If you think listening to music is enjoyable, try recording it. It’s a popular hobby. For me it’s a 30+ year carreer, but the studio is where I go even on my days off (i.e.: It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m in the studio. Probably will be tomorrow and Labor Day too...).
Recording is the big brother hobby to listening. It seems to me that a working knowledge of microphones, mic technique, signal chain (and signal flow) and performance space acoustics is essential in appreciating listening fully. There is nothing that any audiophile listens to that wasn’t first arranged, produced, recorded, mixed and mastered. There are certainly a lot of direct to two-track stereo recordings that are purist in nature and have very short signal paths. But the vast majority of recorded music- and certainly all modern pop/ rock stuff- is manipulated in ways many (if not most) audiophiles are completely unaware of. When people talk about being able to hear the bass player standing in the back of the room, off to the left of the drummer on a song that was multitracked I chuckle to myself. He may have been there, but he may have just as likely been in another studio on the other side of the world months after the other musicians recorded their parts. Making the bass player sound like he is standing there first requires understanding how our brain locates sound, and then knowing which tools to use to achieve that sense.
Understanding microphone proximity effect, the difference between a compressor and a limiter, inductor vs chip EQ, electronic phase manipulation vs acoustical phase manipulation, etc. etc. etc. allows *so* much greater understanding and appreciation for what the playback system they have at home is doing, is capable of doing, and what can be improved vs what’s baked in.
When I’m not in the studio, and where I really ought to be today, is sailing, which is the only other real hobby I have that isn’t audio-related. It’s funny though, as different as sailing is to audiophilia, the same kind of nitpicky, tweaky fiddling is very much the same- always trying to wrangle the last bit of speed for a given hull with given sails. It never ends.
Any hobby with an objective endpoint doesn’t interest me in the least.
