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Audiophiles (lemmy.world)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/funny@lemmy.world
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[–] 26 points 7 months ago (14 children)

Audiophiles get a lot of shit outside their little online dens and it's always the same cable memes everywhere (that's not even the gear most people sell their kidneys for, afaik), but if you're one and you have a shred of self-awareness, this kinda makes ya laugh out loud.

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  • [–] 32 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    When I was in high school, late 90s, I dated a chick whose mom worked in a bakery. She started work at like 2AM and for some reason I don't remember, my gf had to go there and she asked me to go with her...sure fuck it (we pretty much ran free back then, different time) and we went down there. About a half dozen middle-aged women making batter and dough and whatever they did and their boss, the bakery's owner.

    He was in his early 40s, and was like the love child of David Lee Roth and Otto the bus driver from The Simpsons. Cargo shorts, dirty sneakers, Motley Crue tshirt with a blond curly mullet and an earring in one ear. For being 2 in the morning he was wide eyed and he practically exploded as soon as I walked in the door "HEY MAN HOWS IT GOING?! WELCOME TO MY BAKERY!! YOU LIKE MUSIC?! WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DO YOU LIKE?! WANT TO SEE SOMETHING?!" I was honestly on the edge of fight or flight for a moment but despite the coke or just how fuckin excited he was to have a visitor, he seemed safe, so I was like "Yeah sure, what's up?"

    Leads me back to the far corner of the bakery to his office. There are speakers fucking everywhere. In his office he has racks and racks of high end stereo equipment, and he immediately launches into all this technical detail about the setup that I'm just nodding through...."SO THE SIGNAL COMES DOWN HERE THROUGH THIS SPECIAL CABLES...100 BUCKS A FOOT BUT ITS SO WORTH IT...THIS TAKES THE SIGNAL AND MUXES IT WITH THE AMPLIFIER THAN PIPES IT TO THE FLUX CAPACITOR THEN..." and eventually he wraps up and says "CHECK THIS OUT!!!"

    Pulls out one of those gold, high bitrate CDs, Peter Gabriel's So, slots it into a CD player that by itself was bigger and more complicated looking than my whole stereo at home with so many knobs and shit, and cranks it to what he called about 30%. Lights blinking, animated EQs, level meters at the ready...

    Red Rain kicks in and literally takes my breath away, not just in awe, but I mean the goddamn bass was so heavy and so crystal clear that it disrupted the airflow in the entire bakery. The volume was beyond screaming over, it was like you were standing on fucking stage in an arena next to the amps, but not only was it ear-shatteringly loud, it was crystal clear. Like the level of detail and fidelity in the recording broadcasted all these little human moments in the playing that I never had heard before and my mom pretty much blasted that record all the time for most of the tail end of the 80s. After a minute of Red Rain he skips to track two, Sledgehammer and holy shit, that bass riff on that system...felt like when you're standing waist deep in the ocean and a wave comes up with enough force to rock you on your feet before you recover.

    And through all this, these women in the bakery just doing their thing, not a care in the world. Clearly a common occurrence there, 2 oclock in the morning, deep in an industrial area with nobody for miles around, this dude and his like $100,000+ stereo and him just running around like a madman making whatever the hell they were making.

    Anyways, definitely nothing I would ever spend that kind of money on, but man, it was hard as hell to go back home to my shitty $20 headphones and my discman after hearing what $100k worth of high end stereo equipment sounds like lol

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  • [–] 16 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    The moral of the story is cocaine

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    or capitalism. People toiling at 0200 in the morning while some guy has a 100,000 dollar toy.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Not to disagree with the capitalism part but 2AM is a pretty common time to start work in a bakery. They have to allow time for the dough to proof and obviously need to have enough stuff coming out the oven early enough to get it packaged and delivered wherever its going.

    My wife worked in a bakery for a time and she always started work at 3am so that the donuts and muffins and shit would be ready by 630am when people started showing up in droves to buy them.

    I was a greenskeeper for a 36 hole golf course and we similarly had to start at like 2am because we had to be done all our mowing and cup moving and trap raking on the front 9s before dawn...the golfers would be fucking irate if we weren't lol.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    I was a greenkeeper for a while as well, luckily we just started at 6.00 to finish at 11.00ish. Some people would show up early but because we were starting at hole 9 and 18 and going backwards it was no big deal.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    Yeah our golfers were like the epitome of entitled, if they so much as saw us working on holes they weren't even playing on they would go nuclear. We had to be sure we were at least on the 10th or 11th hole by dawn because they would roll up with the sun ready to get their 18 holes in before heading back to the clubhouse for brunch and a half dozen martinis before getting into their Porsche and god help you if they so much as heard the sound of an internal combustion engine coming from literally anywhere.

    Not nice people...but luckily I wasnt forced to deal with them much, and was usually farting around in the maintenance shed with the other kids waiting to punch out by the time we got too busy lol

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    Man, I love these kinds of stories, and I just love hearing about that feeling of wonder in those moments where the music you thought you knew just clicks like it's the first time you're hearing it. That's what it's all about. Made me want to play that Peter Gabriel album, too, after reading your tale!

    That's how they get you down the rabbit hole, though, when you come back home to your modest setup and you miss the stuff you didn't know was there to begin with.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    I don't think anyone with self awareness or love for sound or music would call themselves an audiophile tbf.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Yea i bought a hifi amplifier for 50 bucks at the pawnshop and a pair of speaker from the fleamarket. It works great

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    15-20 year old hifi is the sweet spot for me, $100-200 for what would've been a couple thousand in today's dollars at MSRP. At that point, room/placement and source matter way more than going up a tier

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    They might not self-identify as an audiophile, but they're definitely on the gradient. At high (and even medium) levels of the game, musicians, producers, and mix/mastering engineers are often using >$5K headphones and >$30K speaker setups, and that's not to mention the cost of building & treating the studio.

    These are people with deep love for music, and many of these same people have high-end listening systems at home as well. I've had the joy of listening to some really nice setups, and it's definitely hard going back to my home stereo afterwards.

    Where I think it veers off into pseudoscience is once you get into the stratosphere of >$100K setups. At that point it's marginal (often indiscernible) gains that are exclusively marketed to people with money to burn. People who just want to know they're getting the absolute best of the best, regardless of whether they can tell the difference. There's a lot more marketing than reality at that level.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    $5000 headphones is pseudoscience territory.

    $30k for a speaker setup is reasonable for a professional recording/mixing/mastering studio, or slightly excessive for a hobbyist (but still more or less within reason).

    $100k+ could "reasonably" happen if you're mastering for a complex Dolby Atmos system, but even then it's pretty excessive. And we're likely talking about mixing audio for movies rather than just music at that point.

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