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Anyone else grateful that they got hooked on this crazy addiction

I got home tonight after a 12 hour day of busting my ass for the IT company I work for and sat down in the single chair in my dedicated listening room and turned on Dido’s “Still on My Mind”. As I sat there listening with the lights off, I thought about the fact that the majority of the people in this world will never get to hear anything close to this kind of sound and I get to hear any track, at any time, at any volume I choose. Please don’t think that I am bragging about my system as I know that the majority of you have systems that put mine to shame. I am attempting to express how very grateful I am that I got into this amazing hobby, especially with all the crazy things that are happening in our world today.

 

As a lurker on this forum for a couple of years, I have read the great majority of the posts. Some with a chuckle, some with great awe and some with disgust. We all enjoy an amazing hobby that allows us to escape from the realities of life right in our own home.

 

My system consists of a Devialet Expert 250 Pro, Dynaudio Contour 60 speakers, a pair of REL S510 sub-woofers, AQ William Tell speaker cables, an Uptone Audio Etherregen, SOTM ethernet cable, AQ Tornado power cords, an AQ Niagara 1000 power conditioner, GIK acoustic room treatments and an SGC i5 Sonictransporter running Roon with 5TB of hi-res recordings and streaming Tidal and Qobuz. Once again, I am not bragging, and I am not looking for any comments about how good or bad my system is or could be. My goal is to give you some perspective about how lucky we are to be “audiophiles” in this crazy world.

 

When I sit down with a glass of scotch and put on whatever it is that trips my fancy that night, I can easily put the world out of my mind in under 5 minutes. Listening to what I think is an incredible soundstage and how I can be transported so quickly to the artist’s location is sometimes beyond belief. The best is those nights when you audibly mumble “holy sh-t” after an especially dazzling track.

 

We are a very lucky group of people to be able to sit down with our system that we have built with our own hands and hard-earned money. To think how much time we have spent reading forums and reviews as well as the never ending tweaking. Who would have thought that moving speakers ¼” would make that big of difference?

 

So, who else out there is grateful that we have these amazing systems in our homes and it would almost be welcomed to be quarantined for a couple of weeks?


desert38
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
Who would have thought that moving speakers ¼” would make that big of difference?

Please see the very last photo in the system images. Then read the description. https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367 

Pictured is just one of three corners on each speaker. This is because after untold hours spent optimizing the last thing you want is to have to go through all that again just because someone bumped one vacuuming. This was, like with so many things, something stumbled across by trial and error and experience. 

We see where you're coming from, but our perspective is a little different. Grateful is for a nice break. Healthy, pain free- grateful. Study, try, fail, try again, basically work your butt off thirty years, somehow against all odds settle back in enveloping alternate reality sound field, that feeling my friend is what we call a sense of achievement. 

Its not something we got "hooked on" but rather, cannot ever remember a time we weren't fascinated with quality sound. Grateful is for J Gordon Holt, Robert Harley, Earl Geddes, Duke LeJeune, Keith Herron, Ted Denney, Eric Alexander, Chris Brady, Stewart Marcantoni, Peter Ledermann, Tim Mrock- a whole long list of them. For them we are very, very, extremely grateful. 
desert38 OP
16 posts
 
My local dealer told me a year ago that someday I will stop listening to the equipment and start listening to the music.  He was so right.  Once the equipment was tuned properly in my ears, I started to enjoy the music.  What a wonderful day that was and has been ever since.  Music is such a great escape and we get to listen to it through some amazing equipment.  
teo_audio
2,197 posts
 
Who would have thought that moving speakers ¼” would make that big of difference?

Your hearing is all about thresholds and small differentials in levels of various transients and intermixed harmonics.

Subtlety of differential is what it is based on. In both time and level domains. We don't need much to go on. This is part of the trick that has been at work in human evolution, over time. We've developed into something that defies the mundane views of what measurement is, as measurement is not correlated back to how the ear works.

geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
Even more alarming is the fact that most speakers are waaay too far apart. Hel-loo! Start with a distance of 4 or 5 feet and move speakers gradually farther apart until you strike paydirt. Unless you’re using the speaker set up track on the XLO Test CD or similar your chances of finding the absolute best speaker locations are about as good as solving N simultaneous equations in N + X unknowns. Good luck with that! Yes, I know what you’re thinking, “but when the speakers are far apart and toed in doesn’t that give you a wider soundstage?” 😳
jbrrp1
423 posts
 
I couldn't agree more with the OP.  Wednesday was a crushingly bad day at work, and when I got home late at night I put on Mozart's Clarinet Quintet and just breathed.  Oh, that was so rejuvenating....  I often feel deep gratitude for the immersion in sound and music.

Millercarbon is right IME that we were born this way.
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