Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."
That advice has stuck with me, and I try to have the least taste I can. I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.
I never enjoyed shitty coffee. I never enjoyed shitty chocolate or chocolate flavored things like cakes.
Until I was 30-something I thought I just didn't like coffee or chocolate.
Then one day I had actually proper coffee, and I discovered that good coffee isn't just some imperceptably theoretically better version of regular coffee that snobs are basically just faking being sophisticated for show. They are two entirely different things.
Same even more so for chocolate. 99% of chocolate products you come into contact with are garbage. Actual chocolate is like an entirely different product. It's not a better version of the usual thing. I ate it and thought "Oh. Ok THIS must be why chocolate ever became this huge thing in the first place. Hundreds of years ago before all the industrial process and market forces produced all the "chocolate" I ever tasted in my life, what they had was this, actual chocolate. Of course they loved it."
To restate the point, I was never happy with the regular version in the first place. I assumed "I don't like coffee" or chocolate, the same way I don't like cigarettes. Turns out I love them both.
And it's possible to continue to enjoy the results of having discovered and grown some taste in some area indefinitely without diminishing returns or anything like that. I'm not much of a sweets person so I still don't buy a lot of chocolate or chocolate things like cookies etc, but we have a Trade subscription and get a new and different bag from some random indipendant roaster every 2 or 3 weeks and it's great. I don't love every single bag but I at least find them all interesting and I do love the overall high level of quality basically all the time. I'm not now overall poorer for having discovered good coffee. Life is better. And what else is there?
I only ask because specifically for chocolate and coffee, I would consider the US baseline to be exceedingly average, even terrible. Even "okay" chocolate and coffee from other countries better known for food will blow it out of the water.
The US does do excellent coffee, and excellent chocolate, but you have to seek it out. In a country like Italy or Australia the default, okay stuff is better. If an Australian couldn't tell the difference between good and great coffee I'd see why.
This is definitely the main issue in the US. People are always clamoring for the cheapest thing that's good enough. The US has some of the best coffees, chocolates, beers, food, and more in the world. I mean, if you wanna make money, you sell to Americans.
But they're all artisanal products that few access. The baseline Starbucks, Hershey's, Budweiser, TGI Fridays, etc. are all... so bad.
Hershey's standard milk chocolate bothers me (and many others) because of the spoiled milk/butyric acid smell, which is due to their original manufacturing process.
However, some people in the US enjoy Hershey's, are not sensitive to the smell, and want the chocolate they grew up with (they might also like the acidic/tangy taste.)
But certain varieties of Hershey chocolate (Symphony, Special Dark) do not bother me as much.
Some of the American chocolate for high volume candy bars is very waxy and not very chocolatey.
For example, compare the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to Trader Joe's peanut butter cups [0]. It may be that the Reese's ones used to use better chocolate or it may be that my tastes changed as I grew up. But I used to love them as kids and now they taste off. Similarly for Twix etc.
[0] I'm sure other stores sell peanut butter cups too. There's nothing special about the Trader Joe's ones other than they are mass produced and use better chocolate that Reese's.
I look at products like Hershey's chocolate or Reeses more like their own category of processed food, kind of like Spam. They have a close, but not exact resemblance to "normal" chocolate or peanut butter, but they're also sort of an acquired taste, and I think their customers would be upset if Reese's Peanut Butter cups suddenly tasted like the Trader Joe's versions (with real peanut butter instead of a mysterious chalky peanut-flavored substance), or if Hershey's stopped using the butyric acid process that makes them taste like vomit to non-americans.
Most chocolate things, like random chocolate cookies or commercial cake etc, breakfast cereal, irritate the back of my throat in a mild way. Couple that with the foreground taste not being anything special, and it's just enough to make the whole experience just the wrong side of neutral. Not terrible just not good either.
All stuff that's made in factories and needs to have shelf life, so I can only imagine it's any number of cost saving substitutions and preservatives and who knows what all for other reasons like preserving texture etc.
It's what gives US chocolate the "vomit/bile" taste uncommon in other chocolate. I am guessing it becomes acquired or unnoticeable taste for people who eat it a lot but man is it a shock if you usually eat chocolate without it!
I have no idea why they use it, but I can think of one really good reason why they shouldn't, your product probably shouldn't have "hints of vomit" in its flavour profile.
I mean it's also in cheese. People just aren't used to the weird tang, and I don't blame them. I can tolerate it but Hershey's isn't exactly my favorite haha
There's an enormous difference between supermarket crap (or whatever it is that you think Nespresso is barely better than, because that would be the first thing I think of for crap coffee) and 'local roasters', however overly you think they're roasting.
I get all mine from Pact, by no means particularly artisan or expensive, and yeah a light roast is not my favourite. But whole beans freshly roasted and ground makes an entirely different drink to freeze-dried instant Nescafe or whatever, or supermarket beans ok the shelf for months, flavoured with cinnamon or vanilla or something to hide the stale.
These will give you an idea of beans we find in supermarket, several of these brands are considered as local roasters, I can even find Boreal in supermarket, which would be your typical "new wave coffee bar/beans" https://www.galaxus.ch/en/s7/producttype/coffee-beans-183
Given that, Switzerland is a bit special for this matter I believe, but I know that most people will be happy with Nespresso.
I rarely see anyone drinking instant coffee. On that subject, I rather drink some "expensive" instant coffee (yes I have seen single origin instant coffee) than Nespresso or Nescafé.
Give any child, anywhere in the world, standard Hershey's chocolate and they are going to lose their mind if it's the first time they have tasted chocolate.
Is there any place on earth that has good coffee? Italy's coffee is horrible, even if they have quality machines to make it with. 99% of people will use "ille" or whatever that brand is, which is far worse than starbucks worst roast. Meanwhile I can wander down the street in the US and find better sourced and roasted beans than I could find anywhere in europe.
>Meanwhile I can wander down the street in the US and find better sourced and roasted beans than I could find anywhere in europe.
You must know the place you live very well, I was excited to try coffee in New York when I lived in Manhattan given it was essentially responsible for popularising the current trend in western coffee culture. I had many local coffee snobs directing me to places all over the city and I found only a single shop that I could bear, even then it would've been average to poor in London or Berlin, and worse still in my colleague's native Melbourne.
Blue Bottle was the biggest let down of all, since at the time it was hyped to all hell.
the opposite, the ubiquity of burnt mud in every office coffee warmer seems to have dulled the American palate, that or the over abundance of artificial ingredients in everything, to the extent that they simply cannot discern what good coffee is, because it's either that or coffee that looks like the water from a particularly detail oriented miniature painting session; scant colour, scant aroma.
