Sound quality vs. Mood

I have often found that Oscar Peterson never sounds better on my system than when there are wafts of garlic and basil coming from the kitchen and my girlfriend and I have a lingering buzz from the bottle of shiraz we are drinking.

FatParrot, you must be a Parrot Head!

Oh it's Bandstand, Disneyland, growin' up fast
Drinkin' on a fake ID
And Ramar of the jungle was everybody's bwana
but only jazz musicians were smokin' marijuana

KP

I find it absolutely insane that the subjective context of the listening session is not given supreme importance. In certain moods, I'll sit in my car, in my driveway, and listen to and old Kempf performance (or something similar) and be enthralled by the music.. on my piece of crap stereo where only two speakers work at best (one comes on when it gets enough power, off when it doesn't!) And some days I'll sit in front of my some odd thousand dollar per piece component system and think.. BORING.

A proper Stereophile review would include about 1/4 description of the person's inner state. Feeling mushy? Boy that valve amp sure sounds great. Feeling a bit dry and analytical - "people say the XYZ is overly detailed, and to them I say it simply conveys the music."

It is all such a damn joke in my opinion. Plugging a $1000 power cord into my DAC may have some improvement - but when those certain states of mind come around - sonic benefits are interior. I hate to sound like some newly-come Buddhist or something but really.. audiophiles take the search to the high-end store when maybe they should take the search into their feelings and moods.

Obviously, I am getting more and more into A/B testing, and proof. I just bought a $10 radioshack digital cable to connect my dac to my transport. I'm going to have a friend swap it out for my not insanely pricey, but expensive digital cable - if I can't hear a difference - odds are that it is either non-existant or below the threshold of subjective context.

Thanks for starting this thread.. I find this topic SORELY negelected, and actually quite fascinating (and maybe even useful).

-Adam

Adam, you're 100% right about the importance of mood.

When the mood is right, you don't even think of tinkering/modifying/upgrading anything.

It's a two way street, the music can certainly affect your mood, but thena gain you're simply refelcting your newly modified mood into the music.

Music is and internal experience, both emotional in intellectual. There are times when you do feel like listening for "sound", and that's when you tweak, move stuff around, etc.

That's the "hobby" portion of audio.

When you're in the mood for music (many moods, for many songs, of course) that's the fun portion.

If it was simply about "better sound" I'd sell everything and go read a book.

KP