It always makes me question whether it is good to have a well developed taste.
Having taste makes you require more dollars to get the same level of satisfaction from a meal or a drink.
Having taste makes you require more dollars to get the same level of satisfaction from a meal or a drink.
I have carefully avoided trying excessively high quality things because once I've experienced something truly luxury then it becomes an ongoing expense to keep up that level of experience. The irritating part is that before I was perfectly happy in my ignorance of something better being available out there, but aftewards I feel like I'm "ruined" because I'm constantly disappointed and frustrated if I can't keep up the level of quality.
I have had headphones ruined for me because I tried the Sennheiser HD 800 once and then there was no going back to cheap plastic cans.
I've had monitors ruined for me a long time ago because I got Dell PremierColor 4K display.
Food as per my previous post. I've had such great food in so many fantastic restaurants that I'm upset with mere "pub food" that used to make me perfectly happy before. I am now incapable of eating certain fast food unless literally starving to death.
Etc...
Thankfully, I'm still okay for wine. I believe it comes in two or is it three colours? Whatever, I'm still happy with a random $10 bottle. My boss for comparison now has to buy the $250 bottles at company dinners. Ouch.
It's not really the same as being unable to appreciate anything but a glass of Petrus or DRC. For a one time payment of $1k the HD800s will easily serve you for the rest of your life. If you prefer fine food and wine that $1k might not even get you a single meal.
I've easily spent over $2K so far. When I replace it, I'll have difficulty resisting the temptation to upgrade to the "next level". Planar magnetic or planar electrostatic headphones are the next logical step. Those start at $2K and go up from there.
I'll be lucky to escape this with less than $10K spent...
Sure, you _could_ rip an MP3 with near-undetectable quality loss for most types of music (The Wall, yes. The Downward Spiral, no). But nobody does that, as apparently it was not the default on anything back then and today Youtube and Spotify and all others still use those horrible quality settings as people have gotten used to them.
For reference, I listen to mostly Pantera, Beethoven, Pink Floyd, early Nine Inch Nails, Led Zep. It's not too diverse, but there is a short period from about 1990 to 2005 where music recorded in that period does not transfer to MP3 well. Maybe because the digital artifacts that we cannot hear in the published recordings are amplified in the compressed MP3 - but after that period producers began to optimize their recordings to account for that.
Though I'm sure that the encoders got better, really, the quality of the common rip has not.
By the way, I once made a GUI for abcde called abcdefg (A Better CD Encoder For Gnome) but never did anything with it - it was really just an exercise to learn the GTK libraries because Zim Wiki used them too. But I now regret not publishing it just because it had such a cool name.
I don't know. It's not really the same level of satisfaction. Eating well is very enjoyable.
I think food is one of the product categories in which spending just a bit more raise the quality drastically. Buying fresh vegetables from the market and butcher meats from time to time rather than everything from a grocery store was transformative for me and it's not actually that much more expensive. I guess I could sustain myself on canned peas and frozen chicken but it wouldn't bring me much joy.