Sorry, but I’m not an audiophile

It would be fair to say that, for a student, I spend a stupid amount of money on audio equipment. People will often comment on my purchases with phrases like “Are you insane?”, “Why would you ever spend that money on a set of …..’s?” or “Yeah, but that’s because it’s what you do” and I guess comments like these are fair to a certain point. However, I don’t think that any of them accurately depict why my money goes into the pockets of audio companies.

Over, what I hope to be the next couple of weeks, I’ll be writing some posts about audio equipment I’ve purchased recently. Not to try and entirely justify my purchases (although I think that’s what I’ll probably end up doing), but to explain why the equipment makes the difference for me, and how it has affected the way I listen to music and how my audio recording and editing skills, I hope, will improve as I learn more about the nuances of reproducing audio for people who choose to listen to the projects I work on. In the process, I hope to offer the good and bad points of the equipment that has robbed my wallet, and perhaps offer some (cheaper) alternatives.

I’m certainly not an audio purist. Some people will read this post and shudder when I proclaim that I rip my music to a compressed, lossy, format, but really, I’m yet to hear the difference. All my music is stored straight from a CD 256kbps AAC, unless I buy DRM’d music from the iTunes store at 128kbps, which I try and avoid anyway. For me, storage for media, wether it be photos, music, movies, or podcasts, is at a real premium right now, and so even if I could tell the difference between my compressed music and ‘CD quality audio’, I don’t think I’d be able to manage the amount of data anyway.

I hope you’ll stick with me for the ride over how ever long it takes me to get through writing up these review-like posts. I’d love to get your feedback on the series.

-james