Why listen to rubbish?
Ever since I started listening to music, I have had a lot of interest in audio equipment because I believe that music gets an extra dimension when it is reproduced as well as possible. Of course it's mainly about the music, but still....
When I was about 12 years old my parents gave me a pick-up, one with the lid as a speaker and therefore a mono sound. Not ecxactly the one on the picture but an orange one , slightly more modern. In the evening I lay with my ear on the lid so as not to miss any detail of the music.
In terms of taste, I went in all directions. It started with rock 'n Roll (Bill Haley & the Comets) and then via Glamrock (Gary Glitter, Mud, the Sweet), blues (Rory Gallagher, Eric Clapton, Flavium, Barrelhouse) and ended up with hard rock (Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy, Rainbow) and Southern Rock (Allman Brothers, the Outlaws, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Dickey Betts & Southern Comfort). This was my taste for a while, I think I was about sixteen years old at the time. Thanks to a new classmate I came into contact with Wishbone Ash and Genesis and especially the first mentioned band made me go crazy. My first ever concert was Wishbone Ash in Zwolle. I liked Genesis, but it didn't do much for me than and even now I am only mildly enthusiastic with regards to their music.
In the beginning I was a member of the “discosoos” where you could borrow records for a monthly fee, but later on I bought an LP as soon as I had the money for it. As the hobby grew, so did my stereo system and by the end of my high school days I had a nice set.
In the last years of high school, my taste started to change and I went more towards symphonic rock, as it was called then, and Jazz rock. Especially the guitar work became more and more important and after hearing Pink Floyd's Wish you were here and Dark Side of the Moon I drifted more and more in the direction of what I now consider to be my beloved genre.
But as mentioned in my other columns before, it was Marillion's Script for a Jester's Tear that completely overwhelmed and convinced me and I've been a proghead (or probably snob) ever since.
Because I was doing better and better socially, I was able to invest more and more in my stereo set and at the time that I only listened to prog albums, my set was of HighEnd level. Thousands of euros for a cable? Sure, no problem because that's what you can hear Immediately .......Well, at a certain point you only hear where things can be improved and you get the “audiophile disease” and that took serious forms. I sometimes listened to music that I didn't like but was excellently recorded and produced. That is really crazy.
Due to all kinds of setbacks of a social and medical nature and an ever growing awareness of my "illness" I abruptly sold everything and started listening to real music again on a very simple headphone set and man, I was really enjoying my music again.
However, blood goes where it can’t go and partly because I have worked in the hi-fi business for almost five years, I started investing in my equipment again, with the result that several beautiful CD players, headphone amplifiers and headphones have been passing through. According to my wife, I'm really addicted and I think she has a point.
I now listen on a nice but not excessive set and do it my way and that means not too often, not too long but loud. Quality before quantity. In order not to completely ruin my hearing, I have to keep pace and control myself and that works reasonably well, except on vacation. I put my CDs on an I-Phone via I-Tunes and listen to them via an Audioquest Dragonfly ( great inprovement fot not too much money) on wired Bose earbuds and every day after breakfast I listen to music for an hour or two, preferably in the sun but, since I live in Holland, more often indoors.
Does this column have a punchline? Um, no not really, but I'm more and more convinced that it often happens that a new album doesn't come into its own due to poor recording quality. Of course, that is mainly a matter of money and in this day and age of Spotify and other streaming services (there are also very good ones) it doesn't seem to matter anymore and I regret that very much. Fortunately, there are also more and more musicians in our genre who also have a studio and are skilled in optimizing recordings and have mastered mixing and mastering.
Like everything else, it's all about money here and I would like to make an appeal to buy physical products and support musicians in this way so that they can provide us with even more beautiful music. A CD, will always be my choice, or an LP is just a beautiful possession and you build a collection in your own way. When my daughter reads this, she laughs her ass off because paying for music, crazy, and the latter certainly is true, I am indeed crazy.............for "my" music.
