Richard Feynman Is Another Guy with Good Advice on Making [Audio] Progress
But first let’s check in with Shane Parrish, who writes:
You have to train before the race, not after. You have to build the skill before you get the job that requires it. You have to be trustworthy for years before anyone trusts you with something important. The bill comes first. The reward comes later.
The universe does not offer financing.
This is hard to accept because modern life trains us to expect the opposite. We are addicted to “Buy Now, Pay Later.” You live in the house before you pay off the mortgage. You get the degree before you pay off the loan. You eat the meal before you ask for the check.
We are conditioned to enjoy the benefit today and pay the cost tomorrow.
Achievement reverses the transaction. It requires full payment in advance (and regular payments forever). If you want a fit body, a calm mind, a healthy relationship, or financial independence, the cost is non-negotiable. You must do the work before you get the result.
This is why most people quit. They pay a little, see nothing, and stop. They never make it far enough to see the first return arrive.
Some of this comports well with my audio experience over the last fifty years or so, but some of it does not. I feel the need to add some context to Shane’s advice when it comes to the hobby I have devoted most of my life to.
Audio looks easy at the beginning. An entry-level analog component system can be assembled fairly quickly and can typically be had for under $10k. Moreover, it will sound amazingly more natural when compared to what the first-time buyer is probably used to: digital playback, iphones, streaming, youtube and the like.
However, if you want to improve your starter system and continue to make progress with an aim to reach higher levels of audio quality, that is a great deal more difficult. At a minimum you can figure decades and tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, tweaks, room treatments and the like, assuming you have a good room to put all your equipment in in the first place, without which you are not going to get very far.
Staying focused for the arbitrarily chosen but probably not far off “ten thousand hours” in order to reach the expert level is a part of what Shane is getting at above.
Ten Thousand Hours Is Not Enough?
I had put in my ten thousand hours more than twenty years ago and, although I didn’t know it, I can clearly see now that I still had a long way to go.
This blog (and this one) can help you make progress in every aspect of analog reproduction, especially the software side, i.e., records. The Skeptical Audiophile and its younger brother, The Broken Record, if I may call it that, aim to take the playback quality of your system far beyond any level you could possibly get to by yourself.
Following the path Robert Brook and I have laid out for our readers is not easy, and it is clearly not for everyone. That said, both he and I are convinced it is the only way to climb the mountain.
The way I know that is simply this: For the first twenty-five or thirty years I was in audio, I tried all the other ways, at the end of which time I had little to show for my efforts.
Robert’s story is compressed in time, but closely follows the same pattern, even to the point where it becomes obvious that attending live performances of orchestral music is the only practical way to stay on the right path and discover higher standards to set. (Once amplification and sound systems are introduced, nothing can be assumed to be real, and real is the one thing above all others that we should be striving for.)
Once we took the right approach, dramatic, clearly recognizable success started to come our way, and it can come your way too if you will simply learn from our experience.
Brain Food
We would encourage you to sign up for Shane Parrish’s Brain Food newsletter. It contains a great deal of wisdom, cleverly encapsulated in the idea that he can help you “master the best of what other people have already figured out.” For free.
Expect to see more of his ideas and insights coming to this blog.
Me at the controls of my system, taken sometime in the late-70s.