I will admit of course that the French seem to enjoy charcoal, and when in my teens I worked as at a shop the beans that were left too long in the roaster were usually marked as "French Roast"
idk man, I would say the opposite but I tended to avoid the Illy shops because I already knew I didn't care for that brand much.
Right here in NJ a shop a block away from me had it as their distinguishing feature and I didn't like it much (still better than sbux though). And then when I go on vacation in Italy and other European countries I see Illy mostly in vending machines, so when I see and Illy shop I'm not tempted, when there are 500 other more interesting looking shops every direction you look. And in all of those, I mostly had a lot of cappucinos, and they were basically all excellent.
I cannot call Italy's coffe bad. But I confess I never drink it perfectly straight. Usually cappucino. The European style, a pretty small and strong espresso that is foamed. Not a honking big american cup.
Anecdotally, Australia and Melbourne does it pretty well. And obviously there is good coffee in every American city, you just need to know where to go.
I mean, Australia the default is decent espresso. Even our petrol stations do decent espresso, it is overroasted for sure, but it's not pot coffee either.
But we have the Italians to thank for that, and Australian cafe culture is why it's so easy to get a good coffee even without trying.
Somehow I grew up with the expectation that coffee in US is exceptional everywhere. I guess from movies, pop culture - just how much coffee is part of American daily life.
Then later in life, when I traveled to US as an independent adult (after EU coffee culture upbringing), for work, and embraced the local coffee culture... I had a big disassociation between what my mind thought about how coffee in US should be and what it actually was.
I realized that majority of positive feedback about coffee drinks was based on all those other things people put into coffee...syrups, chocolate, marshmallows, cinnamon, milk, etc. Etc.
+1 on this. There's a big difference for some between the 15 dollar whiskey and the 35 dollar whiskey, probably another jump between 35 and 80 dollar whiskey, and then after that it starts getting into crazy marginal gains. If you drink 15 dollar whiskey you'd get 90% of your gains from just bumping it up to 35 versus going straight for the 300 dollar bottle.
Same it was with me for coffee, I enjoy single origin vs supermarket coffee, but after that it got to a point where I couldn't realistically make up the difference.
There seems to be an 80/20 effect here on how much you should deep-dive into these tangent domains in your life.
Once you get into that high end ($100+ whiskeys for instance), I feel like it often doesn't get _better_, it just gets more interesting. People seek out unique flavors or experiences, but you start max out the pure quality aspect.
Don't go into the difference between varietals, washing process or fermentation ones.
Better, I don't know but there are large differences between producers.
I feel it's the same or similar than wine, chocolate etc
As in to OP's experience with chocolate, some of this may be down to people being more sensitive to flavors and textures associated with the less expensive manufacturing processes.
I, for one, don't like the bite of low quality alcohol. Whisky taken neat starts to be drinkable to me somewhere around $150-$200 a bottle. With ice or water, you can go cheaper than that because you're cutting the harshness of the impurities.
There used to be a theory that passing cheap rail alcohol through an activated charcoal filter several times would improve the taste. In my experience with rail vodka, it removes the worst part of the bite from impurities. But it obviously doesn't make it taste like high quality alcohol. I've only tried this with vodka. It may remove some desirable favors from other alcohols.
I used to think i didn't like people — Until i met some people I liked.
I think it's a bit different from developing taste, what you describe. It's more about finding out who you are. I would say once you know your baseline for what makes chocolate/coffee/etc enjoyable, then taste is about experiencing the nuances within that spectrum. Some people also have a greater tolerance for things that aren't really tasty due to coming up in a culture where things generally taste plain or bad (netherlands and UK come to mind).
No, I've tried cigarettes, which is all I needed for that sentence, something I don't like.
I guess it's a natural question given the rest, and expensive cigars might indeed be different than cheap cigarrettes, but it's irrelevant, since the point was not that no matter what you don't like you might still like the good version.
The point was only that discovering the good version of something did not leave me worse than before because I used to enjoy something abundant and now I can only enjoy something scarce.
It's a bit like Feynman on flowers too. You don't have to be ignorant of the biological workings of a flower to appreciate it's mere outward properties exactly the same way as the layperson does. I still love a box mac & cheese even though I thoroughly appreciate far better home or chef made mac & cheese.
> Then one day I had actually proper coffee, and I discovered that good coffee isn't just some imperceptably theoretically better version of regular coffee that snobs are basically just faking being sophisticated for show. They are two entirely different things.
I know what you mean, but it's important to be mindful of the fact that enjoying coffee is way more than the quality of the coffee in the cup. I think for most there's a whole ritual around having a coffee which renders the actual coffee a minor detail around everything. You can see this even in coffee brewing snobs, where they use extremely specialized tools and equipment to perform a coffee brewing cerimonies that rival religious ones. Sometimes the coffee itself is just the pretext, but the goal is different.
When chocolate was discovered they consumed it in an extremely different fashion from what we think of good chocolate today.
The dried beans were simply cooked with water. Later with milk. Chocolate as we know it only became a thing centuries later. (Dried milk was only invented in 1802, and you can’t make milk chocolate without that for example)
The point of coffee is caffeine. If coffee didn't have caffeine it would be some boring curiosity tucked away in specialty markets. Same with beer, wine, and spirits; it's the alcohol. This is why people still buy Folgers, Pabst, and Night Train: they get the job done for cheap.
Yeah, this is not true. This is the type of argument that people make when they insist that "no one actually likes IPAs and they just want to get drunk quicker."
No, people like IPAs because they taste good to them. I have never heard anyone complementing the flavorings of Pabst (yuk), Schaefer (worst beer I ever tasted), or Milwaukee's Best (aka The Beast). Same with Old English 800 or Colt 45, they're awful but get you drunk for cheap.
As a former home brewer, when I taste a ton of hops, the first thing that pops into my mind is "oh they screwed up the batch" because a fistfull of hops was a way to wipe out bad flavors and save material.
As a home brewer, just because one person tried to salvage crap by dumping hops into the boil does not automatically make all hoppy styles crap. Perhaps more forgiving for less-experienced brewers, but doing them well still takes skill.
It's one of those things so common and spoken about among brew clubs that I saw it as an established truth. We always gave the PNW brewers crap for over reliance on hops. In the time and place I was at, porters and stouts ruled.
The hardest thing to brew at home is actually a pale ale or a light lager. You can't hide any mistakes in those because they are 'sex in a canoe' beers.
Well, I reckon whether one considers that statement true or not depends on who one is (as I'll explain).
Coffee, tea, chocolate and cola all contain mixtures of methylxanthines of which caffeine is but one, others include theophylline, theobromine† and paraxanthine to mention a few.
What's relevant here is not only that all are psychoactive to varying degrees but also they are bitter substances that contribute significantly to the taste. For example, dark chocolate is considerably more bitter than milk chocolate because it contains significantly higher level of xanthines than the latter.
