I think a lot of people are more open to this kind of thing than they think. Purists can complain all day long about Bluetooth audio (I say ABX blind test AAC/AptX transcoding or GTFO), but I'm blown away by the potential brought along with the popularity of premium wireless closed-back cans with active noise cancellation.
These are oftentimes bought for reducing or avoiding stress, but they have great potential to counteract the awful trend of people not even having typical 90s micro stereo system at home, but using exclusively laptop or TV speakers, or mono BT speakers.
So, I'm not grumpy: I like a lot of trends in contemporary personal music listening, mainly streaming for decent quality sources (I equally devour albums, curated playlist and algorithmic recommendations). I've had Spotify Premium since March 15 2009, and it has done so much for my appreciation of music.
Oh wow, got dozens of subscribers to that latest hifi cottage playlist. That's a lot by my standards. Thanks for the interest, people. I hope you all find something fun in there: I really enjoy doing this.
With this development in mind, I'm going to keep this playlist current over time with our new adventures in hi-fi. I'll move the previous content to separate playlists for archiving.
Bummer that Spotify hid playlist subscribers a while back so I can't see who all of you people are!
really enjoying mistape and thought to make a recommendation that I suspect you've already come across - Meg Myers, an incredibly talented singer, covered Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill on her NPR Tiny Desk:
At this level of quality of speaker the accoustic properties of the room (and the location of the speakers) will have a bigger impact on the quality of the sound than spending more money on kit.
I have the M040 which are a newer and more environmentally friendly model aimed at bedroom producers (i believe). There is also a cheaper M030 model.
The M series offer only basic room response controls (e.g. if the speaker is located near a wall or in a corner). The parent alludes to much fancier calibration achieved with the use of a mic and DSP's in the speakers.
The other thing worth noting is that genelecs are very neutral sounding speakers and also (as they are designed as nearfield studio monitors) have a relatively small sweet spot. So maybe not the best choice to fill a big room at a party, but I love them very much :)
You probably don't want to buy Genelec "just because musician X swears by them or Steve Jobs had a pair at his desk". See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20587970
The cheap Polks I have in my living room make a whole lot more sense for that use case than any smaller Genelecs I could've gotten at trice the price. One of the few residential use cases where Genelecs make sense is as actual 'computer speakers' where you get to enjoy the intensity of that near-field sweet spot.
Even the G Ones plus the F One sub are terrific for this, but at a price where you could get a pretty nice basic home theater.
The pair of Genelec 8330A we use at the cottage are just big enough to be enjoyable for our sessions of couchlock debauchery, where we also turn up the volume, and take breaks in order to do so. And the room is super good sounding, too.
My musician friends are usually horrified when I say we listen to Genelecs (or any near field monitors) for fun. This kind of speaker are precision tools, made to be used in specific settings, to painstakingly obsess over adjustments in audio mixes.
Near field monitors are unforgiving and harsh sounding if set up wrong. And they will absolutely not flatter your source material. You usually need a companion subwoofer if you get near field monitors of any size, because they're deliberately made to give a flat frequency response, not to sound beefy, or give a room-filling sound at lower volumes.
Here's the playlist from our latest adventure https://open.spotify.com/playlist/76BJ3kWrBGo0b9p9M2uMob
My Last.fm is here https://www.last.fm/user/apecat
I think a lot of people are more open to this kind of thing than they think. Purists can complain all day long about Bluetooth audio (I say ABX blind test AAC/AptX transcoding or GTFO), but I'm blown away by the potential brought along with the popularity of premium wireless closed-back cans with active noise cancellation.
These are oftentimes bought for reducing or avoiding stress, but they have great potential to counteract the awful trend of people not even having typical 90s micro stereo system at home, but using exclusively laptop or TV speakers, or mono BT speakers.
So, I'm not grumpy: I like a lot of trends in contemporary personal music listening, mainly streaming for decent quality sources (I equally devour albums, curated playlist and algorithmic recommendations). I've had Spotify Premium since March 15 2009, and it has done so much for my appreciation of music.