Buddy came ever tonigh who is into music. We hung out, smoked a few bong rips and after bullshitting for about 20 min I told him I wanted him to hear my new system.
At first he was like “yeah this sounds good”, pretty cool. So I asked him what we’d on of his favorite song. Said he wanted to gear the harmonica in The Wizard from Sabbath. Took all of about 2 minutes and he got a big grin and said “Holy shit, I feel like I’ve never heard this song before. This is amazing”. He spent the next hour playing music with the biggest grin and kept saying “I sounds like they are right in front of us”.
When he was leaving he said he just didn’t realize until now why I was always talking about this stereo.
It was nice to share with someone who got it.
I did something similar with a good friend of mine. He’s a decade younger than me, and thought that Sony and The like were high-end audio.
I took him to The Inner Ear show in Toronto many years back, I told him to bring a CD of his fave band and pick one song to listen to. We went from room to room of the hotel that the show was held.
I had him get his song played, and at several, he was, ya, that’s nice sounding…, but not really there yet. So then I told him to listen really carefully at certain parts that seemed to me to be buried in lower end systems.
Sure enough, after one room, he said, “Hey, I never noticed that there was a little bell sound at xyz part.” Then, after going to a better system, he was bouncing. He said there were 2 bells, and I swear I’ve never heard before. And on his fave system, there were 3 bells… and the lightning went off over his head.
He asked me if there was stuff like this in all music, stuff that you just couldn’t hear on low quality speakers. I just laughed.
So unfortunately he ended up having 2 kids, and lost his high paying job, so he never bought the speakers he wanted, but at least he understood why I was wiling to spend so much money on audio stuff.