Audiophiles on a desert island.

I don't need ANY high end equipment. the best equipment is inside your brain. give me a lousy mono tape recorder, and I will be happy

I see only one solution...

The best walkman ever...









...with good headphones




Plus a good tape stock !





Edited by oliverstoned - January 27 2007 at 05:37

Flyingsod wrote:  So if you were stuck on an island and could only have ONE piece of high end equipment and the rest had to come from normal consumer stores like walmart what would that ONE piece be.

rileydog22 wrote: BaldJean wrote: I don't need ANY high end equipment. the best equipment is inside your brain. give me a lousy mono tape recorder, and I will be happy I agree.  It's the quality of the MUSIC that matters, not the quality of the sound.

Agreed, but the title of the thread does (at least) suggest otherwise...

a piano

dwill123 wrote: Flyingsod wrote:  So if you were stuck on an island and could only have ONE piece of high end equipment and the rest had to come from normal consumer stores like walmart what would that ONE piece be.     high end equipment   Oh you meant audio equipment.

 That is TWO pieces of equipment.





 .


Edited by Flyingsod - January 28 2007 at 21:27

Well, I have to say I agree with most of the posts in general. I call myself a compositional listener. By that I mean I don't really listen to the sound as much as I listen to  the music if ya follow my meaning. I've lost myself in AM radio broadcasts of good music and gotten into a physical altercation once over a static filled song. We were just driving out of range of the station but a great song was still playing and my passenger wanted to change the station! Well, I didnt let him even though we ended up driving off the road a bit.

 I noticed recently though that some of the keyboard parts on Tresspass were barely audible when I played the record. And to boot the bass  and mid lows were sounding really muddled and making the notes blend into each other. It seriously changed what the composition was supposed to be. I am entertaining the possibility thats there is other artistic things I am missing because of poor equipment.  So I thought I'd look into the world of super hifi but didnt know where to start.

 Oliverstoned I have to agree that probably is a great solution for a desert isle but I have to give Thanks to Phileas for providing the only concrete answer I could use. I do have 3 sets of speakers here (all mid to low quality) SO I guess ill see exactly what kind of difernce they can make by switching them  out. If it's serious I'll consider some high end speakers and other equipment. 

thanks all and if you have any other thoughts they would be apreciated.

I'm not an audiophile, but I would probably go with a nice pair of headphones. I think the amount of money some people spend on audio equipment is ridiculous, but I bought $60 headphones (it was for the nosie cancellation which ended up not working well, but oh well) and the difference between that and the headphones that came with my CD player was significant.

MP3 players are no different from CDs if you encode high enough. I would not want to listen to 128kb/s MP3s, but I can hear no difference whatsoever when it's encoded at around 200 kb/s or higher.

BaldJean wrote: mystic fred wrote: a good hifi system is as only as good as its weakest component, so my Linn Sondek would be useless without  decent amps, cables and speakers. Lost on a desert island though, only a clockwork radio would be really useful!   BTW - without decent quality listening equipment you are missing half the picture - our favourite musicians and their producers and technicians spend many hours and many thousands of pounds creating  cd's for our enjoyment, and work very hard perfecting the sound  - show them some respect please and throw the walmart junk and the mp3 players away!     you are obviously one of those hi-fi freaks. even the kind of cable matters? wow! I will never understand what drives you. you must have real problems listening to an album that was recorded with sub-par equipment and will probably automatically downgrade an album with bad sound quality by one or two stars, while for me bad sound quality is not of any interest for rating an album. some of the albums I would give 5 stars to have awful sound quality. for me it is rather the opposite: these wonderfully clean produced albums with top sound quality, played on a top equipment too, leave me strangely cold. somehow I don't hear music there, I just hear sound

If it's cold, it's because it's numeric, and worst, bad numeric. Tube amps compensate by giving back that analog warmth, that real sound with matter, but about source, there's no comparison as well between vinyl and CD.
A great system with analog source and tubes in the highs can't be cold. That would leave you hot




Edited by oliverstoned - January 29 2007 at 05:44

oliverstoned wrote: BaldJean wrote: mystic fred wrote: a good hifi system is as only as good as its weakest component, so my Linn Sondek would be useless without  decent amps, cables and speakers. Lost on a desert island though, only a clockwork radio would be really useful!   BTW - without decent quality listening equipment you are missing half the picture - our favourite musicians and their producers and technicians spend many hours and many thousands of pounds creating  cd's for our enjoyment, and work very hard perfecting the sound  - show them some respect please and throw the walmart junk and the mp3 players away!     you are obviously one of those hi-fi freaks. even the kind of cable matters? wow! I will never understand what drives you. you must have real problems listening to an album that was recorded with sub-par equipment and will probably automatically downgrade an album with bad sound quality by one or two stars, while for me bad sound quality is not of any interest for rating an album. some of the albums I would give 5 stars to have awful sound quality. for me it is rather the opposite: these wonderfully clean produced albums with top sound quality, played on a top equipment too, leave me strangely cold. somehow I don't hear music there, I just hear sound If it's cold, it's because it's numeric, and worst, bad numeric. Tube amps compensate by giving back that analog warmth, that real sound with matter, but about source, there's no comparison as well between vinyl and CD. A great system with analog source and tubes in the highs can't be cold. That would leave you hot

Edited by mystic fred - January 29 2007 at 08:28