#1 Pleasure

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Is your #1 pleasure listening to music on your hi-fi.

For me it shares #2 with my wife's garden and our birds and squirrels from the wood behind.

#1 for me is designing and building hi-fi, especially new projects or specials, and having to adapt the nva building blocks to put up a different structure. Even making cables has a therapeutic meditative type feel to it. I cannot imagine ever retiring as long as I can see and hold a soldering iron. And it fits so well with listening to music at the same time. Radio Swiss at the mo - Giovanni Paisiello - Piano Concerto #5 in D minor. While making some SSC. **magic**

[_D_S_J_R_]

My #1 pleasure is my family. Get them on side and singing sweetly and EVERYTHING ELSE for me falls into place and life is good - NOTHING is going to get in the way of this if I can help it. Audio is my life otherwise and has been ever since I could toddle, so current work is fantastic for me.

[SteveTheShadow]

I love listening to music. Soothes away tensions. Listening to music on a good hi-fi system is one of the great pleasures in life.
Although it is not a business, I also love building speakers and amplifiers. Listening to music on an audio system whose amp and speakers you built yourself is doubly enjoyable, especially when it is used by the whole family and has WAF in spades.

[Lindsayt]

There's a lot of wisdom in what DSJR says. My number one pleasure is spending quality time doing various activities with my family.

Some of the time that includes listening to music whilst doing another activity.

[alfafan123]

+1 for how DSJR sees it. If the family are well and happy then I am good too. After that spending time with friends and listening to good music on the best hifi system I can afford however it can be a bit of a lonely past time as my enthusiasm is not shared by the family.

If I am banished from the living room (all too often) then I enjoy taking my Yorkshire terrier Rosy for walkies ...probably good for me too! You know it is almost impossible to be lonely with a dog. Everyone stops and talks to you which is great.

Also used to enjoy fiddling (technical term!) with my Alfa 156 GTA but sadly that has gone as the cars have had to become cheap to insure for the kids to drive. Hopefully I will get to do that again sometime.

I am far luckier than some so I can't complain

[zebbo]

Sorry to be a bit less PC but I don't see it as my job to keep the family happy, they can sort themselves out however they see fit.
What makes ME happy can't really be pinned down to one thing. The main thing is being allowed the time to simply enjoy whatever it is that I want to do at any given time, whether that be tinkering in my garage, cleaning/tinkering with/riding my motorbike, listening to music or just lazing about doing bugger-all. I plan to get back into classic cars in some, (small), way as I really enjoy that. I also find a wee bit of stargazing very relaxing too.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

I suppose it is children that creates this, so that doesn't apply to me, there is just Nadia and me. And since the responsibilities of my parents have gone with their deaths I *with pleasure* have nothing to do with my elder sisters. So family is not applicable, I suppose I am becoming fixated on my work. Friends are fun to visit and be visited by, I have had Paul Messenger and Terry this summer and Nadia has had two of her friends to stay (one from Moscow), but again not toooo many Visits to hear what I am doing are good, have enjoyed (ego I suppose) the pleasure, and even astonishment, that have greeted the Cubix Pros, my success of the year. The baby Cubettes hopefully will create a stir at a lower level, we will see. I am very much in speaker mode at the moment.

But the sheer delight the wild things in my garden have given me has been the surprise, I didn't feel this in Epping even though less the a half a kilometer from the edge of the forest. I have had to do some tailoring as the garden was dominated to begin with by London pigeons Magpies, Rooks and Crows. We had some small birds but very few and I realised what was happening when I watched the commotion in a tree in the garden as a Magpie killed and eat a nest of baby Blue Tits, and the feeders were constantly raided by Feral Rock Doves (London Pigeons). So an air gun was bought to try and create balance and nature as Mordor and the black forces had control of the garden. Twelve Feral Pigeons and six Magpies donated to the local foxes and they now stay away. The Blue tits have had two additional broods to the one lost and the feeders now are home for six young blue tits and the adults. Many other birds and of course our Ring Necked Parakeets we have had up to six on the feeders at once, the Woodies (Wood Pigeons) we have three pairs who visit, are like flying cows, very heavy and clumsy, and they hoover up everything into their crop and fly up into the trees like blundering bombers to digest it. Two different Robins which is a surprise as I thought they were territorial, and lots of other odd birds I have yet to identify, though I know we get two types of woodpecker. The only thing missing which is very worrying is no Sparrows, not one all summer, and years ago everywhere had clouds of them. A lot of people are blaming the growth in Magpie numbers that have seen an enormous surge in recent years killing them and their young. No Starlings, which I don't miss, noisy things. Insects number well down on years from my memory and very few honey bees, but we have had a spurt of Dragonflies and Damselflies recently coming up from the ponds on the river.

And of course my #1 garden entertainment, the Squirrels, bunch of hooligan school kids and hilariously funny to watch as they play out their dominance and mating games on the feeders (and up the side of our house). We have three we always recognise in half tail, no tail (just a stub) and Cap't Birdseye who is blind in one eye and just has like large black surface to the eye almost looking like an eye patch. Capt Birdseye and at least one of the females comes up to my widow ledge of my workroom to feed as I put a container of peanuts there, and they are almost daring to come in and visit me now, but I have to stay very still.

Warm day, put Beethovens Pastoral on the Pros, open the window. I really don't need to go anywhere else.

[Fretless]

My great pleasure in life has always been music. This stems from a childhood as a chronic asthmatic who could only manage lying in bed and listening constantly to BBC Radio One and reading Biggles, Arthur C Clarke and Asimov.

Music has provided me with emotional stability through various troubles and has remained my companion. All music is great if made from the heart and not (primarily) from the wallet. My CD collection is mainly Rock/Pop with a large and varied Classical section and a growing Jazz department.

Hifi came shortly afterwards. At 15, I rewired an ancient wooden gramophone so I could play a radio/cassette recorder through its speaker - I thought it sounded better. My first pay-check went on a Michell Focus TT.

Other lifelong pleasures that come close; cats, cooking tasty meals for good friends and long nature walks, slowly learning to recognise various birds of prey by their calls and there is always a thrill when you spot deer in the woods in the early morning.

[alfafan123]

Thanks Fretless for jolting my memory with your post. My hifi journey started when my cousin bless her donated me her Philips Disc Jockey portable record player, you know the thing you had to open the lid to enable you to play an LP. It was mono naturally in those days but in my naivety I decide to try and emulate a stereo (which at the time was unaffordable to me) by getting a friend at school to make me my first pre-amp (in a plastic soap box of course!) what else and so I took a parallel signal from the cartridge through the pre-amp and wired it into the volume control on one of my parents Ferranti valve radios and so I had dual mono, and it worked quite well (code for it made a racket) which in my head banging days was required. Yes I know it was completely bonkers but great fun but even I couldn't call it hifi as we know it today. .....got me hooked though!

[jammy395]

Is your #1 pleasure listening to music on your hi-fi. (OP)

No - But it's right up there with this lot, (In no particular order)

Shona.
Mince n Tatties.
My Twa Dug's.
Close Family & Friends.
A good Dram.
My Chickens.
Going Home.
Motorbikes.
Shooting.

And probably a whole lot more......