I've yet to taste any decaffeinated coffee that in my opinion is worth drinking and it's not for the want of the stimulating effects of the caffeine but rather its taste. Without those xanthines the product just doesn't taste like coffee to me.
From observation, most consumers of decaffeinated coffee consume it with cream or as a latte and often with sugar, these additives tend to mask the bitterness of caffeine so it seems its absence doesn't bother them. For my part I add nothing to coffee—not even sugar—for reason that for me the bitterness of the xanthines is an integral part of the taste.
I drink coffee because of its taste, not for its stimulating properties. Unfortunately, unlike many others, caffeine has almost no noticeable stimulating effect on me—I can drink the strongest coffee at bedtime and still easily fall asleep.
† Despite its name theobromine does not contain bromine.
You seem to be in violent agreement with my point, because what I was getting at is that you drink coffee for the taste, and I drink IPAs for the taste.
Even though there's a popular strain of edgy internet bro logic that "no one actually likes X, they only drink/eat/wear/consume it because Y."
I'll offer a counter-anecdote and suggest this advice isn't necessarily ironclad. I've used the same pair of $20 headphones for decades (replacing them with the same model when they die), or else laptop/TV speakers. A couple of years ago I got $200 headphones included with a new phone purchase. The $200 headphones were amazing. I got to listen to all of my favorite music with a new perspective. But I still use the $20 ones on a daily basis because the $200 ones hurt my ears with prolonged usage. The $20 ones are fine. The nice ones didn't diminish my enjoyment of them at all. And every now and then I break out the $200 ones for a treat.
Just don't become a snob. I think people tie their identity to the expensive junk they purchase and develop a sense of ego around it, of being better than the peasants, and that's why they become unable to enjoy the "lesser" experience.
I think you point to the real problem: It's often not about taste or enjoyment but about using expensive things as a crutch for your feeble ego. Neatly expressed by the term "nouveau riche"
I think it's more to do with 'taste' as an indicator of social status. Not all things within the 'good taste' space or expensive. It's more about access to the secret club thinking, e.g. the secret hidden strip mall restaurant that has the best Bahn Mi.
Regarding audio, I have access to very decent headphones and also lower-grade studio monitors, as I've decided to make audio production a hobby of mine. Both of these are absolutely better than my cheaper in-ears for cycling and walking around outside. And sure, you also start to notice how different bluetooth boxes are also on a range of audio quality. And live music on a PA is a whole different ball game and not comparable to studio recordings entirely.
But that's fine. The in-ears are at a decent conjunction between audio quality and a price point I won't be hurt if I lose or break them. And some music from a janky box is better than no music from a janky box. At worst it will be funny how janky it is.
If I encounter something I like, I can ask what it is, break out the better equipment at home, probably sit down on the balcony with some tea or a drink and focus on the music and appreciate it for an hour or so while watching the magpies and crows in our back yard.
It's in fact even fun to me to dive into a song or an album like this to explore what you didn't hear on the other audio system. Sometimes there is an entire instrument you're missing on other systems.
The entire concept of "comfort food" and "poverty food" is about people excusing the enjoyment of "low class" stuff that is eminently enjoyable and shouldn't need justification.
You can learn tasting notes in wines, and how to identify wines that are well balanced with good tasting notes or an interesting character. You can appreciate all the care and expertise that went into that process and how it meshes with the "flavor pairing" guides and cheese that it was served with. You can then buy an entire case of $6 wine from that winery because that wine tastes exactly like Welches concord grape juice and when you were a kid you always expected wine to taste like tasty grape juice but make you drunk and have always been disappointed that wine doesn't taste like grape juice.
That wine was so good and it was $6 because snobs hate simple pleasures.
Don't be a snob. Good is not the inverse of simple, and complex is not inherently good.
Nobody can stop you from drinking boxed wine cut with gatorade. Nobody can stop you from enjoying boxed wine cut with gatorade.
If you find you can't enjoy the simple things, you don't need to "upgrade" or get more expensive stuff or keep up with the Jones's, you need therapy.
I think there's an unfinished journey whenever I hear such a story. Like someone who learns just enough about music that they "feel like" Bach is better than Taylor Swift, but then never move to the other side to use their newly acquired competence to understand what's nice about Taylor Swift's music as well.
E.g. a great designer will be able to design houses in very different styles, because they can understand what gives each of those styles its own specific beauty.
There's a lot to say about this, but I think your coffee friend never passed the snob-like point, which is a point I think most people reach when they learn just enough about something and that makes them feel superior. But if you keep going, then you start to understand what makes Italian coffee great as well, for example.
Wrt to coffee, I speak from experience, after going through very expensive equipment, I have learned to enjoy very different styles of roasts, coffees, etc. I still have preferences, I'm just far less judgmental.
Applies to most of my hobbies, I've seen this trajectory very often.
Yeah, that's a horrible way to enjoy life. By your reasoning, you should subsist on protein blocks and watch paint dry for entertainment. By lowering the bar to the absolute lowest threshold, you'll classify everything as enjoyable.
The pareto principle holds strong. Just put 20% of the effort in and you reap 80% of the results.
I get what they are trying to say. Looking for negatives is the problem.
When I was in college I got into beer. I was brewing at home and whenever I went out I was looking for something new and tasting it like I was a beer critic. It was great fun at first, but then the more refined my palate got, the less I found myself being able to find beer I enjoyed. Like if I went to a hockey game, I'd complain about the only choices being Bud and Bud light.
So I decided to look for positives rather than negatives and my enjoyment level went back up again. No matter where I am, I can find a beer that I enjoy. And that means when I'm in the bleachers on a sunny day watching a baseball game, a Bud Light and a hot dog might be absolutely perfect.
Coffee is the same for me. I was in Toronto this summer and went to The Library Specialty Coffee and had the best pour over I think I've ever had. The next morning I was up early and popped out for a Tim Horton's coffee and it was way different, but exactly what I wanted at that time.
IMHO, being a fan is a lot more fun than being a critic.
Tell me more! I need to hear this! I'm fed up with being a critic. It feels like a trap I set myself into without realizing. I'm at the point where I can only enjoy coffee brew at home with expensive toys and I'm becoming miserable about it: Id prefer the freedom to have anything anywhere while being able to enjoy.
Applies to coffee but also other things. So yeah, pls tell us more.
I mean, I'm not advocating for snobbery or being a critic at all.
One time I was walking around Belgium in the rain, I was cold and every single restaurant or bar (some serve food) was packed and wouldn't let new patrons in.
