Benjamin Grosvenor is a young pianist that people are going on about. He does seem to be pretty good, from an ‘I sometimes like emotion in my music’ point of view, but, for me, there is a funny dichotomy between his appearance and what I hear coming out of the piano. Perhaps it is because he has no panache, no flair, no uber level of apparent sophistication?
Pianist Benjamin Grosvenor plays Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 5 at the First NIght of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, London.
This hobby can be so much fun.
There is the music. Lots of great music. Tons of great music.
There is the pure wonderful exhilaration of hearing a little deeper into our favorite songs when we tweak the system a little or get a new component.
There is the joy of self-discovery as we learn more about our personal tastes and how we are so unique but also the same.
There is the geeky fun of playing with the cool-ass gear.
…… This is so excellent.
Then there are the frustrations.
The dealers or press who convince you to buy something you later find out they misrepresented.
The distributor who gives your friend 40% off while you pay full retail.
The forums deleting your favorite threads for some reason maybe because, well, it *is* Tuesday. The forums that convince you to hate dealers, or hate people with expensive systems, or hate people who like/dislike tubes, LPs, CDs, cables, rap, opera, country, and on and on.
The sites whose underlying philosophy is that audiophiles are marks, or can’t be trusted, or must be treated like children, or that we shouldn’t be allowed to talk to each other or about whatever the heck we want to talk about who cares if we are a little off topic.
…….This is so, so, so freaking mucked up.
OK.
So, yeah, some dealers and press are always just so danged bored. And there are those who, face it, are just way too excited about everything [:-)].
And some distributors are too all-knowing like they think they are Yoda or something.
And some… well, really, a lot… of manufacturers spend all their time in their lab and never get out and hear what everyone else is doing and, well, really just don’t get out much.
But that is just because we are all… just… plain… nuts.
And that is so cool.
So. Do you see the disconnect?
There is this layer of… unpleasantness… between the audiophile nuts and the industry nuts trying to get together and be their nutty selves.
So, in a somewhat self-serving [in so many ways] conclusion, it is now time for us to see what we can do about this unpleasant middle layer.
First, working like a fiend on a top secret project š
Then a family emergency.
Then Neli’s PC’s hard disc starts telling her it is about ready to stop its spinning days forever… so she borrows my drive that has all the CES photos on it.
And THAT is what March has been like. But nice temperatures though. Very nice…
