Lessons of youth

LOL, I visited one of those photography forums back in the film days when one could develop and print his own pictures. No one talked about what one did to take pictures only about things like the resolution of a 35mm lense on a 36 inch print or the supposed improvement in your work depending on whether it was a Leica, Canon, Nikon, etc. ( And I want you to know I used a Nikon F3 and a 1.2 50mm lens. I was, presumably, then a serious photographer! No? :-) The real fun was in just taking snap shots of interesting stuff and playing with the negs in a dark room for my own enjoyment. 

The real fun in audio is listening to the music! The rest is just filling empty time. 

When all was said and done (after getting sucked into all of the equipment hyperbole) what I came to realize was that using a manual camera (without auto focus, spot light meter, auto film advance, etc) and a good hand held light meter made a better photographer of me. It forced me to think much more about what I was doing. Auto focus and built in light meters were/are IMHO the death of creative photography. It took the acquisition of an F4 to reveal this to me. :-)

I see a correlation with this discovery and audio (and I learned this the hard way too). Modest equipment, properly used, can produce excellent results if one takes the time to learn how to use it, as opposed to trying to improve the experience by fantasy based  'upgrading'.