According to me it is the 4% who need help. By the same logic, it the rest (who are not music addicted) who need helpMost mornings I wake up, go and switch on my set up and while it’s warming up I head off to brush my teeth (and ablutions).
During this time I make some important decisions…
Like…What kind of music I want to start my day with and set the mood for the morning.
This is not as easy as it sounds with the endless choices available on Qobuz, Apple Music and other streaming services.
My SO is usually in deep slumber while such vital events are happening.
This behaviour also led some deep introspection a few years ago (was it a need?, was it an addiction? was it a habit? Etc)
This introspection didn’t last long as I had better things to do; like immersing myself in music.
But I also discovered another critical fact:
I would not switch on my set up as much, first thing in the morning if I was not happy/satisfied/thrilled with my system and set up.
But when I was, it’s pretty regular and a good indicator/barometer of how much I liked my set up and its performance.
A very objective measurement
And then there is this. Safe to assume a proportion of these numbers in all regions are addicted to alcohol and start their morning with a drink.
They need help…
View attachment 85718
Music addiction
- Thread starter heliumflight
- Start date
Very much possible. My earliest experience with Music was listing to the radio, my dad's spool tape player/recorder. Walkman and a self made amp during college days. Then it was boom boxes and after I got married I got a Philips powerhouse followed by Sony system (those PMPO days). My interest in listening to Music shot up drastically after I get a 7.1 system based on Yamaha AVR and a 2.0 system based on a pair of electrostats and a valve amp. Some 5-6 years of tweaking, I have finally reached a stage where I'm happy and I just can't wait every day for the night to arrive so that I can plonk myself into a lounge chair and listen to Music 2-5 hours daily. To reach this stage many things have happened (equipment changes, room acoustic changes, furniture changes, etc)
I had the problem of selecting Music out of the wide choices available. You really don't like wasting the precious few hours out of the 24 hours available daily. So I did some coding in C. So all my players (laptop, raspberry pi, macbook) etc record the song I play (local songs, apple music, spotify, etc). I have programmed one remote to rate a song. The numeric digits on my remote assign ratings. I also have a button programmed on my remote to love or unlove a song. These gets recorded into a database. Based on the ratings and love status, I have a system which auto generates a playlist. When I add songs, it auto generates a playlist with the new songs added in the last few days. Currently my playlist are songs from the African continent. According to last.fm stats I'm a serious listener. So whatever I'm doing is because my love for coding, love for Unix and love for Music, love for amps, dacs, speakers, DIY stuff, etc. If I'm happy daily it is because all these things combined gives a thrill. All songs I play (local songs, apple music, spotify, etc) also gets scrobbled on last.fm which has it's own recommendation engine which I find better than even spotify.
mbhangui’s Music Profile | Last.fm
Listen to music from mbhangui’s library (63,844 tracks played). mbhangui’s top artists: Charlie Parker, Clark Terry, Bikram Ghosh. Get your own music profile at Last.fm, the world’s largest social music platform.
Wow!Very much possible. My earliest experience with Music was listing to the radio, my dad's spool tape player/recorder. Walkman and a self made amp during college days. Then it was boom boxes and after I got married I got a Philips powerhouse followed by Sony system (those PMPO days). My interest in listening to Music shot up drastically after I get a 7.1 system based on Yamaha AVR and a 2.0 system based on a pair of electrostats and a valve amp. Some 5-6 years of tweaking, I have finally reached a stage where I'm happy and I just can't wait every day for the night to arrive so that I can plonk myself into a lounge chair and listen to Music 2-5 hours daily. To reach this stage many things have happened (equipment changes, room acoustic changes, furniture changes, etc)
I had the problem of selecting Music out of the wide choices available. You really don't like wasting the precious few hours out of the 24 hours available daily. So I did some coding in C. So all my players (laptop, raspberry pi, macbook) etc record the song I play (local songs, apple music, spotify, etc). I have programmed one remote to rate a song. The numeric digits on my remote assign ratings. I also have a button programmed on my remote to love or unlove a song. These gets recorded into a database. Based on the ratings and love status, I have a system which auto generates a playlist. When I add songs, it auto generates a playlist with the new songs added in the last few days. Currently my playlist are songs from the African continent. According to last.fm stats I'm a serious listener. So whatever I'm doing is because my love for coding, love for Unix and love for Music, love for amps, dacs, speakers, DIY stuff, etc. If I'm happy daily it is because all these things combined gives a thrill. All songs I play (local songs, apple music, spotify, etc) also gets scrobbled on last.fm which has it's own recommendation engine which I find better than even spotify.
