Has Your Hobby Changed?

@baclagg congrats! Great place to be!!! You took great care in putting together that system and tuning the room to complete the setup. It looks great and I bet it sounds excellent as well! Enjoy!!!

@mikelavigne congrats! have a long and healthy retirement!!!

To me, the 'hobby' part is the buying and selling of gear. Listening to music is no more a 'hobby' for me than reading a book or watching a movie. 

Nowhere near retirement, but over these last years have seen my setup going from passive to outboard active configuration and from hifi to pro/studio/cinema segment gear, with my DAC/preamp now being the only member of the bunch that's non-pro (although it was initially aimed at studio use as well). That new gear approach is in service of a more allout physics-first route with a different set of criteria, although merging with and even further building upon these pre-existing values from the "audiophile" camp. Hifi generally became too "flimsy" for me, too brand oriented, too expensive, too "taking the steps up (or down) the hierarchy ladder," too much function-follows-form (and not vice versa), etc. Sometimes you have to unlearn, throw it all overboard and more or less start from scratch. I'm glad I took the jump. 

My job was my hobby...Retirement was difficult with no interaction with the students and teachers...

 i taught reading analysis...

I created my own acoustic tuned room... It takes me 2 years non stop...I lost it...I am in headphone now ( 6 months of listening  modifying experiments now completed) ...

@pooch2 Does the banjo have a resonator or is it open-backed? Your answer is extreeeeemly importnat!!!!😁 As for me, it's an open-backed one as, despite the fact I both frail and claw-hammer, resonator banjos just weigh too much and the finger picks are just too much of a hassle.