My blogging

Welcome to my thinking and sharing about hi-fi music listening.

This is the diary of a hi-fi MAD man. I’m a life-long musical audio dabbler. I care about, and I’m curious about, my music listening experience.

I have a fascination with sound, and a love affair with music. This is my account of my life and times on a hi-fi music listening journey. It’s my journal, diary, whiteboard, pin-board, and scrapbook, of the people, landmarks, and gateway and hurdle events along the way. It’s also my archive of stuff worth knowing about. Here you’ll find my thoughts on hi-fi hobbying and record rescuing. I write about, and share, things that excite, surprise, frustrate, or puzzle me.

Music matters most – hi-fi reproduces recorded art. I listen.

I think that (finally) I have worked out from consulting a dictionary and a thesaurus and from lots of quiet reflection and discussion with other enthusiasts, that I am an audiophile and partial technophile because I am a melophile (musicophile) in pursuit of authentic musical experiences. I listen.

I’m an audiophile in that I very much enjoy hi-fi sound reproduction, and this requires me to be something of a technophile who understands the enabling technology, because basically I’m a melophile, as I love music. I listen. As is music educator Don Kaplan, I’m a mindful melophile. I reflect on my music listening experiences.

I have hi-fi friends who are music loving audiophiles. I consider myself to be an audiophile music lover.

In more than 40 years of listening to music and assembling many combinations of hi-fi components, I have learned one big lesson.

A great audio system is a cherished friend, presenting your recorded music with presence and realism: the musicians’ inspiration and emotion is palpably communicated. There’s a feeling and a place, and maybe a time, with great music – a feeling that’s different. A great audio system reproduces recorded music in a way that brings that feeling forth. It transports.

Attentive listening and deep appreciative music experience can be magically transformed by careful system component matching (actually it’s really about the physics of transducers): does your recorded music reproduction sound like real musicians playing real instruments in a real space? Care and audio insights are needed where technology supports artistic expression, so you need to properly audition audio equipment before selecting components for your listening pleasure. Then configuration and location play a crucial part in the performance of the system in rendering realistic music. The listening space is a most important part of the system, and the most neglected.

I’ve been an avid music listener and hi-fi audio hobbyist, and record collector, since my late teens, and in recent years I’ve been an occasional TNT-Audio.com reviewer, and a writer for Witchdoctor magazine – see My Reviews. There I have shared some of my listening pleasure.

Now I do it here, motivated by sonic sensation and pleasure in writing, not retail remuneration (there’s no advertising here).

I chose my blog name very carefully. So, what do I mean by an appreciation of music and hi-fi?

We appreciate something when we make a situated evaluation of it that leads us to selecting a course of action. Appreciating asks “what is it?”, “what is it’s value?”, and “what shall I do about it?”

My blog is my record of my preoccupation and appreciative activity in music listening and reproducing recordings.

These posts are my appreciations of music and hi-fi.

Only occasionally reviewing special products, my writing will focus on my music listening experiences, and on the musicology of recorded music.