Good Enuff...

I go on a tear about various things and I gorge myself on them till I puke. I'll get an addiction to Popsicles for a week, then forget about them for another year. Or it'll be some kind of food I'll make in vat style quantities and feast till I wonder why I liked it in the first place. What's common with any of that is focus. When you can hone in, perfect your ability to ignore distractions, is when you can make Great Works of Art, be it a bucket of chili or trying to get this computer to run as cold as possible.

“You're more interested in that damn hobby than you are in me!” is a sentence I've heard from time to time. It's true. I can be more interested in a thing than I can be in people at times.

My tinkering is entertainment to me. I'm not sure this is just a guy thing but we can blow off the rest of the world and go nuts on gaming, working out, radio controlled planes or fill up a cellar with Tycho train sets chugging through a tiny town. Some of us build actual man caves to hide and grunt in while others portion out some of their time and attention for an interest that seems silly.

Lately, for me, it's been the stereo. If you want an infuriating hobby that will provide hours of tweaking and calibration, this is it.

I've gone on before about this and it's not a waste of time as far as I'm concerned. Music is the best and and I can back that up with eons of human history saying so. What dogs this particular hobby is the incessant need to constantly perfect the quality of sound. Now I'm doing room acoustical treatments to further perfect it. In the process, the living room doesn't look like a living room anymore.

Corner bass traps, skyline diffusers, reflection control panels, SPL meters; are all fun toys to play with if you're into this game. The problem occurs is that I never can reach nirvana and have it 100% correct. If I can get it to 99.98%, there's that last .02% that I MUST correct. The truth being that it's impossible to do, but I try to squeeze as much perfection as I can out of the room and system.

Why go through this effort? I guess you have to love music in order to devote such care. There are songs that have just one note, one small passage that can make the entire song. Sometimes the beginning of a song is what makes it, the rest is just support for those first few seconds. It's a feeling of “Ahhh...that's it!” You know when you hear it. That feeling can come from anything really. It's when everything falls into place without much effort, letting the moment rise on it's own. That's when beauty can be seen. “Nailing it” would be a shorter description but I prefer to define, define, define.

“Sundown” by Gordon Lightfoot has two notes in it where Gordon bends the strings of his guitar, making the note swing down deep every time I hear that song. That's what I'm listening for, that moment when he does it.. It's heaven. When you hear that through a system that can reproduce the sound, even the raspy sound of the string clattering on the fret board, it's even better.

The intro to Bad Finger's “Baby Blue” is another example I can think of.

*****

There comes a point when I should listen to the music instead of listening to the system itself, but it's hard to differentiate those two as they are so intertwined with one another. Songs I've heard a million times are etched within me and when they're not reproduced like I want them to, I start hunting for the cause. There are numerous causes for shitty sounding songs too. Alot of them I have no control over either. FM fade outs, MP3-4 compression which chops the highs and lows off (that's why they can fit 1,000 songs on a chip) or some annoying DJ who talks right up to the post of a song. Add to that crummy recordings of live material, intentional “brightening” of music because that's what a lot of people enjoy or great songs recorded when recording technology was awful.

Life is short. I'll play audio engineer because I find it fun and I'll just sit back and listen to the music as well without worrying if my picture window is reflecting in the 2000-5000Hz band.

Below are some cartoons I found about this hobby.