After walking around for about 35 minutes we found a cozy bar, had a beer, and discovered that they had a big pot of spicy pasta in the back, where you could pay €1 to ladle full a plate. In my memory, that is still the best meal I've ever tasted. And I'm definitely a haute cuisine enjoyer, been to a fair bit of Michelin restaurants.
Practicing photography on a smartphone is terrible compared to a dedicated device; in both ergonomics (hard to get a good grip, unprecise shutter actuation due to the touchscreen, and sometime unreliable software) and quality (granted, I like to actually print my picture instead of looking at them on a tiny screen; but still the difference is noticeable).
But that doesn't doesn't necessarily mean you need a camera system that cost as much as a small car; you can get plenty joy with an entry-level mirrorless (which would be in the pareto 20% price range).
I think it's a good starting point though. I like to try out the cheapest option and see how it really feels or tastes. For mattress shopping i always ask, "what's your second cheapest option?". For most consumer goods the diminishing returns kick in pretty quick
At some point I think there's almost an inverse relationship with how much time you spend researching a product and how much you enjoy it. I fell in to this hole with gaming monitors. At the top end, no product has it all, no product is without flaws. So then you start getting frustrated that you can't find one that has the right HDMI version, freesync, 240hz, 4k, USB-C with decent power delivery, etc. And what you buy is something quite expensive but every flaw frustraights you.
While if you just ignore most of that and buy something mid tier, you feel quite happy because it works pretty well and you didn't spend too much on it. The moment you start scrolling the subreddit for the product you've gone too far and need to disengage.
I definitely suffer from this "do enough research until I find flaws that I then can't un-see".
When my older kid wanted a gaming monitor, he suggested a specific model because it was on sale and he could afford it. I took that opportunity to do some research solo that night, find a few alternatives, research each deeply and then suggest that we "look together at 2 or 3 different models", compare the features, and talked through whether it really mattered if one was $100 more than the other given the likely useful lifespan of a monitor.
He ended up with a monitor that he's really happy with, we got some time together bonding over a shared interest, and he doesn't have to know all the flaws I saw in it. (It's also barely mid-tier, which is congruent with your advice.)
Yeah for sure do enough research to avoid something awful, but as soon as you get to the reddit comments that are like "Nah don't buy that it's junk, buy this one" and "this one" is twice the price, it's probably best to ignore. And certainly best to avoid doing any more research or reading forums/reddit after the purchase is made.
Ah, but it can give you such fun projects. Go, hunt down your headphones’ frequency response, cancel it out in PulseEffects (if that’s what it is called this release…), then adjust to the Harman Curve…
Excellent idea, hunting for the best headphones only cost me like two hundred hours of my life, couple hundreds of dollars, and rewarded me with a mild tinnitus as well.
I recently tried to play a bit of tennis, which I've already stopped. My friend was appalled when I proudly announced that my tennis racket costed $15. "But we are in tech!" he cried. But for a couple of games, I know I won't be able to tell the difference between a $15 one and a $150 one (I know because I've played tennis in the past).
And true to my predictions, I no longer play tennis and I'm only $15 poorer. I don't know the name for this, but the fact that I avoided wasting $150 and only "wasted" $15 into something I knew might be temporary also feels very satisfying.
> At first, buy the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.
Absolutely the right choice. I do triathlons and your comment makes me think of all the people who turn up, do an Ironman and leave the sport after. Or people who sign up for a marathon, do it, then never run again.
Meanwhile there are shorter events you can do on much less training and cheaper equipment to see if you’ll like it before investing in the extreme end of the sport. If you run a 10k and hate every step, you’ve saved yourself a lot of time, pain and money.
This is my thinking with photography, I love photography but I'm still not very good at it. So I use a D7100, which is probably considered a shitty relic nowadays compared to more modern stuff. But right now, the camera isn't the bottleneck for me getting good photos, it's me. The camera is still way better a camera than I am a photographer.
I'll get a better camera, when I'm a better photographer and the camera is actually the limiting factor, but I expect that is very very very far off.
This is how I have it with my guitar. It's a simple Ibanez Gio from a starter kit, probably coming in at 150 Euros - 200 Euros or so, with another 40 Euros spent on a guitar tech to set it up properly.
I'll replace it once I know how it is holding me back. At least that's the plan I've had for the last 4-5 years. But it has low action, fairly low-noise pickups, holds tuning. So no need so far.
Cheap electric guitars are much better now since the parts are CNC'd, even if they don't come properly setup from the factory. As long as the fretwork is good, you can easily upgrade everything else if you have problems with it.
Yes, and from what I've been reading and hearing: Modern electronic components and the manufacturing methods in general are also much more consistent in this day and age.
Back in the day, costs of a guitar would go into higher quality parts, and possibly even labor to ensure consistency and function exactly how it should. Nowadays, components are more consistent and cheaper than the better components of the 80s and 90s.
Thus the pure functional spread between cost ranges has been reduced.
Yep, it’s the golden age of guitar quality. These days even a starter guitar is pretty darn good. Ditto for amp emulators and small tube amps, wish that was all around as a teen.
I just look around in the most expensive street in my city for posts online or offline of people selling rackets that have maybe 2 hours of use on them. Then you can usually get 150$+ rackets for $15 as these folks threat $150 as I threat $15. Some of them are just given away to charity shops etc.
This is the way I am with hiking and biking. I genuinely enjoy them, but I have a tendency to really get into the weeds with things I'm interested in and ruining the fun.
I purposely just go for hikes for the sake of it, and refuse to give in and buy anything other than a generic bike, even though a part of me really wants __ hardware. If I buy it, that will be the point of no return for becoming a bike nerd and I'll start caring about stuff I don't want to care about.
Now computers, I've learned a million ways to hate them, and learn new ways to hate them every day. Not with bikes, though :)
I do the same, although my reasoning probably slightly differs. I hate the idea that I'll mangle a pastime as "primitive" as hiking or biking into some technology optimization problem. People did this stuff way back with perfectly simple gear and were entirely happy enough.
Sure, I could probably be a bit faster or go on a bit longer if I had better gear. But I could also achieve that by just getting into a better shape. With this level of commitment the gear is not the limiting factor. If I can't go faster with this bike, then I don't deserve to go faster with a fancier one, god dammit.
My work is very complicated and technical, so I get some satisfaction from keeping my hobbies ascetic.
To be honest, when I was younger, I found hardcore cyclists a bit ridiculous and never wanted to be like them. I find spending a lot of money on gear so you can essentially move around unappealing, I guess. It starts becoming about the gear, getting better gear, always wanting something new, etc. At some point it's so far abstracted from simply walking or pedaling and I just can't give a shit.
I think I agree. Although it is funny, everybody’s cut off point is different. I have a… it must be 30 years old by now… old road bike. But, I don’t really like riding bikes without clippy pedals. If I’m not clipped in, it just doesn’t feel right somehow. Like I’m not part of the system, just sitting on the system.
