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Music haters anonymous

You’d think I hate music.

But I don’t, really. I like music. I like it a lot more than my listening habits or equipment have indicated for a long time now. When I was growing up, people had 8-tracks or records. One eccentric old dude in my neighborhood had a reel-to-reel setup that blew my mind. On the other end of the spectrum, casette tapes were coming into vogue. In the 70’s and 80’s, though, I had vinyl like everyone else who cared about how their music sounded. And as anyone from that era will happily parrot, vinyl sounded great. But you couldn’t play it in your car or your Walkman. So as I remember it, my family allowed cassette tapes into our life, grudgingly accepting a huge quality hit in exchange for portability.

When the CD arrived, I remember being hopeful. It promised record-quality music in a virtually indestructible format. It wasn’t portable just yet, but you couldn’t gaze upon one of those shimmering little discs without imagining a CD Walkman in the near future. “DDD” became the holy grail imprint on every CD I bought. Sony had done it again. I was turning Japanese.

Tethered to vinyl only by an oversized love of hip hop music and all things sampling, I essentially migrated my entire music listening experience to CD. That era lasted nearly 20 years, ending in a months-long effort in 2004 to create more space in my shrinking house by moving my music collection to the computer.

When I ripped and sold on eBay the majority of my 1000+ CD collection to 320VBR MP3 tracks, I closed the book on what had long been my favorite setup: a nice 1990’s issue Denon receiver & CD player and a killer set of well-matched, Polk Audio speakers. I sold the CD player for a pittance on Craigslist, and relegated the remainder of the setup to the role of television noise maker, delivering hi-fi Dora and Bob the Builder experiences to my little ones and occasionally enhancing my own enjoyment of crack cocaine the TV show, 24.

Naturally, my music listening habits contracted to reflect the quality and location of the playback devices. My best sounding option is currently a pair of decent headphones at my computer. The most ubiquitous - my iPod through the profoundly flat, crappy stock sound system in my 2007 Jetta. In my living room, there’s a nice (nice for what it is) Klipsch iPod dock, but let’s be honest - it’s a boom box. And so I’ve come to be living a lo-fi life. Which would be fine, I guess, but in my mind I’m still waiting for CDs to sound as rich as records.

So I started looking around this weekend, for a bookshelf stereo for my living room. To replace the iPod dock. To give some sound back to the parts of the house where we spend the very most of our time here. To give the few CDs I still have a fair shake of ever, ever being heard. And to give myself a reason to SIT DOWN from time to time and listen attentively to the genius of so many artists I’ve come only to hear in the background, muffled, muted, and distorted.

One candidate is the Denon M37 shelf system. It’s small, but gorgeous, gets fantastic reviews, and seems reasonably priced for its quality. But I haven’t heard it, and I’m finding it impossible to drop three or four hundred bucks on a sound system without hearing it.

Which is strange, considering how accustomed I’ve become to my 128Kbps life.