How it started
My aunt has a harman-kardon bluetooth speaker at her house in Boston. Whenever mom and dad and I visited my aunt in middle school, I would blast rap and pop songs on the harman-kardon and be amazed by its thundering beats. I've now heard a lot more powerful speakers and listen to more than rap and pop, so that harman-kardon is nowhere considered "good" by my standard today now. Still, I guess the significance is that, that harman-kardon is a proof that even the kid version of me already appreciated good quality sounds, sounds beyond what cheap laptop speakers can produce.
Fast-forward to sophomore year of college. While browsing Costco near UCSB, I saw a beautiful set of sony soundbar onsale for $150. I played the demo, realized it sounds even cooler than my aunt's harman-kardon that I remember, so I instantly bought it and took it to my dorm.
It was gorgeous. I was quite amazed by the even greater thundering beat it can produce than the harman-kardon. Drake and Taylor swift instantly sounded different.
The soundbar was all great until that winter break, I walked into an audio store near my home's Safeway. There were many funny-looking vertical wood boxes at the entrance, and I realized these are actually speakers! I've never seen speakers this big - welcome to the hifi-world I guess.
The owner of the store was super nice, there weren't many customers that day, so he offered me a tour of some of his best speakers upstairs.
Immediately I saw two giant towers of navy blue speakers and a stack of metal boxes in between. The owner kindly explained to my curious face that the metal boxes are receivers that control the speakers, and the two giant circles near the boxes are subwoofers to produce the bass.
Hmm, never heard about receivers and subwoofers before. My Sony soundbar doesn't seem to have that.
"Hey, you gotta sit here in the center to listen to it." The owner instructed me to the lonely chair in the dead center of the second floor.
"Uhm sure. Does position matter?"
"Yup."
For the next 15 minutes, I carefully listened to Simon & Garfunkel's Sound of Silence, The Weekend's Die for You, and Taylor Swift's Cruel Summer. I tried to compare the monster towers to my little Sony soundbar. Yeah the bass was greater, the vocals were clearer, but besides that, I couldn't tell the towers too much apart from my Sony.
"So, how much is this thing?"
"Take a guess!"
"Uhm... $5,000?"
"Nope. It's slightly shy of a quarter million dollars! 150k for the towers, 50k for the receiver, and 30k for the subwoofer."
What? Who the heck would pay this much for a speaker? Yeah it's all great and all, but, 250k?!!
I drove home and blasted the same 3 songs on my Sony soundbar. Surely my Sony sounds not too much worse than the towers, I thought. And boy was I wrong. The louder I turned up my Sony, the murkier the sound became. And no matter at what volume I played on my Sony, its impact was no match near the towers. I didn't feel any resonance in my chest. I didn't feel as if the singer was whispering right in front of me. I didn't feel any liveliness of the drum beats and the guitar strings. My sony was trash.
So that night, I researched on Google and ChatGPT all about hifi sound systems, from receivers to stereo placement, subwoofer cross-over, and so many more. Christmas was approaching, Costco had a pair of small (small in comparison to the quarter million dollar, but big!) Klipsch towers on sale for $2,000.
I've now been cursed from seeing the pinnacle level of sound that money can buy, and I desperately wanted that pair of Klipsch towers. My silly justification was that, $2,000 is a fraction of a quarter of a million dollars, and a house costs more than a million bucks, so buying that speaker wouldn't make us poor.
Of course my mom said no.
A month later, I came back from the ICPC regionals with an above-expectation performance. I found a smaller Klipsch satellite system for $600 on sale, sent the ICPC awards paper and the Amazon link to mom, and she said yes.
Maybe I am the type of person foolish enough to pay $250k for a speaker system. I've got its name down: Focal Grande Utopia.
How it's going
That $600 speaker system is still with me: the Onkyo receiver, Klipsch 8 inch downwards firing subwoofer, and 5 Klipsch satellite for Dolby surround. Although recently I upgraded the satellite to 2 Klipsch RP 600M bookshelf speakers.
Compared to Sony soundbar, Klipsch:
- Offers even greater bass
- Produces actual stereo / surround sound; the Sony soundbar doesn't actually do that
- (especially after the RP 600M upgrade) much more authentic vocals and some layers
I moved my speakers from my dorm to my lab (Professor are you reading this blog) 💀💀💀 But don't worry, I only play it late at night when no one is in the building and I enjoy the music and doing research work, learning new stuff or writing my blogs.
Also, I've grown to like pop and rap a lot less now; I've got a newfound passion for rock, country, and R&B. It turns out, pop and rap are just bass + electrical mixes, and listening it on a cheaper system wouldn't sound too different from a quarter million dollar system. For rock, country, and R&B, the difference is much more obvious. I heard that, with orchestra, the difference would be astronomical.
Where it's going towards
Every once in a while, I would visit the nearest Bestbuy with Magnolia showroom and lose myself in the bowers wilkins, kef, and SVSs. Just when I thought my Klipsch was good enough, I realized that there's always something better. Especially during the climax of songs when there's so many instruments playing, my Klipsch just blur everything, while for speakers like bowers wilkins, the vocals each instrument stay clear from each other.
Oh boy, if I don't plan accordingly, my wallet would lose itself too while I lost myself in the music. So here's my plan:
- I'm not gonna buy any new gears before I graduate college, unless some crazy deal comes up
- After I graduate college, if I live in an apartment, then I will have the kill the hobby for a while because otherwise that's just noise complaints everyday
- After 5 years if I rent or loan to buy a single family house, I'll finally get that $2,000 Klipsch system my mom said no
- After 10 years if my house gets bigger and I get rich enough, I'll buy the $50,000 bowers wilkins D series
- Then maybe the ultimate prize, if I win the lottery (jk i dont do lottery) or something, is that 250K Focal Grande Utopia?
Meh, I don't have many hobbies anyways. I'm just super glad I found something other than coding that I can happily dive into and lose myself in. I remember when I got the Klipsch satellite, I spent days tuning the speaker position and Onkyo receivers config and totally just forget about the time. Every other change made some difference. It was awesome.
Whenever I make a new friend, I would take them to my lab room at night and blast them their favorite songs on my Klisch. It's awesome to put smiles on people's faces. It's awesome to hear music they like that I also like.
Asking ChatGPT, Googleling, watching Youtube reviews on hifi... it's an awesome way to spend time.
It's nice to have a hobby. It's nice to lose myself in something other than CS.