This is a longer tag-page about my personal relationship to music and its aspects. Please scroll to the bottom if you're looking for the articles tagged with "music", related tags and the Atom feed.
The Love for Music
I love music. I used to love it much more when I was younger. When I was in my teens or twenties, I said that I'd rather give away my computers and data than my music collection. Well, this has changed. Maybe because my personal data got so much larger, more connected and thus gained much more value to me. I don't know.
These days, I consume less and less music. By consuming music, I don't think of background music. When I want to listen to music, I don't do anything else but listening.
Albums as a Larger Concept Than Just a Dozen Songs
Most of the time, I listened to music albums. Not just one song after each other. Since my love for music started in the 80s when there were LPs, music cassettes and radio only, I naturally listened to music albums in the order the artists intended. In particular when I started my very intensive Pink Floyd phase, there was no other option. Their albums are conceptual albums which do not make much sense if you take out one particular song. Pink Floyd albums are just like an opera. You're going to miss most of the fun if you ignore the concept of the whole album.
And so I kept that mind set when I started to listen to albums by Sting. Or Peter Gabriel. Or U2. And so forth.
Singing
Ever since I was a young boy, I loved to sing. I sung for myself while I was on the swing in the garden of my parents. I sung for myself when I was going around. Perhaps many people thought that I'm a weird kid, I don't know. I never stopped singing. I loved Karaoke parties in my student dorm. However, the only situation where I do sing these days is when I'm in the shower.
When I'm listening to an album multiple times and I really do like its songs, I do seem to learn their lyrics easily. Well, at least I still know a couple of hundred songs by heart.
I once sung for a band though. I think I found this local band through the local Usenet. They played songs by Red Hot Chili Peppers: a drummer, a base guitar and a lead guitar. And then I came for the voice part. I wasn't particular interested in RHCP albums at the time. However, it was not too bad and so I did my part in the band. Since the band found its tragic end after one of our band members had a difficult time with his family, it was a brief but nevertheless a fun experience to me. We never played outside of the small, dark, grumpy cellar room of the student dorm. Too bad. I really do think that I could have been a proper stage hog while having too much fun.
Nowadays, I guess my voice does not have the same spectrum it once had. I remember singing along with Sting all the time. When I do that now, I realize that my voice fails me when Sting or Bono are singing in a higher range. Well, I won't be a professional singer anyhow, as it seems. ;-)
To me, it really matters which song I'm singing and in what setting. The idea of singing in a choire does not spark any joy to me. I also only sing songs that I like.
Music Education
When I was young, I attended music school. I started with recorder when I was 8 or so. I also attended a class for music theory for two years. With ten or eleven, I switched from recorder to the accordion.
It was OK although I never wanted to practice. It was more the social aspect of it when playing in an ensemble of 6–9 accordions with the base guitar of our teacher. And I was not particular good at playing the accordion. With 17 or so I quit. That's about that.
Discovering New Music
It's totally random how I stumble(d) over new artists. When I was a kid I grew up with German Schlager music my parents listened to. Unfortunately. It was only in my teens when my own music taste developed. For example, when I was maybe fourteen years old, our English teacher organized a listening comprehension. Since he was into music very much, he thought that it's a good idea not to play some boring dialog. He set up a turntable and played "Time" by Pink Floyd. What a disaster: I've failed filling out the blank lines where words were missing in the test. I was overwhelmed by the amazing experience of this song. However, I instantly fell in love with the music of Pink Floyd. This event started a very intense phase where I hardly listented to anything else but Pink Floyd for a couple of years! Imagine that. Pink Floyd had an album for every emotional phase I was going through: weird, sad, eccentric, loud, slow, silent, in love, in rage, you name it.
A couple years before that, I bought a record by the a capella band The Flying Pickets: "Only You: The Best of The Flying Pickets". It's a pretty safe bet that you recognize most of their song interpretations. They're classics by now. While I already knew "I Got You Babe" and "Only You", other songs were quite new to me but nevertheless great pieces of art: "Space Oddity", "Buffalo Soldier", and so forth. It was quite some time later when I found out that most songs they sung were actually cover versions of songs by other artists. What a surprise to me back then. I had a similar experience with a record by "Vienna Symphonic Orchestra Project" (VSOP). This is how I came across "Englishman in New York". And this started my next major music love, this time for Sting.
In recent decades, I also discover cool music through scores of movies. I really like sound tracks of movies like "The Big Lebowski", "High Fidelity" and such.
