The Sound or Music


I listen to all genres of music but really enjoy it with good sound. I know of people who just love one particular type of music but don't care at all about audio. My late relative just loved classical music and had hundreds of good records but his system was like bad transistor radio. He had means but was not interested in better system at all. Music, for him was 99.9% and sound 0.1% of the pleasure. He was most likely missing half of instruments of orchestral music, he listened to - either by limited frequency response or very poor resolution. He was a music lover. Am I a music lover or just only an audio freak?
What about you?
128x128kijanki
300 records is not enough! If it were 3,000 records, then I'd be tempted.

About a decade ago I started to get heavily into early Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and various Delta blues artists. The quality of the recordings presented problems for me. Ultimately it forced me to change me attitude towards what a system can do. Wide and detailed soundstages with gut shaking bass and shimmering highs is nice, but in and of themselves they really don't have that much to do with music.
Give me the boombox - keeping sand out of the turntable would have to be murder; and then there's replacement tubes...
I will take the 300 and great sound--do I get dedicated lines on the island?? can listen to a different song every day for 300 days and after 3 mos on the island when I go crazy I won't remember what I listened to anyway--all kidding aside I have music that sounds great in the car but not so great on the big system--ie poorly recorded etc but is really good music--so if you like music it is good anywhere but it can be so much better on a nice system--that is why we are all here!!
I went on a 6 day vacation to Mexico shortly after Christmas with an ipod chock full of 6800 songs. My only previous experiences with this veritable, yet limited music library, was during work-outs or grass-cutting. My intention was to provide distraction from the lengthy plane ride. What I discovered was how much I enjoyed the music. I listened each and every night, on the beach, and of course, on the flight back. It was the music. I went as far as to tell my family I had inadvertently vanquished my obssessvie tendencies towards vinyl playback.

I had a similar conversation with Arnie Nudell and Paul McGowan at the 1996 Vail Jazz Party. With strong paraphrase on their evaluatuion, they contended music may best be appreciated only through a high resolution system. With the support of a woman comfortable in expressing her opinion I was able to return the focus to the music and the joy there derived.

And, although the audio quality of an ipod may exceed that of a boom box it's offerings are little compared to my home system. I hold the dis-belief that I might ever pick sound over substance.