Lucky you! You didn’t fall into that trap and just enjoy the best experience you could get without overoptimizing for it. I fell into the musical instruments trap for a bit but luckily I got out of it and play with what I have.
I messed up in that domain when it comes to music software, it's tweaks all the way down, amazing that it works at all. I make do with cheap MIDI controllers, but spend hours cracking VSTs I already bought so I can run them in Linux.
Typing this out makes me realize its not even about the music anymore, but the tweaks. Let this be a warning
I don’t know if it’s a counterpoint or not, but I both know and appreciate a lot about coffee and enjoy instant or—especially—that black tarry sludge at the bottom of the gas station carafe, the sort that’s getting ever harder to find. One doesn’t diminish the other, they’re different things.
Similarly consider the people who build world-class systems in their day jobs, yet spend their weekends running Doom on potatoes or battling janky bots to the death.
Cultivating taste doesn’t have to be the same thing as developing snobbery or becoming jaded.
I drink things that taste bad. No, not always. But when an option exists that I think might taste bad, I always choose it. Someone has determined that it is a worthy drink and unless I explore their thinking, I will never know whether or not I agree. Once explored, I have some data that I can use to compare with other implementations of such an horrific recipe. At once, I am a connoisseur of this awful thing.
Let me know if you are interested in the worst place to get a bean-paste mojito with a cactus apple sidecar. I still search for the best.
Why yes I am! Both of those sound suited to a deliciously wide range of interpretation. I’ll raise you a pair of excellent and abject chòu dòufu served within about 5 blocks of each other (oddly enough, in a Puerto Rican section of New York)…
It seems like, in most domains of aesthetic appreciation, it doesn’t take all THAT much “trying stuff” before you get off a “bad-to-good” axis and onto a “varieties of experience” plane… (mumble mumble decommodification etc)
Then again perhaps you and I are showing our hand as people whose aesthetic preferences are not to be trusted :)
There must have been something that drove him to coffee expert level.
For me, I get dissatisfied and then reach for something nicer and nicer until I hit a limit. I'm just very skeptical he'd still love cheap instant coffee. He was climbing a sort of dopamine ladder. Then he ran out of rungs to climb. Now he has to move to a new thing. Life is almost nothing but impermanence and dissatisfaction. Its a little odd to think you could somehow beat the system. The person who finishes the dopamine ladder would never have been happy staying at the most bottom rung, which was disintegrating for them hence pushing them along to the highest rung. Short of becoming a very serious practitioner in things like meditation and other monastic-type things to fight these urges, this is just a really tough thing to get away from.
Now job, new book, new video game, new movie, new friend, etc. We're almost always doing this in some way.
Maybe those examples are things you don't have good discernment with. For me, I can instantly tell when I have quality headphone speakers. I can hear a fuller range of music than cheap ones. Its almost always obvious and cheap ones are almost always annoying. I have yet to go deeper into audiophone territory and I might never, but I have affordable headphones with really nice speakers inside and I wont go any less quality than this. So maybe for you, you can't tell or don't value it, but there are probably other things you do focus on.
I think you have to “aestheticize” the cheap stuff in a way that doesn’t add value purely on price. In other words, you aren’t just picking the absolute best quality of a thing, you’re picking it for some specific aesthetic reason that puts it above the more expensive one.
To put that into more concrete terms: I really like dark roast black coffee. There’s something about the bitterness and presentation that reminds me of coffee’s history, the variety of people drinking it, etc. and thus it is more appealing to me than the “high quality” light roasts with subtle flavors available in the expensive cafes.
Another example are diners. If you become such a gourmand that you only eat at Michelin restaurants and disparage anywhere “normal”, I think you miss out on the real culture and quality of diner food, which is a unique phenomenon.
I think it's possible to get a careful dark roast, but often "dark roast" coffee mainly tastes like burned toast. It's still warm and caffeinated, but it's not really that enjoyable. There's a reason so many people make this kind of coffee very watered down or drown it in cream and sugar. Maybe it feels historically connected to cowboys brewing coffee in a sock over a campfire or whatever, but is that connection really so valuable?
I just prefer the taste and it reminds me more of Turkish coffee, which is my favorite way of preparation. And also black coffee reminds me of various cultural things like diners, detective fiction, etc. Like this quote from Phoenix Wright, the game:
“Blacker than a moonless night. Hotter and more bitter than hell itself… that is coffee.”
Lighter roast coffee just isn’t a thing I generally enjoy, to me it feels like a different drink, an over-complicated consumer product, not the kind of thing one would write quotes like the one above about.
A bit like grilling vs. sous vide with meat. Grilling has a whole culture to it, whereas sous vide feels soulless and overly technical, even if it produces great flavors.
What I love about learning a topic thoroughly is that I can then pick apart the "expert wisdom" into what actually matters. That usually results in me getting better but very pragmatic results.
Coffee is a great example, I worked through the whole stack, tried everything I had access to until eventually I weeded out what matters most to me.
Good beans, good milk, and just enough prep. I tried no prep, all the prep, and then just enough prep. Good beans not perfect beans. Good milk but whatever is available.
I do the same with everything, cars, bicycles, sim racing equipment, computers, software etc.
It sounds like you're choosing to live in ignorance and lead a mediocre life. That's your choice to make but to me that seems sad. Expanding experiences beyond mediocrity is what makes life interesting.
You don't need to have full knowledge or the best, most expensive thing to rise above. The 80/20 rule applies.
You can spend thousands on coffee equipment and hundreds of hours in understanding it. Or you can spend $15 on a pour over cone, $15 on a bag of beans, and $20 on a hand grinder to get 80% of the way there. The coffee you make with this minor investment will be night and day better than the swill you make with cheap grocery store beans and a cheap auto drip brewer.
Strive to be better than average rather than the best.
A fun thing to do is remember why you liked the low end, for me and coffee it was instant coffee with too much sugar, in a big mug, on a building site. It hits totally different to a fancy coffee. I can still drink that now and enjoy it as it is associated with happy memories (and hot sweet coffee is great).
Another is to look at what the low end are trying to do, with wine it is generally appeal to as many people as possible, buying things like the supermarkets own brand of a variety of you like is a good way to get a great bottle.
If you can’t appreciate why the simple / cheap stuff is loved by the masses I wouldn’t think anyone is a true expert in their field. Feels like a well worn path for chefs.
I can't remember where I read this, but I read a very similar sentiment: "If you can only afford $2 pizza on a regular basis, never buy a $20 pizza, because it will just ruin the $2 pizza for you."
Another aspect of this which doesn't depend on price, is when I get attached to some regional variety, and then I move. That's always a bit painful.
