What do/did you do for a living?

Mechanical Engineer, retired from a large Aerospace firm as an engineering manager at the beginning of 2021 at age 62.  Built my dream hifi system and listening room. Nothing more relaxing and satisfying than some good music.  Haven’t taken blood pressure pills since February, 2021- and doing great.

I revamped my entire system- new amps, preamps, turntable, phono cartridge, DAC, transport, streamer, speakers, power conditioner and cables.  Installed dedicated circuits to the front end and the amps.  Installed a hardwood floor.  (Ended up doing it myself).  Added room treatments incrementally.  Worked on the digital side with various Ethernet configurations until I got streaming to sound as good as CD.  (Hi res streaming is almost as good as hi res files.  It’s very very close now.)

I built my first dedicated listening room in 1994 with room treatments and dedicated circuits.  I progressed from DYI modifying hifi gear for a few decades to buying hi end gear about 21 years ago.  Changing out drivers, capacitors, resistors and wiring is a fun side of this hobby but I keep getting back to wanting to enjoy the music not the gear.  I spent about 6 months researching streaming before jumping in.  I found it frustrating having to stop and start over a few times.  I do not consider streaming a mature technology yet.  Maybe if I had $50k to spend on a streamer it might be plug and play- ie. I could just plug it into my router and it would sound perfect.  As is, I’m very satisfied now with streaming.

Hello @rocray I won’t say congratulations just yet then; but good for you.  Been retired almost 32 months now and loving it.  Funny thing is, the only time I’m really relaxed is when I’m listening to music- just like when I was working.

I spent a lot of money in my first year of retirement.  Be prepared for that.  A good part of that was on the stereo.  But I had a grand time doing it.  The hardest thing for me was writing the check for my speakers.  That was a lot of money.  Once I heard them in my room all that stress was forgotten.

I used to work at Bendix Aerospace in South Bend. In the early 80s there were a few engineers at or just over 70 years of age still working. They had worked at Studebaker. They said that they showed up for work one morning at Studebaker in 1962 or 1963, can’t remember the year exactly and found the gates were locked. The security guards told them to go home and turn on their radios. They said that the nightmare unfolded over the next few days learning that the company had gone bankrupt, all assets being sold off and the company had used upped all of the pension fund trying to keep the company afloat. They learned that they had no jobs, no pensions, nothing. It was a sober lessen for me in my twenties at the time to take responsibility for my own future and save. Good thing as most pensions were frozen in 2008 and by 2009 most companies did away with their pension plans- of course existing employees were protected but only to the extent of the freeze date.