View attachment 85722mbhangui’s Music Profile | Last.fm
Listen to music from mbhangui’s library (63,844 tracks played). mbhangui’s top artists: Charlie Parker, Clark Terry, Bikram Ghosh. Get your own music profile at Last.fm, the world’s largest social music platform.www.last.fm
View attachment 85721
View attachment 85720
I did not even know it is possible to write code to do all this.
sachinchavan 15865
Well-Known Member
There’s no doubt all of us are addicted. To music as well as to improving our systems. Let’s just say some addictions are less damaging than others and convince ourselves it’s therefore a good thing! 
keith_correa
Well-Known Member
Absolutely agree with the 2 golden rules which helps in maintaining sanity in any hobby as there are other important family priorities too.
Music is a great healer & uplifts the mood. But obsession of any kind often leads to unhappiness.
Good to have a thought about terms we use
Choices
Preferences
Indulgence
Habit
Obsession
Addiction
the first four are colloquial terms but The last two are defined terms in mental health, though used casually by most to label behaviours and judge.
Happyness may or may not be linked to each of them, depending on the context and circumstances including other needs and priorities including family and other commitments. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that music lovers in general are obsessed or addicted to the point of neglecting other responsibilities.
Well, except possibly one GF somewhere.
Choices
Preferences
Indulgence
Habit
Obsession
Addiction
the first four are colloquial terms but The last two are defined terms in mental health, though used casually by most to label behaviours and judge.
Happyness may or may not be linked to each of them, depending on the context and circumstances including other needs and priorities including family and other commitments. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that music lovers in general are obsessed or addicted to the point of neglecting other responsibilities.
Well, except possibly one GF somewhere.
Imo, listening to music 3 hours continously without break is less stressful and harmless than watching useless YT tube videos, or watching news channel debates.
Only better stress buster than listening to music would be walking, cooking, yoga, reading, cycling, gardening or going to a gym.
Only better stress buster than listening to music would be walking, cooking, yoga, reading, cycling, gardening or going to a gym.
Came across this old article. Still very relevant after 14 years.
In: September 2010
Patrick Dillon20
Music and its accurate reproduction can provide some of life’s great pleasures. Beautiful art meets wonderous technology, and fanatics find communities of fellowship and glossy magazines with which their desires are regularly stoked. But audiophilia comes at a price, and not just in dollars and cents. A three-decade obsession with sound has convinced me that the natural state of an audiophile is not, as we are promised, the relaxed contemplative state of auditory bliss, but the slightly anxious ambivalence of uncertainty. We vary one way or another, but our resting place is not where it should be. When I look for a resolution, I make the following observations to my fellow fanatics about what it means to be an audiophile:
1. You will live with a persistent sense that all is not quite well, that you could do better, and that your system is always in need of something. What this “something” might be will shift depending on how much you’ve already invested: it could be a special fuse or a pair of vacuum tube monobocks, but despite the promises, there is no end point in system design; you can always do better. This is your steady state condition and if you lose your perspective on this point, you are destined to be unhappy and poor. If you gain perspective, you can settle on just being poorer.
2. In an attempt to compensate for your unease you will develop a highly cynical reaction to reviewers who you will come to believe are at best delusional and at worst corrupt, on the payroll of manufacturers who provide them with audio goodies and more. Unfortunately, this cynicism does not quite sate your hunger to locate online reviews of products that support your purchasing decisions. In the absence of full reviews, isolated quotes that agree with you, or the words of complete strangers on web forums will work, as long as they confirm your choices.
3. A further ambivalence is invariably induced by the way audio products are priced. You have every reason to doubt the sanity of a world where a pair of interconnect cables can cost more than a car, and where glib reviewers speak of windows being opened, blacks being blacker, and highs being cleaner as a result. Difficult as you find it to admit, you secretly want to try these in your own system to determine if they actually might do something, which you secretly fear is so.
4. Your system will always sound its worst when other audiophiles come to listen. For some reason, the electricity will be a bit dirty that day, your cables will be on a downcycle, your tubes not warmed up enough, or your tension will transmit itself to the turntable. No matter what you do, people won’t be hearing your system at its best and this will drive you crazy. For some reason, dealers (think about that name!) never experience this, only users (and that name!). Worse, this experience will scar you for months as if your very credibility as an audiophile is under question by your fellows.