Or sometimes they just stop making it. Or they change the formulation!
I am in the 20$ dollars headphones and 200$ TV bucket too. But for different reasons.
The point of the video/movie/song etc. is the content not the fidelity, there is a level of fidelity that allows 99 per cent of the enjoyment of the content. That level of fidelity typically costs 20$ for headphones and 200$ for tvs.
1080p and mp3s are good enough. The point is to see what's happening on the screen and to hear without noise.
I strive to be at the informed part of the spectrum.
Wine example:
- Novice: "I'd like any red wine" -> waiter brings you something you don't like
- Informed: "I'd like a red wine that is dry, not st" -> waiter brings you something you are quite likely to like
- Asshole: "Do you have an Argentinian malbec from 1998-2000, from the so and so valley?" -> you spend a lot of money and like the wine, or you are unhappy because they don't meet your asshole preferences
Keep pushing through the asshole stage and you get to another where you learn to enjoy what you enjoy, whether it is a $10 chocolate chip cookie or Chips A'Hoy. A $200 bottle of wine or a $5 bottle.
It is possible to dig deep into subjects and emerge with a nuanced understanding rather than an asshole demeanor!
I've kept aquariums basically my whole life and have had all kinds of critters including a really expensive marine tank fully kitted out with fish worth hundreds each. My current favorites are some guppies I got for free because it wasn't worth charging for them!
> - Asshole: "Do you have an Argentinian malbec from 1998-2000, from the so and so valley?" -> you spend a lot of money and like the wine, or you are unhappy because they don't meet your asshole preferences
So asshole is having preferences that don't fit the norm? If they don't impose their standards on you, and do not act a snob, why do you care?
I think that's mostly true above a certain threshold, but where that threshold lies, is probably different for different people.
The <1$ earphones you get on an airplane sound terrible. I can understand what the actors in movies are saying but that's about it. I can't hear or experience the music.
The $20 headphones my kids have are a good step up. For me headphones/speakers in the $100 range make me _feel_ more when listening to music. But I don't need to go more expensive. That's where my threshold is for music.
The lesson is to learn enough from first principles and then optimise pragmatically for fun and comfort, and only go really nerdy/taste-oriented on a few things at a time.
I use secondhand laptops/phones/tablets, plain wired airbuds insead of airpods etc., because I know what good enough is, for the purposes I have in mind. (I also know that most of the music industry still practises what Phil Spector preached about bad radios.)
I know a tiny bit about coffee and I like it, but I optimise for pragmatic fun. I know enough to know that the grind makes most of the difference, but a cheap contemporary stainless steel burr hand grinder makes really enough of that difference. I know enough to know that the Aeropress is not a toy, that the flow control cap accessory is helpful, a simple process, and I know enough not to over-optimise that process because it won't be fun. I do have a scale; I use it only if I feel the process can't be eyeballed and guesstimated.
I own a 3D printer: I bought the cheapest properly viable, just-about-big enough model. Here I am going much more deeply into the nerding, but in phases; I've owned it three years and I am only now doing the Klipper upgrade (from Marlin/Octoprint). I know I need a bigger printer but I also know this smaller printer will teach me things I need to know. The most important thing is not to optimise the printer: it is to learn CAD properly to express my ideas.
In my day job, I know enough to reduce my code dependencies but not to roll all of them myself. I know enough to know that in my specific job, spending my time optimising Docker containers is unlikely to provide any meaningful reward over roughly configuring more complete VMs, etc.; I know enough to know that AI is a rabbit-hole that other people can go down and I am probably not missing out by not adopting early.
Is any of the above wrong or misguided? I am sure some is. Not enough to matter though: I'm over fifty and in the grand scheme of things I am going to die soon.
It sounds to me you're describing the feeling of being content, rather than having the least taste.
I prefer to look at things that way rather than not having taste. Some people really enjoy $600 headphones, while others don't really care.
I think everyone has some "taste" though, you don't really realize it until you compare experiences.
For me personally, having taste doesn't ruin my experience for anything - it just add more to things. And I still like the things I like, even if there is "less".
Using more expensive headphones and hearing instruments I've never heard before makes it fun and using $20 headphones is still fun because I'm still listening to music I like.
yeah for headphones, I also feel the same. But for food and coffee, I really cannot go back to lower standards.
It feels like I put myself in a trap with this attitude.
I have not found a way out yet.
On the other hand, a part of becoming an expert in some field should be getting to be _realistic_. Learn not to deceive yourself.
I can give you an example from my experience. I got annoyed by my dull knives, so at first I went and bought really expensive knives, the ones made of hardened high-carbon steel that start rusting if you look at them dirtily. And I spent hours reading reviews before buying them. That's probably the "most expensive cup of coffee" stage.
Then I stumbled upon a Youtube channel that explained how to sharpen knives properly. So I bought $70 worth of diamond sharpening stones and re-sharpened my old IKEA knives. And they started working almost as well as my set of ultra-expensive knives, but they are far more practical. The expensive knife set is now a display piece in my kitchen.
Another revelation for me was that past a certain point, there's really not that much difference in the quality of sushi. It's just rice and sliced fish. Sure, there are individual variations between chefs in rice-to-fish ratio, maybe some special soy sauce here and there, but these are all just matters of personal taste. So I now just enjoy sushi for its taste. And instead of a looking for reservations in expensive restaurants, I just drop by my local sushi place and just ask the chef to add a bit more wasabi to the rice.
I've watched like 3 hours of his videos on sharpening because he's pragmatic, approachable, and scientific, and now I actually understand how to sharpen a knife and why it works.
That's not a bad rule of thumb, but it's also easier to get dry, poorly seasoned rice, mushy fish, overdone or poorly done sauce and toppings combinations, and >1 day old uni than I'd really like at a lot of places.
Your advice makes sense when your local options are good enough, but I don't think you're actually arguing that quality doesn't matter -- only that beyond a certain point the additional discernment isn't valuable.
I went down the knife-sharpening rabbit hole a bit, too, but I only managed to make my knives duller with whetstones, even though I have good dexterity.
Eventually, I just took my knives to a professional sharpener and got the paper-thin, tomato-slicing sharpness I wanted.
Funnily enough, I had both an expensive "forged" knife and a cheap IKEA one, and the IKEA knife was sharper and held its edge much better.
> That advice has stuck with me, and I try to have the least taste I can. I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.
Thank you for sharing this observation. It resonated with me in a surprising way. Finding something that's "good enough" is such a blessing.
I think that's a shame - I take a different approach that means the article resonates with me a lot more.
It's about learning enough to be able to appreciate something beyond surface level. You struck a chord with coffee and headphones - yes, I've gone deep on both, but rather than suck the enjoyment out of cheaper options it's given me an appreciation across the segment. I can now buy a cheap coffee and make it taste excellent - I can appreciate a well tuned headphone regardless of cost or lack of technicalities.
