Great thread. Reminds of of the story I've got of my in-laws. My MiL's health was heading south and she needed more help around the house than she was getting from my FiL. But she was always nagging him about all kinds of stuff, not least of which was his audio gear hobby. Bottom line, she went to asisted living (where she died two months later). He stayed home and died about a year ago. Here's the little obit I composed:
"To my family and friends with whom this may strike a sympathetic chord,
Just a note to let you know that Janet's dad, Ed ******, passed away in the last few days. He was 86.
Ed was a good guy. He was into jazz and classical music and collecting records and loved to mess around with stereo equipment. He liked to find old used gear cheap at places like the Salvation Army and would work the stuff into some system at his house. One year when I was there I counted no fewer than five functioning systems and his two main systems had multiple components in them. He was particularly fond of turntables and routinely swapped them out. Last time I was in Wisconsin I saw two different piles of old plinths and related parts from a handful of 'tables he'd cannibalized at some point.
His gear was never close to high end but that was never the point with Ed. He managed to get some workable sound out of it and enjoy the music. Many nights I would get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and Ed would be sitting in the living room in his underwear listening to classical music at three a.m.
Another thing he liked to do was build speakers. Janet and I met in Miami in late 1981 and less than a year later she was off to graduate school at the University of Florida in Gainesville. I gave her the only pair of speakers I'd ever made (to this day) to use with an old Kenwood receiver her dad had given her when she left the Midwest. When her parents came down to visit her in Gainesville, Ed saw this crummy pair of handmade speakers and was really impressed that the guy Janet was involved with had made them (although not for her), and given them to her. The quality of my relationship with Ed was sealed from that point on even though we'd yet to meet.
He was an awful woodworker, and I say that only with affection. He would periodically attempt other home projects (all accomplished with equally poor results!) but he must have made a dozen speaker cabinets in the years I knew him. They were all atrocious: out-of-square boxes with misaligned edges and opposing surface planes that would have intersected out in the street someplace if they'd been extended, particle board edges that had strips of pine tacked onto them, the whole cabinet painted in some horrible gloss brown house paint. But they were his work and he would hook them up somewhere and there would be sound coming out of them. One time I was in Wisconsin I think there were nine different speakers hooked up in the living room and at least five or six of them were handmade. It was Ed's "surround sound" system.
Ed was Ed. He went through life living it the way he wanted to live it. He knew what was important to him and he pursued those interests right to the end. And I cannot imagine he ever gave a moment's thought to what other people thought of him.
I'll miss him."
I should add that Ed was always moving stuff all over the (small-ish) living room, and putting up "acoustic treatments" here and there (he liked egg cartons). It weas always very amusing to see what he was up to. I know he was more than happy to get the wife out of the house. We laugh about it now.
