All the news coverage of the Iowa caucuses inspired me to create a poll and I thought this would be a fun place to start. We’ve touched on this in a couple of threads I’ve seen but I thought it would be interesting to delve a bit deeper.
How good of an idea does your significant other/partner have of how much you have spent on your (current) main audio system? If I asked them roughly what you had paid for it what do you think they would answer?
Doesn’t know/doesn’t care
Knows it’s expensive but doesn’t pry
Thinks they know but don’t (would probably guess more than an order of magnitude too low)
In the ballpark (correct order of magnitude)
Total transparency (we share everything)
They should know they paid for it!
0voters
Remember, what goes on the dCS Forum stays on the dCS Forum! You can be honest here. Circle of trust!
For those who checked boxes 1-3 I offer this lovely little documentary about the members of the Audiophile Club of Athens and their wives’ reactions when they find out how much their husbands’ systems are worth (from about 10:20 but please watch the whole thing, I think you’ll enjoy it)!
After watching the video of the Audiophile Club of Athens, I understand now what the 2-channel guys are after, a psychoacoustic holodeck. This is definitely not possible with headphones simply because of the awareness that there is gear around one’s head. Also, after very engaging listening sessions with headphones, one needs to give the ears several days of rest to recover.
I appreciate @barryr1’s thoughts above, his words have triggered a wistful series of remembrances and thoughts to stir in my head. The mention of his grandma buying and gifting the Help album caused me to think through my earliest recollections of the music my parents played in my home while growing up in SF (Nat King Cole, Sinatra, Bossa Nova, Paul Desmond, and so on) and the transitional discovery of my own likes. My first two albums (the ones I bought with my own saved money) were Help and Out of Our Heads (these were not my dad’s favorites, nor was Surrealistic Pillow bought a year or so after.) But I knew he had turned the corner a couple of years later when he bought CCR’s Willy and the Poor Boys for me for Christmas in '69. And as my tastes progressed I sought out a wider variety of genres to enjoy: Traffic, Tower of Power, ELP, Donovan, Lynyrd Skynyrd, CSN&Y, and even more Serio Mendes!
Yes, sifting through and owning a lot of gear has been great fun for me and my wife, but accumulating the components that fit together properly to play the music we love in the way we want to hear it has taken many years and been a wonderful journey. The musicality of what I listen to is what drives my continuing interest in our hobby today (I love music and I thank my parents for that), and each component we have in our kit has been carefully considered and chosen because of how it presents the music as we want to hear it.
I have read many times in this forum (and some others) when someone posts that they’ve “reached the end” in their pursuit of gear, and then they are quickly called out by several other posters who question the accuracy and longevity of this statement. In truth, I too am near the end, yet I still love to look at and listen to new things. But I am very happy with what I’ve curated and now find myself simply focusing on the music.
Except I would love to find the right pair of speaker cables to finish things out just a bit better . . .