"It’s funny. When I was a little boy and told people I was gonna be a comedian, everyone laughed at me. Well, noone’s laughing now."
This one's definitely a Yahtzee! Thank you, geoffkait.
Per the thread topic, my first system was a Yamaha CR640 receiver with a handy loudness switch, a pair of Klipsch Heresy speakers that I bought unfinished in birch to save money, a Pioneer TT with an Audio Technica cartridge and a sleek pair of B&O headphones. I Really enjoyed that system until it was all stolen from my college apartment one Saturday night when I was making the rounds at the local bars.
Perhaps I was vainly more proud of that system but I know I’m humbler and more utilitarian about my current system, having more of a mentality of considering my system as just a conduit to the music with no or minimal pride of ownership involved.
Regarding this whole Happy Scale concept, no offense ishkabibil, I think it’s childish and irrelevant. An individual chooses whether to be generally happy or not. The level of enjoyment an individual experiences when listening to his system is dependent on other factors that are not well articulated or considered when something as broad as a Happiness Scale is used, and these neglected factors are mainly technical and emotional in nature.
The technical factors include the quality level of the specific playback system components an individual selects to utilize, the overall sound quality level produced when these particular components work in unison as a unique audio system as well as the knowledge and experience levels of the individual being sufficiently high to successfully select and combine these components into a unique system that ultimately results in a perception of overall high quality music and HT audio.
The emotional factors relate more directly to the music itself and the individual who’s listening, the feelings and memories the music genre and specific track invokes in them, how well it’s recorded and reproduced as well as any and all feelings and emotions they perceive on an instinctual level.
Now, some may argue it’s a matter of semantics and the Happy Scale is just a general relative summation of the degree to which an individual enjoys an audio system. But I reject that notion because the Happy Scale is thoroughly too simplistic, general and vague to accurately include,detail and describe all of the various factors that are involved in the enjoyment of our music and HT content on our audio systems.
I consider the Happy Scale closely related to the Pain Scale continuums often seen in doctor offices. The ones with a cartoon facial expression representing the level of pain a patient can select they’re currently experiencing from zero depicted as a happy face to 10 depicted as a face in excruciating pain. I recognize the utility of the Pain Scale to a doctor but utterly fail to recognize the utility of the Happy Scale to myself.
We all realize, of course, that this is all just my personal thoughts and opinion. My disdain for utilizing this Happy Scale concept properly has absolutely no effect on others doing so.
Tim
