on, I was forced to realise, that my mind got more and more entrapped by the gear and less by the message the music might have to convey. This was not merely bad, because through this, I became more aware of that musical message, which managed to get through the audiophile smog, which made me forget my system and brought me back to the beginning of what my quest had been all about. The lesson learnt was an old one and is obvious and to those, who really read these few lines, I do not need to repeat it here. I am now back with the music and the means of reproduction do not matter, because the message, if it is valid, the mind, if it is receptive, will not even be aware of the medium, as poor as it may be.
Cheers to my old friends here, I miss you, the gear abandoned strangely not.....
Detlof |
Heck, wonderful to see, that this great thread is still alive. I poked my nose into it about 15 months ago and what I said then, holds still true. I'm back here now to ask a few questions on behalf of a friend and when that is done, I'll be off again to do an old wheezers version of what Joni Mitchell sang so beautifully about on her first LP..... and yes Drubin, what you read between the lines was true, but we got rid of it now. Cheers to you all. Being here, for a jiffy, rekindles such good memories.
Bless your ears!!!!! (((: |
Sure, you must be hungry...and thanks for hanging around all that time, hope you didn't get bored. |
Chashmal, well spoken! Roll with it until you either fall deaf, go broke or die. Whatever comes first. |
Get yourself this or that gear is not the point. Our tastes are too varied and the one man's heaven is the other man's hell..and as Tbg so rightly says, why get off at all. This IS our hobby and our passion and that's all there is to it. What most of us do reach however, after a long learning period which may have cost plenty, is that level of contentment, where the need to experiment further and to spend more money gets down to practically zero. |
Actually, come to think of it, in my opinion the merry go round is not a good metaphore for what we are doing. Going round and round implies no progress. You may change your position within that given circle but you get no further. I find this too pessimistic a view for what we are intelligently doing, because progress towards a goal, as subjective as it may be, (although there is such a thing as the absolute sound) is possible. I would prefer the image of the spiral , because this would not imply the futility of our efforts to progress. The top end of my spiral would be what I hear as the "abolute" in my favourite concerthall in my favourite seat. Sometimes , when experimenting, trying new gear or tweaking, you slide forward and upward on this spiral, sometimes you slide back. On a merry go round you don't get anywhere, just have movment ( speak, different sounds as you change gear or tweak) but you don't get anywhere and you should in fact get off it by trying to figure ou how you would like your gear to perform in aural terms and relentlessly strive for that. Then you've left the carousel (or treadmill in other terms) and are on a spiral with a definite goal or end and if you think you're close to what you'd like, you can stop struggling upwards, only watching out not to slide back. |
Yes Tvad, LOL. Getting lots of inspiration from the "real" but how to implement at home with ones limited means pocketbook- and technologywise.....still it is possible to a certain degree, though not in the state of addiction, speak carousel- or threadmillmode. |
"I think "getting off the merrygoround" is deliberately pejorative. Most don't want to get off, but often do have to cutback"
Exactly
Happy listening and as Phd so rightly says, we WILL enjoy our music. Perhaps even more intensely and deeply during the bad times we have now.
Cheers,
Detlof |
Yes, and don't go to live concerts! (; |
