My name is Lee and I’m from the United States (Terre Haute, Indiana to be specific.) I’m from and currently live in Terre Haute, but I did live in Colorado for over twenty years. I’m also an U.S. Air Force veteran with almost ten years in and was stationed in Colorado and the former West Germany. I used to play the trumpet in my earlier life (actually I still have it and would love to start again.) I have spent most of my career as a field engineer or service technician (electronic/calibration/computer) with a couple assorted degrees, such as an BSEET and BSTC.
I have been collecting music since the early 1970’s, mostly rock, with some blues and jazz. The first 45rpm singles that I purchased, with my own money, were “The Cover of Rolling Stone” and “Dueling Banjos”. But most of my music was in album form, since both of my parents worked on the LP pressing lines at the Columbia Records plants (Terre Haute, IN & Carrollton, GA). Every Christmas and birthday, I would get a nice, fat stack of LPs. So that set in motion the music collecting. I actually worked in the same buildings in Terre Haute, that my parents did, but they were called Sony DADC not CBS Records. I maintained and calibrated measurement equipment for the manufacture of CDs, DVDs and BDs. Unfortunately, I was laid off from DADC in the Spring of 2018. Some folks say that physical media is a dying format, after all.
I have been using and maintaining computers since the early 80’s and I also started maintaining a personal music database using Swift on my Commodore-128 in the late 80’s. I later designed and created a database using MS Access in the early 90’s, which I still use today, but I do port it over to MS Excel and a .PDF, for normal folks to read.
As far as the Hi-Fi stuff, well I remember drooling over the very large Pioneer receivers and open-reel machines in the late 70’s and I was hooked. I’ve been collecting and upgrading gear on a budget scale, ever since.
I have been involved with computer audio since the late 90’s. I remember recording LPs or cassettes to wave files, then worrying about hard drive space, until I burned the files to a CD. I am so glad the days of small HDDs are history. I am currently at the over 35k mark for music files on my NAS, what a long way from 40MB HDDs, eh? I have been using EAC and foobar2000 on my systems (Linux and Windows) for years and started using Roon in early 2021. I also use several USB DACs (AQ DragonFly v1, iFi iDSD Nano and Zen DAC v1) for audio output. I have recently built a Roon endpoint running RoPieeeXL with a 7" touch screen and a HiFi Berry DAC2 Pro hat. Fun project BTW.
I have been a Tidal subscriber for about six years and recently subscribed to Qobuz, even though they are part of the reason I was laid off from Sony DADC. I just love the idea having so much content at my fingertips. And Roon is the icing on the cake and it ties it all together, IMHO. Cheers, all!