I don't love being an audiophile. Don't hardly even like it. At all. What I love is music. Specifically, the cathartic pleasure that some music brings. It just so happens that even as hard as this is (building the kind of system that can deliver this), I get a whole lot more of that from a good system than by running around to concerts hoping for a good performance.
No. I do not live being an audiophile. Being an audiophile has required that I learn physics, acoustics, psychology, electronics. Woodworking. Soldering. Sheetrocking and sewing. I've had to learn more stuff about more areas of science than most actual scientists. And then after learning all that science to listen to the most whackily unscientific nonsense - because it sometimes turns out to actually work.
Being an audiophile means walking into a store and asking to hear something and instead of "sure" and they actually let you listen you have to endure 5 minutes of questioning the likes of which you can never be quite sure how much they're trying to one-up vs actually help you.
Being an audiophile means having a system the whole reason for which is to disappear leaving only the music, only to have people who experience this magic want to talk about nothing but the system.
I do love sharing it with them though. And when I'm listening to it myself. The two times when I have to say its not so bad being an audiophile.
No. I do not live being an audiophile. Being an audiophile has required that I learn physics, acoustics, psychology, electronics. Woodworking. Soldering. Sheetrocking and sewing. I've had to learn more stuff about more areas of science than most actual scientists. And then after learning all that science to listen to the most whackily unscientific nonsense - because it sometimes turns out to actually work.
Being an audiophile means walking into a store and asking to hear something and instead of "sure" and they actually let you listen you have to endure 5 minutes of questioning the likes of which you can never be quite sure how much they're trying to one-up vs actually help you.
Being an audiophile means having a system the whole reason for which is to disappear leaving only the music, only to have people who experience this magic want to talk about nothing but the system.
I do love sharing it with them though. And when I'm listening to it myself. The two times when I have to say its not so bad being an audiophile.