Are you an audiophile or a music lover?

[Pacha]

+1 I’m an audiophile music lover.
Being a part of a musical family, most still play or perform and I was a durmmer before my hands were damaged in Viet Nam. One member who teaches piano even owns Oscar Peterson's piano. My partner, she is a Jazz singer that I go to every live performance she has. I still also like playing with my system somewhat and making improvements. My bottom line would be, without the music, why would I need a system!

 

[thedudeabides]

Well said.

Ii is unclear to me what the OP wanted to achieve with those "provocative" lists.

This is second thread of this nature that I recall. I do, however, understand the intent. Music lover or gearcentric. The lists are way too long and confusing. I would rephrase. Much simpler but I suspect most will say both.

Do you prioritize music over gear (accept the limitations of your system without the need to constantly upgrade or think about upgrading) or do you continuously upgrade your gear (or think about upgrading) with the goal of increasing your enjoyment / appreciation of music? Or are you a combination of both hypotheticals? My apologies to the OP. I do not mean to hijack your thread.

 

[jeromelang]

Good sound is a drug

 

[Al M.]

Do you prioritize music over gear (accept the limitations of your system without the need to constantly upgrade or think about upgrading) or do you continuously upgrade your gear (or think about upgrading) with the goal of increasing your enjoyment / appreciation of music? Or are you a combination of both hypotheticals?

Excellently put. With most it's probably a combination of both. After some serious upgrading and tweaking over the years I am now at a stage where I can prioritize music to such an extent that I don't have to constantly think about improvements, as I am very happy with my sound.

Today is a pure music day, as has been more the rule lately, as dialing in my new speakers has come to completion. Even in periods of less satisfaction there have been many pure music days, of course.

Certainly, there may be temporary excesses in the audiophile direction, as probably every audiophile has experienced at some point, including myself, but most will still think the music is first. Only when the excesses become permanent in an obsessive fashion, there is a problem.

 

[godofwealth]

To clarify, I think I have turned into a deep music lover because I started life off as an avid audiophile. Almost 50 years ago (goodness gracious me!), when I was a wee teenager and an undergrad (I entered a university at 15!), I had my first exposure to an audio system at a friend’s dorm room (we had no stereo at home). I still remember what was playing: Frampton comes alive (some of you might know this rowdy live concert album that went platinum multiple times, I think). Anyway, I was blown away by what was in retrospect a rather modest cobbled together system from a cheap car stereo and home made speakers. I spent the rest of my undergrad building various cheap systems scrounging around electronics stores for parts, while on summer breaks. The other big revelation I had was in grad school when on a whim, I scarfed up a pair of free tickets to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. That was the big aha moment for me. I vividly remember the concert. Michael Tilson Thomas conducting with Cho Liang Lin playing the Sibelius Violin Concerto and then after the intermission, Rachmaninov’s Symphony 2 with its ultra luxurious strings. I was in sonic heaven, and could barely sleep a wink that night. Audiophile in me met the latent music lover in me. Although I was then deep in the study of AI at Carnegie Mellon, then and now one of the world‘s most prestigious centers for research in computer science, I was also drawn to the crazy hobby of being an audiophile and being a music lover.

I think both of these aspects of my life remained all the way through my life. One advantage of being an academic was that I traveled widely to more than 50 countries all over the world to lecture on AI, and as luck would have it, most of the places I visited would offer me the chance to hear great live music. I have heard all the great symphony orchestras and opera halls in Europe, as well as great choral music in many old churches.

I spent 15 years teaching in Massachusetts at a university located in a lovely small college town, where my next door neighbor played for the Boston Symphony, He was a music lover through and through. He barely had what any one of us would consider an audio system (a cheap boombox, and a throwaway laptop to hear music streamed through Spotify when streaming became available). But for him, hearing music was playing music. He was always playing music. When not playing for the BSO, he would play at local jazz clubs, cafes and even at home. His idea of a musical evening would be sit at home with a score of a Beethoven symphony and go through it page by page, trying to understand how the great master wove his fabulous music with such elegance. The Beethoven Fifth was stitched together with just four notes, which has been metaphorically called Fate knocking at the door. I learned a lot from hanging out with him how music lovers live in a different world. He was my prototype for my caricature of a music lover. He never would waste money on an audio system. If he had spare money, he would spend it on a musical instrument. To him, that was the hardware he would consider spending money on. He didn’t care much for the sound of any of my systems, although one crazy New Year‘s Eve, he danced with his wife and the rest of our neighborhood into the early morning hours on my then big system, featuring a Magneplanar 3.6r, Krell 700CX, Mark Levinson 32, and a trio of Esoteric digital front ends (P-03, D-03, and the Esoteric Rubidium clock). He had to admit a real audio system sounded pretty darned good!

