I’m an audiophile.

Next to creating and producing music I love listening to it. The thing is, I don’t just listen to it, I get involved with it… which brings up a recent experience:

How many times have you been faced with a situation that seems not to have any solution?

Let me explain what happened to me the other day. I have these two big 250 lbs (each) studio monitor speakers that used to be sitting in the wall (in sophits) in my former recording studio. You’ve all seen pictures of recording studios with the big mixing console, etc. That’s how my control room looked.

When Gwen and I built our dream house I had the Architect design (to my specs) a new control room as well as a dedicated listening room. (Hey every musicians’ dream is to have a world class recording studio in the house!) Well, to speed up the story. We don’t use big consoles to mix music anymore, it’s done in the box (inside the computer). So these behemoth speakers were relegated to the listening room. Where they made great home theatre speakers but not what I would call “audiophile” quality for listening to music.

Now in their heyday these speakers demanded (and received) 600 watts of power each! But now things were very different… I enjoy moderately low listening levels when I listen to music but I want to hear everything. I’ve got this really cool tube amp that only puts out 35 watts a channel (not 600). Needless to say when I connected the big speakers it didn’t sound right.

I set them up about 8 feet apart like they were in the old studio. The sound was small and congested so of course I blamed the amp.

Then I woke up the other morning with an idea:

Why was I thinking like it was still a recording studio? Why do those speakers have to be 8 feet apart? So I moved them further apart… about 16 feet apart! Now you would think that the small tube amp would never work now, because the speakers were so far apart…Guess again!

The speakers disappeared!

And a large holographic image of the music appeard between the speakers! It was amazing and I was floored. How many years had gone by (7 years) that I hadn’t taken advantage of this amazing musical bliss!…That was always there waiting for me to just “connect the dots”.

By changing my perspective regarding what was possible, I transformed already existing things (tube amp and studio monitors) into something I never imagined would work together… much less create an astonishing result!

Everything you need to transform your life is already in your possession or you have access to it… Change the way you look at your life and you will immediately alter the possibilities… Change your perspective/viewpoint.

Like me you may be blinded by a preconcieved notion…

Just by moving a couple of speakers another 8 feet apart I suddenly had the sound of a $50,000 sound system…and it didn’t cost me a cent!

-Bob Baran