Music lover or audiophile?

rvpiano

I have to admit that I still listen for the sound at least as much as the music.

While I do understand the gist of what you are getting at there, I think it bares reflection that listening to music is to also love the sound. The musicians pick their instrumentation for how the instruments sound, because it is as much an influence on the music as the choice of notes.

It can be quite hard to separate the enjoyment of "music" from "sound."

I can listen to music as pleasant "background" from any number of "crappy" systems.

But to be compelled to sit down and directly concentrate on the music, I need a reason to do so.


Yesterday I heard a bunch of my LPs played back on a big, full-range pair of $20,000 speakers. I heard the music, but wasn’t compelled by the presentation to enjoy it nearly as much as I know I can. Throwing the same tracks on my system, dialed to my own preferences, and even though I happened to be using at the moment an old, tiny Spendor S3/5 monitors, I was just swooning to the music and sound in a way that just escaped that other system. Once the timbre and presentation of the music sounded "right" to my brain, I could just relax and luxuriate not only in the melody and beat, but in the sensuousness of the sound, which increased my involvement in the music.

Music is like heroin. It doesn’t do anything unless it’s the real thing. A junkie knows right away when somebody’s trying to scam him. Well, maybe he doesn’t. How the hell would I know?

An ordinary man has no means of deliverance,

I’m a music lover period.......

I bought mu current very high-end system 7 years ago and I haven’t replaced a single component.  I’ve added a 2nd pair of amps, an atomic clock and a cement rack in year one - did an “A-B test” for each of these, but I haven’t upgraded/changed the turntable, CD player etc. for different ones.

I don’t know or wanna know how al of this works - it’s a black box.  (Just like when I go to buy a new car - salesman always wants to pop the hood and explain everything - I tell him, “don’t bother - I don’t care what’s under the hood - I’ll take a test drive and decide)”

Whether I'm a music lover or audiophile is situational. I've always enjoyed music played on most any old system because I'm not expecting quality sound.

I can become an audiophile at live amplified concerts and audiophile systems. I've always been a critical listener at live concerts, in the vast majority of cases sound is horrendous, way too loud, astringent mids and highs! Too many sound reinforcement companies don't know what they're doing. An audiophile friend owns a sound reinforcement company, he does sound right, it can be done. I suppose the only thing that's ever made the bad sound event enjoyable was the ganja, alcohol and good friends. On the other hand acoustic instruments and minimal sound reinforcement can make for a very enjoyable qualitative experience.  I can also go into critical mode when listening to audiophile systems, its the expectation of quality that lends itself to qualitative judgements. It took many years of system building to get long term musical enjoyment from my own system. In the early years I would be happy with quality for very short periods of time. These periods of enjoyment increased in time as my system got better, to the point where today I'm never dissatisfied with the sound.

Still, despite no longer being dissatisfied, I continue to tweak my basic system, I always think I'm finished, and yet I find another thing to improve. As of today I can't think of a single thing I want to change, but based on past experience I can expect I'll be changing out something down the road.

And so it seems I'm finally a music lover when listening to my system, yet subconsciously still analyzing sound quality.  I suspect many of us are  in the same boat, coincidental music lovers and audiophiles when listening to our finely  tuned systems.

Heroin does take you to a certain place. Where does music take you ? And surely good sound facilitates that.