Gosh, hope no one took "obsessive" as derogatory, surely wasn't meant that way. We are on an audiophile forum, where we endlessly parse the microconcerns of a hobby which leaves normal people mystified (as in "You spent how-fripping much on a DAC? And what's a DAC, anyway?")
Just struck by the range of "normal" human behavior. Almost everyone likes music, but most are content to listen to an MP3 on the phone via $2 earbuds. Compare that to using your best surgeon's touch to gently lower the stylus onto a slab of freshly cleaned, dried and de-static-ified vinyl which may have cost more than you dare tell the spouse, then sprinting to sit in the sweet spot for perhaps 18 minutes before you have to get up and turn the disc over.
And there's a similar order-of-magnitude difference in dedication between gulping a Styrofoam cup of whatever's in the breakroom pot, versus tracking down a source for beans grown by monks on a mist-shrouded mountain, keeping the beans in cryogenic storage before roasting them in a countertop autoclave that holds a temperature to within .1 degee C and times with an atomic clock, placing the warm beans in a grinder that's better engineered than most German cars, then rushing - quick, before the ambient air in the kitchen turns the grind rancid! - to get the result into a device that might have been designed by NASA engineers who were feeling steampunk and which cost more than some cars, and going through all that before 8 a.m.
Surely, obsessive is not too strong a word....
