Music

by popular request (okay just @ted and @nicholas) here is an overview of our hi-fi setup:

* but first, why?
listening to music can be either a passive activity, like background music while cooking or commuting, or an activity that demands your full attention. if the latter, then the quality of your experience is shaped by the ability of your system to reproduce music. this means everything from source (streaming, CD, vinyl, reel-to-reel tape) → amplification → volume control (preamp) → speakers and all of the cables in between.

maybe this all sounds dumb (who cares about cables???) but until you have a once-in-a-lifetime experience listening to a really great system, you won't know what you're missing from your favourite music. not just technical qualities like detail or extension, but emotion, texture, and meaning. hi-fi is a great real-world example of plato's cave, because once you've heard what you're missing... you can't unhear it.

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I will pretty much never balk at the price of hi-fi gear like speakers, amps, turntables, etc. because they are some of the things that I use most in my day-to-day life.

60hr this week alone (!!), pretty wild. of course not all of that is dedicated active listening, but still. 

the only things that I (maybe) use for more hours per week would be my laptop and desktop computer.

Same. As soon as I saw this I looked at my own Roon home page to check my listening time at home this month.

I don't look at these numbers very often; my subjective sense is just that I'm "almost always" listening to music.

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Writer, senior editor, music nerd, GenX eldergoth, monastery-bootstrapper. https://paragraph.xyz/@danicaswanson https://tinyurl.com/Black-Stone-Wordsmith

a fellow Roon user, incredible! you’re the second one I’ve encountered on FC so far. very cool.

how do you listen at home? mostly streaming or analog as well?

I've been meaning to mention Roon on Farcaster for awhile, so it's great to find other users here. I'm a lifetime subscriber, and a very happy one.

I once had a Qobuz subscription for streaming, but I stopped that quite awhile ago. Now I just use Roon to organize and play all the files in my own digital music library, many of which were originally ripped from my CD collection or downloaded from Bandcamp.

I imagine I'm not the typical Roon user in that I focus on my own local file library. (Side note: it's about 500 GB of music, and would be larger if I'd learned about the difference between MP3s and FLAC files earlier... lol).

Before I found Roon I'd been using WinAmp, MediaMonkey, and Clementine Music Player, all of which I liked. I made lots of playlists for my music newsletter and for events. I once had a side project decorating chill rooms for small gatherings, and sometimes I also made custom themed playlists of ambient + drone music for those events. So organizing and searching my files is important. Roon is excellent for that.

I'm GenX and came of age long before the rise of streaming, so I'm used to buying and owning all the music in my library. And since my tastes are so heavily focused on dark ambient + drone (about 90% of my library), I had to spend a lot of time ferreting out all kinds of obscure tracks not available on any streaming platform, so streaming didn't really make sense in my case.

ahh okay, very nice. love to hear that there are people out there with local file libraries, very based. we mostly stream but certainly have our fair share of bandcamp purchases too.

your approach makes a lot of sense, Roon—more than most player apps—allows for thoughtful ways to organize and engage with larger collections, which I’m sure you have as a music writer.

on the analog side of things, we’re really looking forward to receiving our CD player in January. should be fun to play some physical media again even though our CD collection is modest.