5. You will start to listen to music you never really cared for in the past. Your spouse will become suspicious that your rock and serious instrumental tendencies have given way to smoky voiced chanteuses with, heaven help you, backing bands of players you hardly recognize. You live in fear of being exposed as a closet air guitarist rather than a soldering-gun wielding jazz afficionado. Worse, you start to pick up a “collection” of audiophile-approved recordings that have fantastic soundstages wrapped around sterile tunes. And you leave these lying around in full view, just in case.
6) To convince yourself that you are sensible, you will have one product in your rig that is “killer” for the price. You appeal to the price-sensitive normal human in us all by invoking this giant-slayer’s reviews and revealing how you heard it once compared to a mega-priced equivalent where you were the only person prepared to admit they could not hear a difference. Sanity partially and temporarily restored, you secretly plan to rewire your living room with audiophile-grade wire and to steam-clean your LPs.
7) In an attempt to appear cost-sensitive, you will dabble in DIY. This could take many forms, but your new-found obsession with affordable paper-in-oil capacitors and high-quality resistors will serve as a shield against claims that you have become a nutter. Now you can quote the cost-to-manufacture for basic audio items and speak authoritatively of the mark-up due to marketing that you and your fellow DIY-ers avoid. You secretly realize those boxes you assemble look ugly to everyone, even you.
8. Once you are a fully paid-up member of the audiophile brigade (with multiple magazine subscriptions, shelves full of old issues, and an obsessive need to track that vintage CD player on Audiogon to see just how much it sells for at auction), you will, not as miraculously as you might have once imagined, become email buddies with a power conditioner “designer” who has single-handedly unearthed new laws of physics and applied them to domestic wall outlets. You remain unclear if your power cords are the last yard or the first three feet but you feel certain they make a difference and spend accordingly.
9. You have become blase about double-blind reviewing. You wish reviewers would do it but you can’t bring yourself to try at home. You find every convenient excuse why it’s a problem: your auditory memory is too faint, you can’t trust your kids to make the changes unseen by you, it’s too much hassle, and everyone “knows” it doesn’t work in audio (though it’s been used to great effect everywhere else where human taste and preference are evaluated). Secretly, you fear that you might not be able to tell the difference between the SACD layer and redbook, so why risk the humiliation. Better to lessen your unease by espousing relaxed sighted listening as the only meaningful approach.
10. Your home will become a temple to your religion. Cables will be dressed, risers bought, pucks placed on tops and speaker positions taped to the floor so you can always move them an inch or two around during a private listening service, safe in the knowledge that your little “undo” trick will work. You will even contemplate brutish sound panels which in your eyes (only) will be justified to others as room decoration. Though you intend to sell your spare equipment, you don’t. It sits in a pile, ready to be repurposed for a second, third, even fourth system for the garage that never actually gets assembled. You forget how much you paid for some components even though you would cry if your pension plan dropped that same amount.
Ah friends, it never ends. It’s all about the music, people will tell you, but you and I know it is much more than this: unease is your disease. And we wonder why young people aren’t audiophiles!
THE UNEASE OF THE AUDIOPHILE
The Audiophile ExperienceIn: September 2010
Patrick Dillon20
Music and its accurate reproduction can provide some of life’s great pleasures. Beautiful art meets wonderous technology, and fanatics find communities of fellowship and glossy magazines with which their desires are regularly stoked. But audiophilia comes at a price, and not just in dollars and cents. A three-decade obsession with sound has convinced me that the natural state of an audiophile is not, as we are promised, the relaxed contemplative state of auditory bliss, but the slightly anxious ambivalence of uncertainty. We vary one way or another, but our resting place is not where it should be. When I look for a resolution, I make the following observations to my fellow fanatics about what it means to be an audiophile:
1. You will live with a persistent sense that all is not quite well, that you could do better, and that your system is always in need of something. What this “something” might be will shift depending on how much you’ve already invested: it could be a special fuse or a pair of vacuum tube monobocks, but despite the promises, there is no end point in system design; you can always do better. This is your steady state condition and if you lose your perspective on this point, you are destined to be unhappy and poor. If you gain perspective, you can settle on just being poorer.
