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When did you most enjoy the music?

I think this may be geared towards the over-60 crowd, which seems to make up a good portion of our membership.  I was thinking the other day - There is no doubt that, since I got into high end audio I am getting better, more realistic sound.  With the right recordings, instruments sound real and I think I have my system well tuned to my tastes.  But I was thinking back on when I really enjoyed the actual music the most and I came up with these - When I was in my late teens and sitting in a friend's room with a pair of JBL 100s sitting on the floor and against the wall, driven by a Kenwood or similar receiver listening to Hendrix, the Fudge, the Band and all that stuff.  Maybe in a bar with a Seeburg jukebox blasting Sexual Healing or Give It Up - 1968 driving down to the Newport Jazz Festival in a Rambler with 1 8 track tape and listening to Born on the Bayou 100 times over and digging it every time it came around again.  We all parrot the same crap now - that our systems are transparent and disappear, but do they?  The system disappeared in that Rambler because you paid absolutely no mind to the gear that was playing.  Just digging the music.  Didn't have to sit in the sweet spot or anything.  Maybe it's something that can't be recaptured, as it is with a lot of things of youth.  So be it.  And you may feel the opposite.  And no, I wouldn't want to go back to JBLs on the floor anymore because my priorities have changed.  Then was then and now is now. 
chayro
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
We all parrot the same crap now - that our systems are transparent and disappear, but do they?
Mine does. 

But seriously, what you're talking about, "music", we focus on the sound with our systems but music is much more than sound. It comes from the root "muse" the nine goddesses who presided over science and the arts. Today we use the word muse to mean the source of inspiration. 

When you are young and life has yet to beat you down you are full of hope and promise and inspiration. So of course music, which you now know means of or like a muse, inspires you. It still does- if you are young at heart. 

Had a wonderful long talk with Ted Denney the other night. Now there's a man still young at heart. Boy is he ever in the right line of work!  

There really is nothing in "music" then that requires sound. See? Like in Margin Call when the Jeremy Irons character has just been told the financial world is about to collapse, he says the music has stopped.  

We audiophiles work in a realm that is passing strange. We want perfect sound to create something that does not even require sound at all. No wonder one of the more common complaints is here we go down the rabbit hole.

russ69's avatar
russ69
3,520 posts
 
It's the same for me now at 66 as it was back in the day. A good record played low at 1am sends me right back. I have to force myself to go to bed, I just want to keep listening. The magic is still there. 
tomcy6's avatar
tomcy6
2,597 posts
 
I can remember music coming out of a cheap AM transistor radio, probably with a cracked speaker, resonating with the very fabric of my being. Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone, The Who - I Can See For Miles, Jefferson Airplane - Somebody To Love. These songs hit me like a bolt of lightning.

I still love that music but I wouldn’t want to listen to that sound anymore. The music I listen to now on my several orders of magnitude more expensive system is mostly different and the much better sound helps me enjoy it. I still get great enjoyment out of music, but 50+ years on, the experience of listening to music is very different, but just as enjoyable.
edcyn
1,876 posts
 
I've been nuts for music since I was three. Every record player/music system I've ever had has given me pleasure and a good 90% of the upgrades I've gotten over the centuries has made things better still. Right now I'm listening to some modernist who-knows-what via Primephonic. Sound is not as 3d as I might like but the tone is lovely and the composition is emotionally engaging. Hooray for hi-fi!
perkri
908 posts
 
@russ69 

+1

Sit up much too late listening to music.

Tonight will be no different. Just Lenny Breau and me :)
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