When headphones reach $2k+ and coffee starts costing $50 for 100g, rather than get universally better they tend to get opinionated - a different flavor of weird as a friend once said.
So I would suggest that it's fine to go deep on something, but make sure you're doing it to get to a deeper true/understanding.
You're describing the hedonic treadmill. But I think you are missing something.
The thing is it does feel good to fix things and upgrade. The treadmill just says your baseline reverts back to where it was. So yeah you're just as happy with the expensive TV as you were with the shitty one, but it did feel good to upgrade, if only for a little while.
So the key is to introduce tiny upgrades and often. If you blow your budget for the whole year on a TV then you only get to be happier once. If you tinker and introduce tiny, sustainable upgrades you can be happier every day.
The sustainable part is important. You can only afford something if you can buy it twice. Don't ever take out a loan to buy anything (apart from a house).
I too have this fear sometimes, and for example never want to learn anything about wine, but it's not always the case.
A friend and I have bonded over appreciating the "shit" things, like white bread toast and hotel coffee and I think that's quite a good habit to instill. I love coffee and will hunt out the best spots in any city for a single-origin V60 on ice, but I am equally content in a diner when the only option is literally just "coffee".
Also studying art & practicing photography has made the world a much more beautiful place. Some of my best pictures have been taken in places that are usually considered unphotogenic.
To quote Reggie Watts:
Listen, invest two hundred dollars in a pair of good headphones
Take care of ′em, put 'em in your ears, listen to the music
Listen to how it′s supposed to be recorded
You're missing, I swear to God, forty to fifty percent
Of the music that's in there in the first place
So if you wanna go back and listen to
The shit that you thought you liked
You might even like it more, motherf*er
This did inspire me to get better headphones and I have no regrets! I think some parts of the aversion to getting too fancy come from the reasonable ideas of: not wanting to lower your floor, avoiding the hedonic treadmill, and not wanting to increase your burn. This kind of does make sense for coffee: a lot of coffees you get will be out of your control and increasing the fanciness of your coffee is an ongoing expense. For headphones though they're all moot. I can't remember the last time I wore someone else's headphones, and it's just a pretty small once off payment (these have lasted me 5 years). I would strongly recommend upgrading in this department.
As for TVs, I rewatched Alien on my friend's new LG OLED and it was absolutely stunning. I am looking forward to getting a new place and having a nice set up like that. Again just a once off thing.
And just for balance, my computer monitor which I use all the time has an annoying flickering issue that I have just been putting up with for a long time.
> Listen, invest two hundred dollars in a pair of good headphones Take care of ′em, put 'em in your ears, listen to the music Listen to how it′s supposed to be recorded You're missing, I swear to God, forty to fifty percent Of the music that's in there in the first place So if you wanna go back and listen to The shit that you thought you liked You might even like it more, motherf*er
Chances are the music you listen to was recorded, monitored, and mixed using Beyer Dynamic DT100s. They're those white ones you see everyone with in photos of recording studios.
Try a pair. You'll wonder where all the bass has gone. That's because they're not "optimised" or "enhanced" or "MEGA BASS DOOF DOOF DOOF" headphones. It takes a bit of getting used to, like eating less processed food that's not loaded with salt and sugar.
After a bit, you'll realise you can actually hear detail in the bass.
I used to have some medium expensive good headphones. That was pretty much the only non-shit hardware I ever invested in and I really could hear a difference. But with age and decreasing hearing now I cant tell anymore, so that one thing I cared about not buying cheap trash is no longer relevant.
The trick for most things is to just not spend time and effort to learn what to look for. Happy to see in this thread I am not the only one.
I'm with you with the TV - HD is usually enough, but audio needs to be at least reasonable. $20 headphones is too cheap, even from a longevity perspective.
If noise at all bothers you, decent ANC is a game-changer and worth spending more. I never tried it until I picked up a next cheap pair with it, and it's even better with a good pair.
If your friend keeps mastering coffee he'll learn to appreciate what Folgers or Starbucks is doing again. He'll also learn to suggest the coffee that will make someone happiest, or help them the most, in a wider variety of situations. It's nice to retain youthful oblivious in some categories, though. We can't learn everything anyway. It's often enough just to know how to avoid expensive mistakes.
I've used the "Harbor Freight" principle for years when purchasing tools for either professional or personal use. I'll buy something I need at a discount store like Harbor Freight and use it for as many jobs as it lasts. If it breaks and I still need it, I'll upgrade to a better version. If it doesn't break then all the better.
Oh dear. Years ago I had the ‘misfortune’ to taste some of the greatest first and second growth Bordeaux wines—the 1945s, Margeaux, Lafite, etc. Now my palate lies in ruins, ordinary wine is essentially undrinkable, and even good wine only draws comparisons with those Greats, enjoyment for their own sake is thus reduced or lost.
To make matters worse, those great Bordeaux wines and Burgundy's Grand crus such as Romanée-Conti, Grands Échezeaux etc. have in resent years reached truly dizzying heights, only multimillionaires and lottery winners can now afford to drink them. Unless one’s in either of those categories, paying a $1,000, $10,000 and upward per bottle is even an outrageous notion to contemplate.
Lesson: getting spoiled on the very best—especially early on—depreciates one’s appreciation for not only the mundane but also things that by most other criteria are deemed very good.
It's possible to be exposed to, and understand, high end things. I've had $2000+ bottles of wine, listened to music on $100k+ speakers, driven $500k+ cars, seen Keith Jarrett Trio at Montreux, had cat-shit coffee, etc.
And I'm perfectly happy listening to Toxic by Britney Spears on phone speakers while drinking Miller High Life on a sunny day in the park, hopping in a banged up Miata to rip a donut in a parking lot.
Don't let fear of "spoiling" things keep you from ever growing your experiences. People tend to have a gravity for the things that matter to them.
And don't let knowledge of fancy things keep you from finding joy in the basics.
I don't need any more hobbies. I already have too little time.
Also, shitty coffee ensures I don't drink even more. I failed with beer, so I am probably what some call a connaisseur. I learned a bit about whiskey, and once every 3 years I buy one I like, but I don't need an expensive hobby.
I used to build my own computers. Learned a lot, was fun. Now I exclusively use hand-me-downs. Understanding how I can get the same (perhaps more!) done within a smaller envelop is kind of it's own hobby.
I have a TV with a row of dead pixels. I don't need to watch even more.
The money saved this way is just a happy by product.
Work gave me a 5k monitor to use at home. I set it up dual monitor with my cheap-o monitor. Had to upgrade that as it looked awful. But now maybe better for my eyes?
