Are you distracted by gear?

Shoot, I miss climbing and the social aspect of it. Haven’t climbed since Feb =(.

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Lol, 100%. I spent 10 years building cars far beyond my driving ability/enjoyment. It takes active effort on my side to enjoy what the hobbies are realy about

Yes gear distraction is a problem for me. The reviewers hyping up new features or characteristics always get me for cameras specifically. Soon came to realize, those features and improvements can only be taken advantage of if they fit your use criteria. For example, do I really need that new high iso performance even though most shots will be taken in decently lit areas? Probably not but would be a nice safety blanket.

So for cameras and audio gear, I tend to search for what fits my needs even though I want it ALL! Sometimes I let myself go overboard and that’s when selling the gear comes in but it’s really hard for me to part with my camera gear since they have provided me with work. Audio gear is a bit easier to part with.

But yeah boredom probably is a factor and bright shiney and new is another one. Reviewers saying how much better this is compared to the old one is another factor. My solutions was to stop watching reviewers. The marketing is to strong and the urge for that new new is to enticing.

My approach to gear is currently to use them to their full capacity. Taking advantage of the features and abilities and if I find myself hitting a wall in capabilities, I’ll look into upgrading.

I don’t even bother upgrading my phone anymore. I feel smartphones have hit a point of diminishing returns.

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I actually had that problem when I just started my leather crafting lesson. I used to blame my cheap tool for my ugly results. I started to buy more expensive tools and it didn’t make my leather creations better. It took me a while to learn that before acquiring a better tool/gear, I should make myself worthy of using it.

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I think it’s natural at the beginning of a journey into a hobby, you haven’t formed concrete ideas of your own, and you don’t have enough personal experience to form them, so you just try and absorb as much as you can, usually glomming onto ideas/pitches that resonate.

These days I have a list of things I would like to try, and given the opportunity at the right price I’ll jump, I still occasionally watch some Youtube reviews if the equipment isn’t something I’m familiar with. Though it’s usually other peoples experiences with new pieces of gear that get me interested.

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I just wish I had the money and my country had the stock for me to be distracted by gear
The absolute lack of PC components is an issue where I am atm
Also I want a BMPCC6k

I’m probably what you call a cyclic collector, or I go all in on a specific hobby or interest of mine, much like @Nick_Mimi describes it in his post.

There was a time early 2000 where I imported a lot of CD’s from Japan, probably so many that I landed myself on a personal shitlist over at the customs office, since I never seem to escape customs fees ever since :joy:

But on to the topic. I guess I am distracted by gear to a certain sense. Or at least I like to keep myself up-to-date on a topic. The up-to-date thing is more habitual after having worked in audio / video retail. I’d like to know what I talk about first hand, or at least get enough information in a subject so I can make a qualified guess or recommendation when someone asks me about something.

As for my personal meanderings in different fields. I tend to go all out up to a point of reaching satisfaction in the field. At first it was building a sizeable music collection as I was building my system too. Then when I got to a point of where I felt like, yes this is it, I simply just sat down and enjoyed the fruits of my labour in building all of this up. Sure the journey itself was enjoyable too, but the end result was something that I felt wholly satisfied with, thinking that there’s no reason for me to spend anything more on it, within reason, as anything that was an upgrade from this would cost me astronomical amounts of money that I couldn’t possibly justify.

This is why I originally got myself the Harmony Design DA9 and Ear90, as that was the absolute end-game back then along with the Benchmark DAC1 etc. Now 10-15 years later I felt I wanted to experiment with other / cheaper options, but ultimately fell back to just upgrading my previous gear to what I think might be my absolute end-game for now. So soon there will be a D90 and Ear903 coming along in a few weeks after I’ve sent my old gear to the guy making them for upgrades.

My whole collectathon shenanigans have been a bit frivolous at times though, so I’ve talked myself into reason (mostly, lol). I used to buy a whole lot of figures and resin kits up to the point where every shelf had something. I also used to buy pretty much every game that was of interest to me on a Steam sale or Humble Bundle deal.

But since both time and money is limited, I’ve slimmed down the collection and sold off a bunch of figures, along with just buying the games that I want to play now. Makes more sense than sitting on 200 games that I haven’t even started, also gives me a reason to work on that endless backlog.