So, my answer is that it is possible to be a crazy audiophile and a crazy music lover, and the two are inextricably woven together. If you have a great system, and it is possible to put together a great system at a very modest price, you can‘t but help get drawn into the music. It’s like the twin strands of DNA that have shaped my life. It’s woven around like the DNA double helix, coiling around my life for the past 5 decades. I know there will come a time in my life when I won’t be able to enjoy my music because the only music I can hear, like Beethoven, is in my head because my ears won’t work anymore (or who knows what other parts of my body will eventually fail). But, who wants to think about that?

My old high school teacher used to quote poetry and one of his quotations stuck around in my mind all these years. It’s from the great poet Omar Khayyam:

“Dead yesterday.
Unborn tomorrow.
Why fret about these if today be sweet”.

 

[thedudeabides]

Good sound is a drug

Question is how bad and expensive your drug of choice is.

 

[godofwealth]

Case in point. I’m listening right now to an old mono jazz album by the incredible Jimmy Giuffre recorded in 1954, 70 years ago! If you can enjoy stuff like this, you’re on the road to becoming a true music lover!

 

[Al M.]

Case in point. I’m listening right now to an old mono jazz album by the incredible Jimmy Giuffre recorded in 1954, 70 years ago! If you can enjoy stuff like this, you’re on the road to becoming a true music lover!

View attachment 123054

Yes, I can enjoy jazz in mono, I have done so. I even have enjoyed Bartok string quartets on a cheap mono cassette player. But what does this have to do with being a true music lover? I can enjoy Bruckner on the cheap standard car radio, but I want to enjoy Bruckner on my system in the best sound possible. And ideally, I want to hear a Bruckner symphony live, in an excellent performance in the best possible seat.

 

[Kingrex]

Sometimes I feel like just another audiophile. But then I get wound up in a record like Martha Argerich on piano in Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.1. Then I remember what music is about.

 

[Al M.]

I spent 15 years teaching in Massachusetts at a university located in a lovely small college town, where my next door neighbor played for the Boston Symphony, He was a music lover through and through. He barely had what any one of us would consider an audio system (a cheap boombox, and a throwaway laptop to hear music streamed through Spotify when streaming became available). But for him, hearing music was playing music. He was always playing music. When not playing for the BSO, he would play at local jazz clubs, cafes and even at home. His idea of a musical evening would be sit at home with a score of a Beethoven symphony and go through it page by page, trying to understand how the great master wove his fabulous music with such elegance. The Beethoven Fifth was stitched together with just four notes, which has been metaphorically called Fate knocking at the door. I learned a lot from hanging out with him how music lovers live in a different world. He was my prototype for my caricature of a music lover. He never would waste money on an audio system. If he had spare money, he would spend it on a musical instrument. To him, that was the hardware he would consider spending money on. He didn’t care much for the sound of any of my systems, although one crazy New Year‘s Eve, he danced with his wife and the rest of our neighborhood into the early morning hours on my then big system, featuring a Magneplanar 3.6r, Krell 700CX, Mark Levinson 32, and a trio of Esoteric digital front ends (P-03, D-03, and the Esoteric Rubidium clock). He had to admit a real audio system sounded pretty darned good!

Great story, but that's a music player. You can also be a music lover without playing any music. I am one of these.

 

[godofwealth]

Yes, I can enjoy jazz in mono, I have done so. I even have enjoyed Bartok string quartets on a cheap mono cassette player. But what does this have to do with being a true music lover? I can enjoy Bruckner on the cheap standard car radio, but I want to enjoy Bruckner on my system in the best sound possible. And ideally, I want to hear a Bruckner symphony live, in an excellent performance in the best possible seat.

But that’s precisely the point I was trying to make. The audiophile in you wants to hear it in the best sound possible. If you were my next-door-neighbor in Massachusetts, my archetype for a music lover, you would be perfectly happy reading the score of the Bruckner symphony. Let’s face it, reading the original score of the Bruckner symphony 4 (one of my favorites) would make you understand his music far better than any audio system possibly could. But, that takes real *work*. And we want to listen to lots of music, in the streaming world, we want to hear millions of tracks. The composers from the 17th and 18th century didn’t face this problem. They wanted to ”hear” music, they read the scores of Bach or whoever else they wanted to learn from. Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner went deep into understanding Bach because so much of what they wrote depended on the intricacies of counterpoint.

 

[treitz3]

<snip> For me music is my drug of choice. <snip>

Typical with audio forums...



Okay, back to discussing audio....

Tom

 

[Ron Resnick]

Here is a compact way to ask this question:

Do you play music to listen to your stereo?

or

Do you play the stereo to listen to your music?

 

[dcathro]

Hello dbeau. Yes there is a definite purpose best discussed over in my system thread. They are a work in progress to alleviate the effect of the protruding fireplace on the room acoustics.

Peter, a true music lover wouldn't bother about fixing that!