2. In an attempt to compensate for your unease you will develop a highly cynical reaction to reviewers who you will come to believe are at best delusional and at worst corrupt, on the payroll of manufacturers who provide them with audio goodies and more. Unfortunately, this cynicism does not quite sate your hunger to locate online reviews of products that support your purchasing decisions. In the absence of full reviews, isolated quotes that agree with you, or the words of complete strangers on web forums will work, as long as they confirm your choices.
3. A further ambivalence is invariably induced by the way audio products are priced. You have every reason to doubt the sanity of a world where a pair of interconnect cables can cost more than a car, and where glib reviewers speak of windows being opened, blacks being blacker, and highs being cleaner as a result. Difficult as you find it to admit, you secretly want to try these in your own system to determine if they actually might do something, which you secretly fear is so.
4. Your system will always sound its worst when other audiophiles come to listen. For some reason, the electricity will be a bit dirty that day, your cables will be on a downcycle, your tubes not warmed up enough, or your tension will transmit itself to the turntable. No matter what you do, people won’t be hearing your system at its best and this will drive you crazy. For some reason, dealers (think about that name!) never experience this, only users (and that name!). Worse, this experience will scar you for months as if your very credibility as an audiophile is under question by your fellows.
5. You will start to listen to music you never really cared for in the past. Your spouse will become suspicious that your rock and serious instrumental tendencies have given way to smoky voiced chanteuses with, heaven help you, backing bands of players you hardly recognize. You live in fear of being exposed as a closet air guitarist rather than a soldering-gun wielding jazz afficionado. Worse, you start to pick up a “collection” of audiophile-approved recordings that have fantastic soundstages wrapped around sterile tunes. And you leave these lying around in full view, just in case.
6) To convince yourself that you are sensible, you will have one product in your rig that is “killer” for the price. You appeal to the price-sensitive normal human in us all by invoking this giant-slayer’s reviews and revealing how you heard it once compared to a mega-priced equivalent where you were the only person prepared to admit they could not hear a difference. Sanity partially and temporarily restored, you secretly plan to rewire your living room with audiophile-grade wire and to steam-clean your LPs.
7) In an attempt to appear cost-sensitive, you will dabble in DIY. This could take many forms, but your new-found obsession with affordable paper-in-oil capacitors and high-quality resistors will serve as a shield against claims that you have become a nutter. Now you can quote the cost-to-manufacture for basic audio items and speak authoritatively of the mark-up due to marketing that you and your fellow DIY-ers avoid. You secretly realize those boxes you assemble look ugly to everyone, even you.
8. Once you are a fully paid-up member of the audiophile brigade (with multiple magazine subscriptions, shelves full of old issues, and an obsessive need to track that vintage CD player on Audiogon to see just how much it sells for at auction), you will, not as miraculously as you might have once imagined, become email buddies with a power conditioner “designer” who has single-handedly unearthed new laws of physics and applied them to domestic wall outlets. You remain unclear if your power cords are the last yard or the first three feet but you feel certain they make a difference and spend accordingly.
9. You have become blase about double-blind reviewing. You wish reviewers would do it but you can’t bring yourself to try at home. You find every convenient excuse why it’s a problem: your auditory memory is too faint, you can’t trust your kids to make the changes unseen by you, it’s too much hassle, and everyone “knows” it doesn’t work in audio (though it’s been used to great effect everywhere else where human taste and preference are evaluated). Secretly, you fear that you might not be able to tell the difference between the SACD layer and redbook, so why risk the humiliation. Better to lessen your unease by espousing relaxed sighted listening as the only meaningful approach.
10. Your home will become a temple to your religion. Cables will be dressed, risers bought, pucks placed on tops and speaker positions taped to the floor so you can always move them an inch or two around during a private listening service, safe in the knowledge that your little “undo” trick will work. You will even contemplate brutish sound panels which in your eyes (only) will be justified to others as room decoration. Though you intend to sell your spare equipment, you don’t. It sits in a pile, ready to be repurposed for a second, third, even fourth system for the garage that never actually gets assembled. You forget how much you paid for some components even though you would cry if your pension plan dropped that same amount.
Ah friends, it never ends. It’s all about the music, people will tell you, but you and I know it is much more than this: unease is your disease. And we wonder why young people aren’t audiophiles!
