Graz
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2004
- Posts
- 726
- Likes
- 15
So you’re moseying through life…maybe it’s at home, or at the office, or cruising mobile…and somebody happens to notice your headphones/headphone gear. Usually the people doing the noticing aren’t into head-fi…no big deal there, I mean granted it’s a fairly exclusive club.
So on the semi-rare occasion that this does happen to me, I tend to sigh inwardly a bit because I’m pretty sure how the next few minutes of my life are gonna go down. It usually goes something like this:
You begin to describe the gear. This is almost invariably met with polite nods and smiles, but the nods and smiles are a front for the utter lack of real interest in what you’re saying. In my estimation, what these facial reactions and body gestures are really saying is: “Crap, I wish I hadn’t asked anything about his guy’s headphone gear in the first place…where’s the eject button?”…and…”This guy’s insane, I can’t believe he’s wasting so much money on this crap.”
So after you describe the gear, there’s generally (but not always) an invitation offered to give said gear a listen. Your captive audience (while still fumbling for a graceful out) will generally accept your offer at this point out of sheer politeness, but with no real interest in giving the gear a serious, meaningful listen. Almost without fail, the “listening session” goes down something like this:
- He/she puts on the headphones for about 15 seconds (in rare cases 30 seconds, but on no occasion that I’ve ever encountered has it ever been over 60 seconds)
- He/she fiddles with the volume control a bit.
- He/she removes the headphones, smiles, tells you how great they sound and promptly ejects at the earliest possible moment.
And as they’re walking off, they’re rationalizing their 15 second “listening session” to line up with their belief that you’ve wasted far too much money on your stupid headphone crap. But you know with absolute certainty that the amount of listening time given by the listener was totally inadequate to form any meaningful opinion, and basically you’ve both wasted 5-10 minutes of each other’s lives.
So ok…yes, there has been the rare exception when a truly interested audio nut really “gets it”, and really appreciates what you’ve got…but this almost never happens. In my experience, the above scenario is the norm.
Does this happen to anyone else?
Peace,
Graz
So on the semi-rare occasion that this does happen to me, I tend to sigh inwardly a bit because I’m pretty sure how the next few minutes of my life are gonna go down. It usually goes something like this:
You begin to describe the gear. This is almost invariably met with polite nods and smiles, but the nods and smiles are a front for the utter lack of real interest in what you’re saying. In my estimation, what these facial reactions and body gestures are really saying is: “Crap, I wish I hadn’t asked anything about his guy’s headphone gear in the first place…where’s the eject button?”…and…”This guy’s insane, I can’t believe he’s wasting so much money on this crap.”
So after you describe the gear, there’s generally (but not always) an invitation offered to give said gear a listen. Your captive audience (while still fumbling for a graceful out) will generally accept your offer at this point out of sheer politeness, but with no real interest in giving the gear a serious, meaningful listen. Almost without fail, the “listening session” goes down something like this:
- He/she puts on the headphones for about 15 seconds (in rare cases 30 seconds, but on no occasion that I’ve ever encountered has it ever been over 60 seconds)
- He/she fiddles with the volume control a bit.
- He/she removes the headphones, smiles, tells you how great they sound and promptly ejects at the earliest possible moment.
And as they’re walking off, they’re rationalizing their 15 second “listening session” to line up with their belief that you’ve wasted far too much money on your stupid headphone crap. But you know with absolute certainty that the amount of listening time given by the listener was totally inadequate to form any meaningful opinion, and basically you’ve both wasted 5-10 minutes of each other’s lives.
So ok…yes, there has been the rare exception when a truly interested audio nut really “gets it”, and really appreciates what you’ve got…but this almost never happens. In my experience, the above scenario is the norm.
Does this happen to anyone else?
Peace,
Graz