Does a listening room help or hinder?

Lots of people treat music as a religious experiance(and it often can be). They hear good sound for the first time and are suddenly off to chase the Holy Grail of audiophilia. After years of buying and selling diferent peices of equipment, gradually improving their system in ever smaller increments, trimming the poorly recorded fat from their music collection, they reach a point of either satisfaction or neurosis. Friends stop making music recomendations because they know it couldn't possibly be recorded as well as your coveted ten or twenty "perfect" recordings. The loan audiophile sits alone in his dark basement with only the tubes of his $5,000 preamp to keep him company.

Get your office back into the listening room before it is too late! Get some buddies who listen to "boom-boxes" over to have some beers and talk about the sport of choice(while listening to something that completely rocks on your system). Save the serious listening for the recording engineers and just enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Good luck!

How can you say that you are "listening" to music if you are doing something else, such as working on a computer?

I have a listening room and use it for listening. When in another room (office, kitchen), I use the listening room system to supply "background" music, but then I am not really listening (more like "hearing"), so it isn't really important how good the system sounds.

There is no such thing as "multi-tasking" when it comes to music listening.

Bob P.

I definitely think there are different levels of listening--primarily critical and background. As mentioned above, I have my computer in my listening room, and I can certainly listen to music while playing on the computer, just not critically. In fact, sometimes listening to music this way ("background") is more enjoyable than listening critically, because I'm not worried about all the audiophile minutiae that so often gets in the way of enjoyable listening. When I want to listen critically, the computer and lights go off, and I do the audiophile thing.

Bob is right. If you want background music, use your laptop speakers. Save the listening room for serious listening. Time is an issue with me as well. I can't just sit there for hours listening as I have things that have to get done, so I can relate to listening to a song or two - then doing something and so on.

But just set time aside where you clear your mind and just consentrate and enjoy the music. If you have a laptop, you'll just get busy with that and the music may sound good, but you're not really listening.

The responses seem to be divided here, but lean more in the direction of the office/listening room. And I agree. The only problem is when you want to have others with you and the office is too small. Here's the solution. Put the system back in the living room, then move your desk and computer in there too. No one really "uses" a living room, so what th' hell!