This one has been brewing for a while. God, hearing is beautiful, music is beautiful. It feels like experiencing life without music is not even experiencing life at all. The point of this post is mostly to show the value of a good speaker system. Yeah, it sounds lame, but like, hear me out. I don't know how to put it into words now. I bought a second hand Yamaha A-420 for like $30 and I got a set of RIZ ZK-235 speakers from my dad. He has had them since his college days and they have been collecting dust in his basement for quite a while, only to be revived by my retarded urge to hear.
Before this, I've used a Logitech X540 speakers configured as a 2.1 system, pretty much since I've had a computer. I've been listening to the same, V-shaped, mid lacking system for almost 20 years now. Upon hearing Novo Amor I've realized, Christ... What have I been missing out on all this time. I got the speakers and the amp, hooked them all up and whoa.
It felt like gaining a new sense, a deaf person hearing again. The immaculate stero imaging, the amazing, poweful, mids that I've never heard before. I'm listening to my system as I write this and I'm tearing up. I cannot put into words the beauty of music that I'm being opened up to every time I power on this amazing piece of equipment. The A-420 isn't even Yamaha's highest end but compared to "PC Speakers" it's such a jump, I wish I had the vocabulary to express it. Christ, the mids. I've missed out on probably half of my songs by not hearing all the details in the mids. Oh god, the mids! I am in love, I am melting. And not just the mids. These speakers go down to ~80Hz and go up to 18kHz or so. The highs are as crisp as ever and the lows aren't as rumbling as they could be but there is not need to. They are tight, they are as tight as buttocks of a beautiful woman in their physical prime. It's such a breathtaking experience, being able to take in music in such a way.
I'm looking around at my peers and all I see is Spotify and headphones and bluetooth speakers. Spotify... That's what music has been reduced to. Opus 128kbit... God bless Opus, what an amazing compression algorhithm which I myself use on a daily basis. But to use it as a main form of music consuption? In a time of gigabit ethernet connections and one terabyte SD cards? Why? I look around and all I see is gloom and sadness, all I see is gray. All excitement for the future I see is misguided, coming from people who see the current state of events and have their own idea of how to improve it, without taking in account our history. Cassettes, vinyl, reel to reel all died so we could have free, lossless audio encoding. What we resort to? Subscribing to a music consumption service. I've paid for Spotify but I don't like it. I want my own music, I want my own connection with the artist and their works. I want to hear all the beauty, the emotion, the passion put into it. I want it and damn it, in 2023 I can have it. I don't want to subrscibe to any bullshit like MQA or Tidal or Spotify. Give me my CDA and give me my FLAC. I am in a prison of my own nostalgia but fuck if that prison isn't more pleasant than the dreadful world of today. What a depressing state of event. Consume music, consume art, consume content. Stream, stream, fucking stream that content while I clean my fucking dishes.
To think most will never experience the warmth eminating from a class-AB amplifier as it's pumping 20+ watts of clean audio in your room. The warmth, the beautiful warmth. the proof of work and energy expelled. What an amazing experience of touching my A-420 and feeling the pure heat from it's transistors on my hand, it's such a breathtaking, emotional experience. This ain't a rag agains't efficient class-D, no. I just don't understand when we all collectively decided to dump... Sound systems? Like, yeah, I'll buy my speaker-amp combo? What? Why?! The voices these speakers produce, they vibrate through my being, the power this amplifier pushes, the dynamic range! That's another thing! The A-420 has a massive knob which I just love turning! The more you turn it, the fuller your room gets. There's just more and more sound, no distortion. Imagine if there was an experience knob and you could just turn it up, experiencing more! The more you turn it, the fuller your sound is, the hotter the amp is, it's all such a touching experience.
Dump your fucking Spotify, dump your fucking Tidal. Buy your WAVs, buy your CDs or fuck it, pirate your shit. Live a little, feel something, experience something! Why are you settling for 64kbps opus when you can get more?! Again, opus is amazing and I love it so much, I love the fact I can fit a whole song in a megabyte. It's a breathtaking advancement in audio compression and it really does sound good. But god, FLAC. Every crackle, pop, hiss, it's in me, it's in my ears. I hear whatever my poor ears can take. I don't want to settle for less. It's almost 2024 and I want fucking music. I want fucking music! Give me PCM! A phone from 2014 could play it, no questions asked.
I love my speaker system, I love my Yamaha A-420 and I love my RIZ ZK-235. I don't want bluetooth speakers, I don't want soundbars. I am stuck in my own prison of nostalgia and I can't find the motivation to break out. Everything is shittier. Internet is faster but the people that inhabit it are so much more sour. The music is more accessible but it's so much more corporatized. The communities have never been easier to foster but they have also never been so distant. I've never felt so distant from my fellow man. Stop reading this. Go call your best friend and go meet up with them. Go visit them, go out with them. See their face, see their being. For all you know, this may be the last chance.
29.10.2023.
