My favourite online magazine for audiophiles is today’s post:
http://copper.psaudio.com/home/
I was turned on to the mag through Seth Godin (who has finished an 8 week contribution to the mag). Seth’s articles were all great, and the rest is informative and entertaining. Highly recommended, so give it a whirl.
I have different environments in my house which let me unleash my obsessive, audiophile twitch to different degrees. Much depends on who is sharing the room with me. My wife and young daughter are busy, and have little enthusiasm for beautiful speakers, separate amps and pre-amps, and careful consideration of source. Instead they want instant sound to a somewhat gratifying level (mostly from the TV). So it is a soundbar and sub, and/or bluetooth speakers all the way in rooms that we share.
My office is a different story, and requires a computer based digital sound system largely driven by a DAC and a headphone amp. In this room I am the chimp with cans on my head. Nobody else is listening and I can geek out on settings to my heart’s content. I can listen to obscure stuff too. All on the cans.
My final space which allows for a different setup, is the listening room, where i can set up the more fragile and complex equipment such as LP players, stereo speakers and preamps. This is a hard sell in a busy household because space is at a premium. But for now I am winning the battle.
Life being as busy as it is, most of my serious listening happens at my computer nowadays. No complaints, distractions, or interruptions. At the computer i am just a chimp, with some cans on and a big old smile on my face.
Seth Godin is a huge inspiration for this blog. One of his most enduring messages is the project vs. job idea.
I love the idea of accountable projects vs. jobs that encourage deniability. Seth just riffed on this in his latest post: Your job vs. your project — Seth Godin’s Blog on marketing, tribes and respect
For Chimpswithcans, I have chosen to write my own blog and to deal with material that I love (audiophilia, music….and occasionally chimps perhaps). It means that there are no rules other than the ones I create for myself. No boss. A whole new world.
This blog is about audiophile culture, music, and technology surrounding this. It is my project and it will get better and better, day by day. There is a growing audiophile community in my hometown (Cape Town) that I hope to serve.
I will give reviews, opinions, thoughts, desires, facts, beliefs on audio and I look forward to it every day.
I believe that of all the innovations this year in hifi and audio, MQA will have the biggest impact on the music industry this year. Not a new speaker design, or a new material or even a new motherboard. Those things are hardware, easy to replicate and almost perfected.
Software is eating the world and MQA software could be a way to add scarcity to music once again.
Interesting times.
Sometimes it is most pleasurable to work with limits. When I was a young boy, I played SimCity games on the computer for a while. I learned of a cheat that meant you never ran out of money. Even if your city was invaded by aliens, hit by tsunamis and earthquakes, looted by the criminals and polluted beyond repair – the money kept rolling in.
This cheat quickly ran out of appeal. Far more exciting is to work with what you have and try to fight off the baddies with little to no chance of survival. Sure your city crumbled to the ground most often – but once in a while the enemy retreated, the civilians loved you as a mayor – happy days.
I find listening to music to be similar. I have a NAD 3020i amplifier which is almost as old as the LP’s that I play. My speakers are small Q Acoustic 2020i’s. I know there are infinitely more expensive and powerful setups out there, but still i have never enjoyed listening to music so much. The limits of my setup means that I have to experiment with alignment of speakers, with LP needles, volume settings, and pushing the amp and speakers to breaking point. Working with these limits opens the door to miracles. Perhaps it is my brain tricking my ears into the effectiveness of some tweak, or maybe its something as simple as the amount of sleep i have had, or the food i have eaten, but sometimes it all just sounds perfect.
I suppose my biggest point is that most of us don’t have the very latest and greatest equipment. But limitless resources and equipment does not necessarily give you happy listening. Working within ones means and limits, and recognising when it all comes together is my secret to listening enjoyment.
How does one become an audiophile? What does it mean to be an audiophile? I’ve been pondering the personal origins of my hobby, my passion, my obsession lately.
My own ardent interest in high-fidelity sound kind of snuck up on me. If I really think about it, this hobby makes no sense at all – I can’t afford it, clearly marketing and placebos are all around me tricking my brain. My younger self would have ridiculed my current self for hankering after another DAC, for considering cables worth more than my TV, or for the stream of images of outlandish speakers that dominates my newsfeed – and yet…
…and yet when I have the right set of headphones on, or when I have speakers, a bunch of cables and a new amplifier to set up from scratch, or when I get lost in reading hundreds of vinyl covers – it all makes perfect sense.
My first clue into the origins of my own audiophile conversion comes in the form of playing live music. I played in bands for most of my teenage years and early 20’s. Music was my haven, my happiest place. I have always found peace listening to music and actually playing it gives me something that is quite hard to describe – but it is something like the feeling you get when you hit a massive drive off the tee at golf, or when you see a long lost friend for a good catch-up session. It feels so good.
So the first clue to my own audiophile origins lies in the source material – music as a form of media has always made me happy. Extraordinarily happy. But I enjoyed playing and listening to music for 30 years without caring one bit about the quality of its reproduction, and without knowing what a bitrate, a tweeter or a soundstage was.
Uncovering the true underlying reasons for my obsession is going to require a deeper analysis: The technology, the marketing, the current music industry trends, the psychology, the biology. I will try to attack them in this blog, and you are welcome to join me.
Chimp with cans.
Chimpwithcans 