Yes, approaching my 90th birthday next year, I‘ve absolutely no chance of ever listening to it all. So what has led me to this crazy situation?
Four main motivators –
- A love of all forms of classical music with especial focus on Chamber works;
- Audiophilia, an affliction of 80 years only recently cured;
- The joy of collecting.
- The Alpha-male organisinjg & control syndrome
In my earlier years with better hearing facilities, I attended orchestral and chamber concerts as well as opera when the opportunity presented itself. At home I graduated from a pre-teen love and fascination of music via a wind up Edison phonograph (I still have it) to 78rmp shellac records on a wind up Columbia portable, to mono LPs, then excitedly, stereo!! That sinspired a valiant effort to achieve audio Nirvana via many tone arms and Koetsu etc cartridges, Linn and other turntables.
The next major event was the release of awful sounding digital records - yuk. These remained scorned until my interest was kindled by laserdisks and I was forced into taking the medium more seriously. Suprise, surprise, given better electronics, digitally reproduced music actually was listenable, even enjoyable!!
That marked the next manic phase of various hi-end players, DACs and finally quality headphones. The cherry on top emerged in the form of Meridian Sooloos and the FLAC format for music. That messy and expensive system was replaced 5 years ago by Roon which highlighted my acquisitiveness by stimulating the collective urge.
OK, having 50+ different interpretations of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is admittedly crazy and a more sane individual would whittle the list down to 2 or 3 or would they? The more sensible course would be to resist downloading any more versions, but then, maybe that would miss having a superb interpretation in the music library! And, faced with an accumulation of 50+ versions, who would honestly prefer the task of listening to them all to make judgement on the “best” three rather than spending time exploring other superb music in the library?
And thousands of hours haver been spent on the library at this PC, controlling and editing. Each album has been given 2 or more custom tags with the header and artist format standardized to a level so items are relatively easy to find. If identified, Roon adds links and might add a review but regardless, I have added data to many albums using Word or Publisher and then saving it to the album in PDF format in Windows Explorer. E.g. I have added a PDF file to accompany the superb Anne Akiko Meyes album “Mirror in Mirror” which describes how this artist collaborates with contemporary composers , some even composing specially for her to play on her 1741 “Vieuxtemps: Guarneri del Gesu violin. Adding such files makes editing a never ending job in this big music library!!
Yes I do actually listen to the music, often letting Room select for me via Shuffle, usually with the tag setting for Classical fare only. The non classical 4787 albums are shuffled for background music for guests although guitar items might also be spliced in. I wallow in Baroque and Early music but that does not mean the genius of Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn etc are ignored. I do also have some weird modern classical fare which I tag as “Oddball or Avante Guarde” and rarely listen to. I’m not deleting it as someone later might actually like it!!
So there you have it fellow Roonies, a deranged senior in your ranks with an obscene music library of downloads, who, after spending an equally obscene sum of money on reproducing gear, now only has a limited time left to listen to it!! Ahah, but I really do think I have achieved Audio Nirvana and am enjoying music at the best possible fidelity. This was driven home to me recently when seduced into buying one of the best DACs money can buy in the form of the R8 Audio-gd DAC. A careful A/B comparison with a considerably modified LKS DAC yielded no discernable difference. Note that this should not be interpreted as meaning the Audio-gd is in any way an inferior product because the Aurillac G1, ahead in the audio chain, is already stripping out heaps of jitter meaning the later DAC has a much easier task to convert those bits to very listenable analog.
To summarise the madness of decades of audiophilia, here is what I have learned:
-
Musical reproduction in the home can never duplicate the experience of the live concert – there is no “absolute Sound” so pursuing it can lead to a foolish bank balance deficit and possible audio obsession. (Note that seating position in a concert hall can vastly affect the nature of the perceived music – there is no “perfect” listening spot)
-
No audio component is perfect – they each add a sonic signature so a collection of electronics in a chain do embow it with a unique sonic signature. Unsurprisingly a keen ear can detect a difference in sound between system A and system B… The critical point to appreciate is that neither A nor B is necessarily imperfect nor is one better than the other. Either can reproduce music very nicely so anyone moving from A to B is not upgrading but is merely moving sideways. Been there, done that far too often.
-
Audio memory is highly unreliable and can be strongly influenced by only minor changes in level. So hearing a different system to your own might only impress because it is different, not necessarily better. Add in the placebo affect, that our brains with connected ears are not always at the same level of reception, and there is a recipe for audiophilia with subsequent audio industry enrichment!
-
Contrary to my conviction some years ago, digitally reproduced music via CD, FLAC etc in not inferior to analog vinyl. I now have the opposite viewpoint, it is superior with no clicks and pops from surface noises, no distortion due to compromised arm geometry and no problems associated with curve correction from very small voltages. (Yes I know these can be minimized to acceptable levels but a system not involving such problems is fundamentally ahead)
-
Marketing based on the number game is alive and well, convincing suckers like me that an amplifier with distortion measurement of 0.00015% is better than another with 0.0001%. In similar vein a FLAC file with specs of 352/24 is regarded as superior to one of 44/16 despite independent tests proving no increased audio fidelity can be observed with hi-resolution formats.
-
The cost of an audio component is not correlated with quality of music reproduction. This is very obvious currently where relatively inexpensive items from Chinese manufacturers like Topping can sound as good as, if not better than many other highly regarded (with good reason) other brands. Again, been there, experienced that many times.
-
Headphones can, in most instances, produce a better musical experience than speaker systems and can do that at far less cost. The exception is for some music, particularly organ, where good very low frequency sounds from speakers is far more satisfying than from headphones. But the cans avoid the ever present room resonance problems as well as only require a more delicate and more easily achieved amplifier output. That said, some people cannot tolerate headphones and they are inappropriate for group listening.
-
No music library is too large as there is just so much wonderful music out there to enjoy so why re strict it if the budget allows? Yes duplication of the work with different artists can be a bit hard to justify but variety is the spice of life and no one interpretation is either absolutely “right” or the “best”. Some argue about the timings used by some artists as being inappropriate but this, to me, is nonsensical in the context of such a subjective and emotional situation. So, only having only one interpretation can fix that in the mind as the way it should always be played thereby restricting enjoyment as performed by others.
-
I’ve reached the age where I can be a boring old fart so, realizing that, it is time to finish. I append a couple of files to illustrate my old age dementia. One shows items used to enjoy music via Roon in any one of a number of rooms (hardwired with digital cable from the Aurilac G1 streamer), the other shows a crazy 7.1 surround sound A/V system in a specially constructed (and designed by me) pentagonally shaped lounge (avoiding rom resonances? -not quite, but almost) where I enjoy video each night for many hours.
Yes I am very spoiled old fart and love both music via Roon and good video from a variety of sources!
thoughts for you, which you should ignore for your own well-being: Holo NOS DACs driven by HQPlayer; custom tube headphone amps from DNA; Linn Space Optimization with Klimax Organik speaker systems to tame complex rooms.
