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.

nice to see this thread re emerge

fun to hear the backgrounds of the frequent participants here (and the notable silence from the troll farm...)

@jjss49  I know right. It's been fun to go back through these and read about they different life experiences. Interesting change in my cost perspective over the the past 3 years!

Worked with family excavating business from age 14 to 24 running heavy equipment. Got out of college in 1981and moved to Colorado and worked in an Industrial Engineering group doing flunky work at a facility that produced the component that goes into our nuclear warheads that produces the nuclear reaction (explosion). Around 1995 I transitioned to Software and have been a database administrator for 25 years. Always had some kind of system since high school. My first ribbon tweeter was around 1976 Infinity speakers. Damn things would fail on a monthly basis.

Drug Lord.