I'm listening to many genres (mostly pop/rock), music of many decades (mostly 1960s-2000s).
Streaming Services
I never streamed music. I dislike Spotify and sorts. They ruin the business model of new, unknown, lesser known artists while pumping lots of money to the artists that don't rely on that big pile of money any more.
Furthermore, streaming music does break up the albums into single tracks. While the youngsters do seem to prefer it that way, I do think that this is preventing you to discover hidden beauties and B-sides which I did. Many of my favorite tracks aren't part of the famous tracks that hit the charts and radio.
Most people don't seem to care. Well, I do care. If you want to support musicians, go to their live concerts, buy their albums in form of a physical piece of art and convince your friends to do similarlily.
HiFi Equipment (Nerd Section)
I do have a fetish for cool HiFi equipment. When I was a boy in the 80s, I loved to go through every HiFi manufacturer catalog I could get. In the hardware stores, I often visited the HiFi sections, dreaming about owning those devices.
My first proper HiFi device was a Panasonic boombox with detachable speakers. It had a tuner and a mechanical double tape deck. Nothing fancy, no remote. I used it a lot. I recorded songs from the radio onto tapes. I listened to those tapes frequently.
With the broader availability of CD players, I really wanted to have one on my own as well. My boombox had an AUX input. So I just needed that CD player to hook up with my set. I never wanted something as badly as this CD player for Christmas. I new all the devices on the market, I tried them out whenever I could get my fingers on them. I was fascinated by the advanced look and feel: motorized CD trays, displays using LED technology, electronic buttons instead of mechanical levers. Yes, most HiFi equipment did not have electronic displays back then. What an amazing step forward!
On that Christmas eve, I was more than happy when I unwrapped a JVC CD player under the tree. My parents bought a few CDs as well: some sampler albums with actually good music. I was soooo happy. Then my parents insisted that I should take the CD player to my room before we started to eat our Christmas dinner. Yes, here in Austria, you get your presents on the evening of December 24th. While I still was on emotional overdose, I took the precious device and went to my room. Well, then I instantly went silent when the whole room of mine was full with brown cardboard boxes. I had to catch my breath for a moment. Then I unwrapped them, one by one. A JVC turntable. JVC speakers. And finally, a JVC amplifier with built-in double tape drives as well as a radio. So instead of buying me a CD player, my parents got me a whole new JVC HiFi tower. And I even got a JVC remote - my first remote for anything. It was extremely difficult for me to leave the room and finally join the others for the Christmas dinner.
Afterward, I connected all the devices and read the manuals carefully. I remember than I was sitting on my bed with the remote in my hand while pushing the Eject/Close button for the CD player for fifteen minutes or so while having tears of joy in my eyes. Even today, I still get very emotional when I remember that day.
Best Christmas ever.
One by one, the components got upgraded over the years. I switched to speakers from Magnat with decent 10mm² speaker cables. Those cables have been my HiFi speaker cables ever since. They still run my speakers and I don't need the real fancy, expensive ones because they might be as good as a coat hanger.
With my first summer job, I invested 7000 Austrian Schillings in an Akai GX-95 Reference Master tape drive. It may be still my most advanced HiFi equipment. I could talk for maybe three hours straight about its nifty properties and features. It really resembles peak tape technology even now, with only a few minor things missing that hit the market after it. This tape deck is pure awesomeness when it comes to HiFi in terms of looks and inner values.
When I moved away to join university, I had not enough physical space for my HiFi equipment. Therefore, I switched to a compact SONY MHC-C33 set. It came with a pair of speakers, 5 disc CD player, double tape deck with logic buttons, tuner, amplifier, remote.
When the MiniDisc technology came to market, I was on fire again. For the first time, there was a non-linear HiFi recording media: you could jump from one track to any other within a second just like with CDs and you could reuse any remaining empty recording space even after deleting random tracks in the middle.
Well, to be fair, there has been another digital recording technology before: Digital Audio Tape (DAT). However, the equipment was very expensive and it still was a linear media that required winding/rewinding and you could not reuse removed track capacity for new recordings.
As a direct contestant to MiniDisc, Philips introduced the Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). Since it basically had the same downsides as DAT but with a lower price tag, the market quickly settled for MiniDisc and DCCs were history. I knew one guy who chose DCC over MD but I - and most other music nerds I knew - naturally settled for MD. I even made a MiniDisc Homepage for the local community which listed the most current prices for MDs. The cheaper the better.
