My audio nerdiness led to lots of OCD behaviors, some (many?) of which I still employ today. A particularly good one was that I would play every new record I bought once or twice, you know, to properly wear in the grooves, then I would make a cassette recording of it and seldom, if ever, play the record again. And somewhere around the early ’90s I also started to make mixtapes. In between the songs I would put clips from movies (mostly) or (sometimes) TV shows. I was very meticulous in my process and would record and re-record these clips several times, if necessary, to get the timing just right. Yup, OCD.
That said, this is not meant to be an exploration into my special tendencies, but rather an illumination of how I got to where I am today with regards to my audio intake methods. Throughout my twenties and early thirties I got home-theater curious and flirted with some 5.1 systems (a.k.a. surround sound with a subwoofer). This was fun but I didn’t take to it with the same eagerness as I did traditional stereo. I felt like the additional speakers in the 5.1 setup was cheating. To wit, in a superbly tuned stereo system the speakers will essentially vanish as the music plays its way around the room to your ears. Yes, surround sound definitely added to the movie watching experience, but the physical response I still love to this day when a dialed in stereo system gets to me is the high that keeps me craving the two-channel drug.
In my late thirties and through my forties my priorities got rearranged as my life centered around raising my daughter. And computers gained ubiquity. I got on the Napster bandwagon for its massively influential ten minutes of fame and at the same time was enjoying playing around with wifi networks and setting up remote sets of speakers everywhere. The central nervous system was in my office but I could send music to the living/dining/kitchen area and/or back yard with a couple clicks of a mouse. This was a lot of fun, especially because I still wanted music playing all the time but I had little freedom for the actual sit-down music-listening session.
I had been using a piece of software called SoundJam MP by Casady & Greene to organize all of my digital music for quite a while when, in 2000, Apple bought the SoundJam software assets and turned it into iTunes. I was acquiring quite a bit of music and at the same time I began ripping my own CD collection into computer-storable files. Being able to call up any song in my growing digital collection on a moment’s notice made me feel like a badass. And to be able to pipe that music to another room or the backyard doubled that feeling.
Somewhere around this chapter I boxed up my records and turntable and moved them to storage. And finished ripping all of my CDs into MP3 files and sold the discs. In short, I went full digital. And I scoffed at anyone who thought they could tell the difference between an MP3 file and a CD. The true portability of good sound was here and I was one of its biggest champions. This was my default mode for fifteen years, probably.
While there are things for which I won’t pay a monthly subscription, streaming music isn’t one of them. I value the massive access one has with streaming music. In 2011 when Spotify launched in the U.S. I hopped on board and slowly started to rely on it as my main music delivery method. I still used iTunes to play music, but less frequently so. And it was around this time that I picked up my fist portable Bluetooth speaker. Next thing I knew, my music collection was literally with me anywhere I went. I had a hockey-puck-sized JBL speaker that I clipped to my backpack so that when I rode my bike I always had music playing. (In 2011 I t-boned a car on my bike, the car having pulled out of an alley and coming to a stop right in front of me. I broke five ribs and a collar bone. I was wearing headphones and although I didn’t usually play the music too loud so as not to drown out the sounds around me, I wonder if I might have heard the car before I hit it if I didn’t have headphones in. So it was then that I switched to the Bluetooth-speaker-clipped-to-backpack method of playing music while riding my bike.)
In 2017 a new chapter of my life began when I divorced my wife. Our daughter was seventeen. I ended what was an emotionally abusive relationship and eagerly began single life excited to follow my north star, so to speak. (Actually, Finding Your Own North Star is a book by Martha Beck and worth a read if you want help finding or rediscovering your true path.) Remember that record collection I had? The one I put into storage about fifteen years prior? I made those the centerpiece of my new trajectory.
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