I felt like the same was starting to happen with my headphone collection and desktop setup too, buying many IEM’s and looking at new headphones every now and then even though I don’t need any more. So yeah here’s hoping that my final splurge on upgraded amp and dac will actually put me at rest for the next decade or so and I can just sit down and enjoy what I have :sweat_smile:

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On a side-note. I don’t like to half-ass things. So I mostly look at getting something solid that will last me a long time. So when building a PC I would go high-end on most components. If I buy a bicycle I want it to be able to last. If I’m getting a microphone I want it to be a good one etc.

This sort of relates to another hobby of mine, fountain pens. I used to collect a lot of them. But after a few years I ended up having a custom one made by Nakaya Fountain Pen Company, which to me was that holy grail and haven’t bought a single pen since.

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Ah a fellow fountain pen collector. Unfortunately I’ve stopped buying pens not because I’ve found my holy grail, but because my company had decided to go full digital for our documents. Kinda sucks to be honest.

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It’s no coincidence that our What Did You Buy Today thread has by far the greatest number of replies and view more than doubling our second most popular thread… What Are You Listening To Tonight.

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2 months ago, I planned to stop buying gear so I can save up for some CD purchases. Nope.

Can I hold off even a month? hahaha

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Yeah kind of sucks, working in psychiatric care I don’t get much use of them here at work due to security risks. Would be a different story if I had a desk job. I liked University a lot because of this, I got to use my pens all the time and it’s mostly during that time which I ended up buying pens every other month. It didn’t help that I actually had access to two local pen and paper stores, so lots of inks and spontaneous purchases were acquired there.

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Ah yes. I have a bunch of Touhou Nendoroids just sitting in their boxes because I don’t have the space to have them out. Also got 3 warship models that need to be built… but I haven’t touched those boxes for like 2 years due to a lack of supplies, space, and time necessary to built them. I should probably sort out my storage closet and also get to selling my Audio Technicas. Such a pain to do on top of regular daily responsibilities.

Nice topic!

Hm. I don’t think I am distracted by gear. However, I do research about it, I follow what’s new.

It somehow feels weird to be enjoying music, at least on forums. People are constantly arguing about X gear over Y gear, and it’s all about the gear, music rarely gets discussed. As much as I admire high-end stuff, to me, headphones or any other audio equipment will always remain tools for listening to music. That’s what is most important to me. While I do appreciate technical complexity and everything, it has always been about music for me. I cannot imagine spending hours swapping cables and seeing which one is “better sounding”. That will never be me. But I do know people have money and it is a hobby, so people want to have the best of the best, even if it’s several thousand dollar cables.

Some people have a really hard craving to keep buying stuff, but I am very much happy with my current setup. But then, some of us are just a bunch of passionate individuals who love to research and make sure we are getting “THE” best :man_shrugging:t2:

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Loving the responses to this thread.

Thanks for sharing everyone. I figure a lot of us probably share some specific personality traits that have us here reading about headphones for hours at a time.

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I blame my uncle for my habits. He got me into plastic models, model trains, Lego and, hi-fi when I was little. I now have a bunch of boxes of plastic models (planes, tanks, etc.) that haven’t been touched in 20+ years. Spent the last 10 years collecting $30K worth of model trains :man_facepalming:t2:. Collected F1 diecast models for a while. And there’s stereo gear all over the place…

In my case I think boredom has the largest role to play with the technical coolness factor coming in second.

My theory as to why music is not often discussed as much is that music is so wildly varied and divers that even if you broke it up into genres and even some sub-genres you still couldn’t cover it all. It’s kind of worthless to try and discuss a massively broad topic like that (imo) since the discussion would have no focus. It would just be a cluster fuck.

That’s why I think the “what are you listening to tonight?” Thread works so well. It’s not about discussion. It’s about discovery and recommendation. You post a spotify, youtube, bandcamp, etc link there and people can scroll through and check out what catches there attention.

Also what good is it to discuss music when you could be listening to it?

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To be fair though That thread is full of people shoowing off non audio gear purchases as well discussing purchases and even first impressions. while what are you listening to tonight is just peopl e dropping links and not really replying to much

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or people too busy shopping to listen :man_shrugging: lol

honestly yeah. Im so glad Im a gamer so my gear always serves a purpose. I think my Gen Z brain sadly can’t just concentrate on just music. If Im not consuming 2 pieces of media at the same time or not consuming media while at work or on my hikes I feel like I’m missing something.

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