I bought a SONY MDS-303 MD-Recorder for recording and stationary use and a Sharp MD-S50H MD player for listening on the go.
After recording a MD with your favourite songs (back then typically bad/medium quality mp3 files), you wanted to program the track titles and the disc title properly. You could do that with any MD recorder via its hardware buttons or via their optional infrared remote which had a simple ABCD... keyboard on it. This task was so tedious that you really wanted something better. So I bought a DIY hardware kit from CZ which was using LIRC. The device was connected to the serial port of my Linux PC. Then, a thin 10m cable went from the device to an infrared diode at its end. With command line tools, I was able to send text files of a special format to the device. Basically it consisted of a title line for the MD title and track lines for the track names. After confirming, the LIRC device emulated an infrared remote control and did the track rename task almost as fast as a human could type on a keyboard. It still took a while and sometimes some infrared commands did not get through properly but it was much better than the alternatives.
Later-on, there came NetMD where you had a proper computer interface with the MD recorders directly but that was too late for me as I switched over to mp3 players who themselves had many advantages over MDs: fast transfer from computers, no need to rename tracks, much more capacity than the typical 74 minutes of MDs, much longer music playback on a set of batteries, smaller form factors, lighter, ... aaaand MD was history as well.
In late 2025, I bought a used Sony MZ-N505 portable MD recorder which comes with NetMD. My plan is to play around with it and try to make it work with any Linux tool to name tracks of MDs. My initial tests were not successful but I'll eventually re-try again just for fun.
I guess it was somewhere between my tape deck and my MD era when I also bought a really good CD player since I already knew that there won't be much innovation with CD players any more. It was a Sony CDP-915 which had awesome features when it comes to recording parts of a CD onto tape or MD. I can talk about the advantages of this CD player for an hour or more.
These days, I do have my top 400 songs or so on my mobile. Yes, this does break my "listen to whole albums" pattern. However, I rarely listen to more than just a few songs at a time these days. But I remember the whole album when I listen to a song.
A couple of years ago, my wife surprised me with a really great birthday present: she bought a vintage LP record player Beogram 1000 from Bang & Olufsen. It's really beautiful and it started our shared LP collection phase. So from time to time, we visit flea markets and thrift stores to buy old records. From time to time, we listen to them.
In the meantime, we've collected multiple vintage LP record players. Our current favorite and main turntable is a Mitsubishi LT-5V, the world's first vertical player. So it's not only a visual enjoyment, it comes with a fascinating technology as well. I always wanted to have a tangential player ever since I fell in love with the fancy ReVox HiFi equipment my music school had in the 80s. But the Mitsubishi is even better than the ReVox devices.
In 2024, I bought myself a tube amplifier. I always wanted to own a cool looking tube amplifier. Just for fun and the good looks of it. I don't care about high-end audio properties because my ears won't recognize them anyway, if it isn't some audiophile bullshit anyway. I settled for a hybrid Juson Audio JTA100 with a very reasonable price tag for great features such as Bluetooth playback.
With a Douk Audio VU3PRO we can now switch between our Onkyo AV amplifier for video playback and the tube amplifier for music playback. The front speakers are powerful but sensitive Paradigm Monitor 11 v5. We also have a center speaker from the same speaker series and a pair of Tannoy rear speakers. I previously owned Mission M73i speakers and a Tannoy MXC-11 centerspeaker. You can buy them if you want.
Also in 2024, I refurbished my old HiFi devices so that all of them are functional again: switched rubber bands, broken mechanical and electrical parts, removed a couple of decades of dust and dirt. I put them at display in our living room, you can see some of them on the picture above.
I currently don't have any incentive to change anything on our HiFi setup. It's finally perfect for us.
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All articles tagged with music (sorted by last update, oldest on top):
- Logitech Squeezebox Boom
- Das Eels-Konzert im Orpheum
- Woodstock 2013
- Pop-Musik verkommt in Richtung Mittelmäßigkeit mit Ablaufdatum
- Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here
- Microsoft schließt Zune-Dienst: gekaufte DRM-Musik ist weg
- The Who (and Slydigs)
- Sting-Konzertkarten beim Hofer erhältlich
- Gravity Is Just a Habit: OK GO
- Trump an die Macht
- Konzert von Maybebop im Orpheum
- Migrating Media Meta-Data from Bashee to Rhythmbox
- A-capella-Musik
- Partielle Integration mal anders vermittelt
- DIY Noise Canceling Headphones