 

[dcathro]

As we begin a new year (Happy 2024, WBF!), it might be an opportune moment to refresh ourselves and ask ourselves some really important and basic questions. Think of this as a New Year’s resolution for WBF members.

So, the question is: are you an audiophile or a music lover? Perhaps a bit of both (or as we mathematically inclined geeks would put, you are a “convex combination” of attributes that define an audiophile or a music lover). So, what defines an audiophile? What defines a music lover? Are these fundamentally incompatible? Perhaps not, judging from the many hundreds of posts on WBF, people really dig music, but they also love to horse trade with their equipment, seeking to extract every nuance of music from their grooves, tapes, and streaming bits. So, let’s define these terms.

An audiophile is someone who:

1. Spends far more on his/her system than on their music collection.
2. Spends far more time listening to their system than listening to live music.
3. Spends far more time listening to other people playing music than creating music themselves (like playing a piano).
4. Thinks that increasing the bit rate or depth of a digital recording improves its sound.
5. Thinks that stereo or multichannel audio is fundamentally better than mono.
6. Thinks that recordings made in the digital era, or on DSD, or DXD, are fundamentally better than recordings made 60-70 years ago.
7 Doesn’t listen to any music recorded before 1960.
8. Only listens to music sitting in his/her listening room centered between the speakers.
9. Cares about obscure audiophile terms like soundstage, depth, height, transparency, blah blah.
10. Wants to hear the subway trains roll under Kingsway Hall on their favorite recordings (Harry Pearson, hope you can hear me still!).

OK, with that out of the way, let’s turn to a music lover. A music lover is someone who:
1. Is perfectly happy listening to a boombox or an FM radio station or gasp, even shortwave radio (as I did many decades ago as an undergrad!).
2. Has no clue whether a recording is in mono or stereo, or whether it is recorded as an MP3 or DSD 512.
3. Goes regularly to live performances (opera, symphonies, chamber, jazz, popular music, folk, country, …).
4. Can‘t for a moment sit still in a chair listening to music, but must bounce around in the groove, digging the music.
5. Cares two hoots about soundstage, transparency, height blah blah.
6. Has their dealer set up their system, and never touches it again!
7. Tends to hang on to their equipment for 50+ years, only replacing it when it absolutely fails and even then grudgingly.
8, Actually can read music scores, and tends to get bogged down in the minutiae of whether the composer wrote something in C minor or C major.
9. Argues vociferously whether the best conductor was Toscanini or the best singer was Caruso, both of whom recorded their albums in mono on 78 rpm discs.
10. Has no clue at all what high end audio is, until they accidentally hear a high end system, and then WOW!

OK, WBF. What are you? An audiophile or a music lover?

I think I am both, but according to your criteria I am neither

 

[Kingrex]

I can't read music well. I play by ear and feel. And for the most part I suck. So I listen for enjoyment. I am surely not going to labor through reading a score. Not my personality.
A piece of why I have spent money on my system is to be able to really hear the music. That is my only real access since I can't read it. I get enjoyment from hearing the strike on a Timpani. I don't want to hear muddy rumble. I want to hear a mallet hit the skin. I want to hear the subtle inflections of the pianist. It helps me draw into the performance and what the artist felt when they played it. A boom box or Bose wavedream cant resolve well enough. Sure, you get the gist of it. And for playing Peter Frampton, any stereo will do. But not so much for classical. Same for jazz. When you hear a players chest moving in and out and their mouth working the reed, you are better able to sense all they put into the piece. So, Im an audiophile to get close to jazz and classical.
The first version of a real stereo I bought 8 to 9 years ago would have been just fine for Lynrd Skynrd. But my setup now. OMG. Its so much better. As I sit here typing with the volume on 1 and my wife asleep on the sofa next to me, Im shocked at how clean and clear every note is on Mozart Piano Concerto 27. I can feel the rise and fall of the soloist. I can hear the soft woodwinds respond back and strings regal with delight. Extracting that detail is not possible without financial investment and time tuning the system.
I love the music. I'm an audiophile to better access it.

 

[MikeHorns]

 

[Robh3606]

I am both no bad points!

Rob

 

[dcathro]

Here is compact way to ask this question:

Do you play music to listen to your stereo?

or

Do you play the stereo to listen to your music?

Nicely put!

As I am into DIY, I am often playing music on my system in order to try and improve the system.

Then I will play the system in order to listen to the music.

I think that makes me both.

 

[Ron Resnick]

Do you play music to listen to your stereo?

or

Do you play the stereo to listen to your music?

Except for conscientiously listening to the stereo for evaluation and testing, I really do play the stereo to listen to my favorite music. I play the stereo once or twice a week. I think of those sessions as events, as alternatives to watching a movie or to being engaged in some other dedicated activity.

In order for me to want to spend two hours or three hours or four hours on those music listening sessions the sound from the stereo has to be pretty darn good.