Music is a pretty large part of my life, which is one of the reasons good reproduction of it has been so important to me over the years… I’ve always had high-end hardware for my listening pleasure – be that a home stereo setup, a portable player, or even my cars.
This is mostly because there are songs that are indelibly etched into some decade of my life or act as a soundtrack to some carefully preserved memory. A few bars of some tune can play back an entire event in the dimly lit past, so I like to make sure that the music of my life sounds as good as possible.
So, accordingly, I’ve had a lot of neat audio equipment. Like the Panasonic RX-CD70 ‘boom box’ I had in ’87, or the full stack of SAE gear that ran ADCOM amps that pushed Acoustat speakers that was my home setup on the later 80’s. I even tend to put high-end equipment in my cars… Hell, my current car’s audio system was tuned by Jimmy Iovine – you know, the former producer / chairman of Interscope Geffen-A&M Records…
Because of all this musical reproduction hoopla I’ve always been into well engineered audio as well, so a lot of those afore-mentioned ‘memory tunes’ are from various Alan Parsons albums, like “Days Are Numbers (The Traveller)” instantly takes me back to driving around Worcester Massachusetts in the late 80’s. Or “Eye In the Sky“‘s memory of sitting in front of an Apple ][ is so strong I can still see the output from the hex editor I was using on the green 80-column monitor in the computer lab at my high school in ’84.
For my more modern musical tastes I’m heavily into modern progressive like Porcupine Tree and ‘synthwave’. I got into Porcupine Tree because of the engineering… Steven Wilson is such an amazing engineer and each track he works on is incredibly well crafted… His remixes of my favorite Jethro Tull albums are incredible as well.
Listening to "One Brown Mouse" by Jethro Tull (Steven Wilson remix)