When the Apple Air, with the M1 chip came out, I upgraded, because the charging port on med 2013 MacBook Pro was failing. It never occurred to me that my old laptop had terrible performance, it felt just fine. The comparison of the two made me not wanting to go back. Monitors feel like much the same, once you had a high DPI monitor, it's hard to go back.
I did look at the website of the local IT refurbishing company yesterday, and you can build a completely workable office/development machine (including monitor) for less than I paid for my current 4K display.
In some sense I am a little sad that I didn't just go down the route of refurbished hardware for 20% of the cost, but my eyes probably appreciates it.
I imagine your friend is talking about specific coffee preparations like "espresso" because, for example, there are hundreds of years of traditional Arabic coffee that continue to be appreciated for generations. Your friend reminds me of this movie scene in Mulholland Drive[1].
For coffee, I get beans from a local roaster, like $14 per pound nowadays. I like the taste and it is nice to support someone local. Then I put it through a ~$200 Flair espresso machine. It is a manual press, so it has become a fun project/ritual. Plus, Americano is or espresso tastes better than coffee (and IMO mine is better than the coffee shop… a lot cheaper at this point I guess, too).
Here's a handy recipe for your friend: go to a blind tasting. This way, they will probably find out that they really can't tell a $15 coffee from a $150, or a $500 machine from a $ 5,000 one.
Works like a charm with wine: I know a lot about it, can maintain a conversation for hours, but will never buy anything above $50/bottle except for a gift.
Same. This is a surprisingly simple recipe for a happy life and helps prevent lifestyle inflation. It reminds me of PG's "Keep your identify small" (https://paulgraham.com/identity.html).
I deliberately avoided cultivating a taste in coffee and wine after having acquired a taste for good whisky. For exactly the same reason you mention: I knew my utility from drinking coffee/wine would stay constant, but the time and money cost of acquiring them would significantly increase.
How your friend enjoys coffee does not predict how you'll enjoy music? Getting wider ranges of experiences often is fun and worthwhile. Avoiding that to save a couple hundred bucks doesn't seem rational.
There are certainly diminishing returns but good coffee is objectively better than some pre ground supermarket stuff. Part of it is recognizing what's a good value more than what's the best and most expensive.
Ignorance is bliss and cheap taste is the best one. This is the reason why I have been reluctant to learn about wines. I am satisfied with cheap wines and I would like to keep that way
Yup. A few years a go a friend of mine made me notice my cheap third-hand thinkpad t440 had screen tearing issues i had never noticed. I couldn't unsee them after that.
it's stochastic, our tastes grow as we do, a stale mars bar is sufficient for a child, where a small square of 80+% dark single origin might be the evolution of that taste over thirty more years.
I was raised a snob by chefs, my snobbery extends to all areas of my life in the hope that I might find reason enough to stay.
Honestly that sounds like a personal issue. I’ve gf the opposite experience - trying the high quality version of a thing has allowed me to find more intentional appreciation of the low quality version. I like shitty wines better now that I know what a good wine is, because I know what I’m paying for. “This isn’t great but it was like $8” and “this is great and well-worth $40” are better together than just “this is cheap and I dont mind it” in my book.
Then again I’ve never understood the appeal of ‘ignorance is bliss’
Not to criticize your friend, but it isn't as if things following his path is sn inevitable law of nature.
Coincidentally I went from being an Audio consumer to a person that developes audio hard- and software, and mixes music in my spare time and deals with live sound in acoustically challenging rooms in my work (to keep things short, I do/did even more).
While I certainly spent some money on audio equipment, I can't say that you need infinitly expensive stuff to enjoy it. For me it went exactly the opposite way. Where as a teenager I thought you need all that expensive stuff to make and listen to music on a high level, I now know what matters and what doesn't.
There is a point beyond which things don't matter factually, because they are beyond the limits of human perception. Audiophiles then trick themselves into hearing the atoms that make up the wire, when every measurement doesn't show anything.
One of my mics I prefer most on floor drums is a modified Pyle Karaoke mic I got from Amazon for 30 bucks and added a cheap transformer into. My headphones are maybe 200 bucks (and half of that was paid for reliability, not for sound quality). I got a second pair for closer to 1200 bicks, but thst is just for retouche work where I need to hear the faintest background noises, I actually prefer the sound of the cheaper ones.
I am still amazed by most recordings I was amazed by when I started on my journey. In fact more so now.
We don't need to inevitably turn everything into a stage to show off our own mental superiority. Especially in the audiophile realm these people claim to hear things that they wouldn't be able to pick out reliably in a properly conducted double-randomized blind test. And everything else is basically worthless since you then just measure a persons ability to fool themselves.
Recently my assistant who just started out in the field came for advice. She wanted to spend some money on a mic and audio interface. And I recommended her one for a quarter of the price she planned on spending since it basically had the same measurements and better software support. As for mics I told her to test my mics with that interface and she should use that test to figure out what she wants. Originally she wanted to spend good money on getting an expensive studio mic, in the test my old dynamic Sennheiser MD21 that I got from ebay won. She got the same for cheap from there as well.
Don't get me wrong, I will be the first to hear bad acoustics, missaligned speakers, a dying loudspeaker suspension, a overdriven amplification system, a missed buffer deadline, a bad mix, a bad recording, phase issues, etc. It is my job to notice. But that doesn't mean I can't enjoy the music running over such a system as much as I did before I knew all that. In fact I might even enjoy it more.
I deliberately avoided fancy coffee because I didn't want to raise that bar and add a chore to my mornings, but last year I finally caved in. A friend asked incredulously "why wouldn't you want to enjoy something more?"
In hindsight it was dumb. I love the little ritual of making coffee. I finally notice coffee, the same way I notice good carpentry and art. It added another layer of understanding and appreciation to life.
Art is all about the shortcuts you choose to take to represent reality on a canvas. I think that life is the opposite. It's all about what you choose to complicate, to be deliberate about.
> I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.
It's the same argument as "why do you spend so much time and money on food, it's going to become shit anyway".
No, just no. You can close your eyes, chant lalala with plugged ears and inhale all sorts of copium, but listening uncompressed music and movies on expensive equipment is a completely different experience, period.
You can't say that you enjoy it as much as they do, because you are you and they are they.
You misunderstand the point, I'm afraid. It's not that better things aren't better, it's that they don't increase your enjoyment of the better thing, but decrease your enjoyment of the worse thing.
yeah but you can't tell what good is because you was not exposed to enough good TV. Taste and perception is much more of a developed skill than people realize.
Most often, people deliberately choose not to pursue a special interests area because of limited time / budget rather than a lack of perception for what is "good".
That advice has stuck with me, and I try to have the least taste I can. I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.