I Never thought music lovers would be a show off. But show off ppl try pretend to be music lovers
. i was in FOMO (or FOBO) avoiding atmos (height channels). After a long haul of savings upraded to atmos and my opinion about atmos is for more evolved humans of future ( music lovers ) who would grow an extra ear on their head to differentiate the sound is coming from above or below.
I had a thread started for it (the atmos bash) and all so the so called music lovers who have been howling about this atmos and made my money go in drain started their rant...
Unfortunately these distortive gang is evolving the avr industry in a wrong durection
heliumflight
Well-Known Member
dvraghavan
Active Member
Everyone needs some passion - that makes sense for one to get off from bed every day.
FOr some, it is making money; for some it is improving their craft; for some it is art (music, painting, dance)
If listening to music serves that purpose, who can fault it.
I have seen though that, with most "audiophiles", it doesn't stop with listening to good music. WHen listening to good music ceases to be enjoyment and turns into obsession with getting that extra bit accuracy at the cost of everyday life, then we need to be careful. As with all addictions, I suppose it is difficult to get rid off.
FOr some, it is making money; for some it is improving their craft; for some it is art (music, painting, dance)
If listening to music serves that purpose, who can fault it.
I have seen though that, with most "audiophiles", it doesn't stop with listening to good music. WHen listening to good music ceases to be enjoyment and turns into obsession with getting that extra bit accuracy at the cost of everyday life, then we need to be careful. As with all addictions, I suppose it is difficult to get rid off.
I'm not sure about this.
There was a time when I woke up to Bhajans (almost ritually to Hari Om Sharan) ,8am on Vividh bharti or others, random cassettes on walkman during commutes ,if at home - 70s/80s after lunch , later on Samanta fox on walkman or the like, later Binaca geet mala/Radio Ceylon or Chitrahar etc, later night time Bad Boys Blue/Modanna/Wham!/Self control/Pet Shop Boys/Lipps Inc/Moroder ......
I was termed addicted as others could perceive it - Point being , once you remove "Music", it changed the state of mind - to a bit on the negative side and longing for it subconsciously.
COOLDUDE7808
Active Member
I have been addicted to it since my childhood and maybe its thanks to my Late Dad , Who always had the Tape recorder on in our house when he was there . Over time it has lead to spending lot of money on multiple systems , large CD collection ,some of which are still sealed packed since many years . I have always given this a thought and then consoled myself saying ...Look you completed your studies , you are working and do not really spend on anything else apart from this one hobby . If you don't listen to music , your screen time will increase and that's bad for your eyes . Hence this is any day better than computer , TV or Smartphone . And then proceeded to buy the next set of systems and new CD's
Around last year during rainy season , there were some power issues in my building and my amps conked off . Could not listen to my systems for nearly 10 months . Alternatively watched OTT and did not really miss music too much is what I thought at that time . BUT very soon I got into fixing things . The kind of effort that I took to figure out those issues , fix it , then buy stabilizer , repair systems etc etc was such that my mother said - If you had put that same effort in studies or doing some certifications ( working in Software) , you would have been somewhere else .
When I look around and see today's generation addicted to everything which is on some screen big or small - Social media , TV , OTT , Gaming and what not . I think Music and Reading in my case is any day better .
Also I still recall , I was good at Maths (Algebra and Geometry ) and use to always study that more than other subjects , My folks were happy , but the real reason was you could study those subjects while listening to music simultaneously . There was problem solving and nothing to mug up unlike other subjects
Around last year during rainy season , there were some power issues in my building and my amps conked off . Could not listen to my systems for nearly 10 months . Alternatively watched OTT and did not really miss music too much is what I thought at that time . BUT very soon I got into fixing things . The kind of effort that I took to figure out those issues , fix it , then buy stabilizer , repair systems etc etc was such that my mother said - If you had put that same effort in studies or doing some certifications ( working in Software) , you would have been somewhere else .
When I look around and see today's generation addicted to everything which is on some screen big or small - Social media , TV , OTT , Gaming and what not . I think Music and Reading in my case is any day better .
Also I still recall , I was good at Maths (Algebra and Geometry ) and use to always study that more than other subjects , My folks were happy , but the real reason was you could study those subjects while listening to music simultaneously . There was problem solving and nothing to mug up unlike other subjects
Last edited:
sachinchavan 15865
Well-Known Member
Such a heartfelt disclosure. Thanks for sharing.
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