Little bit about me and my interests.

Hi,
I'm Randall DZM.

I'm 19 years old, Asian, and absolutely love music! As you can probably tell this blog will mainly be dedicated to my experiences with music, music equipment and the like. I'll try and keep this updated as much as I can. Also, with every post I do, I'll try and include a short review of some current music I'm listening too from my collection. I guess I'll explain a bit how I became interested in this hobby.
Note: I'm gonna ramble on for a bit now and this post may get boring (I'll try not to do this with future posts.)

I've always been interested in music and began to be introduced to popular music during my junior high years.  At this time I began looking for a more portable option to listen to my music. I've never really been a fan of Apple (or windows for that matter) so during mid 8th grade, I picked up my very first mp3 player; a Sansa Fuze. By the time I got to my freshman year, I was like any other teenager using Skullcandy's and listening to low quality rips of music.

Towards the end of my freshman year after having been through multiple pairs of Skullcandys I decided to look for some better IEMs (In Ear Monitors (they are essentially a fancy name for earbuds)- more on this in a later post). That search lead me to Head-fi and the beginning of my addiction to Hi-fi music. Growing up, my parents owned a mid-fi system that I preferred to anything I listened too. This quickly became a reference system for me to compare my portable setups too. I began to realize there was so much I was missing and how much better music could sound. The only problem with this was I didn't really have a way to move this setup around due to the size so my focus shifted to a portable setup. Throughout high school,  my tastes in music began to change partly because of this realization. Many would say this was a turn for the worse, as I started to stray away from popular music and started listening to less well known bands and older music. Popular music just didn't interest me anymore, though there are exceptions and I still do listen to a tiny amount of what is considered to be mainstream music. Not only that, my music collection grew a tremendous amount during my 4 years of high school. I also began to explore the different equipment that makes hi-fi music possible. I now firmly believe in buying cds (it supports the artist too! :) ) and ripping to lossless file formats.

My current collection spans roughly ~240,000 songs and 3TB of storage. I do most of my listening on my portable setup as i'm out and about a lot. When I get the chance though I try and listen on my home setup. My portable setup consists of a source (Cowon s9), Amp (Pa2v2/Homebuilt), and IEMs (Head Directs RE0's.) The sound is absolutely stunning and in my opinion a portable setup doesn't get much better. I'll be reviewing the different components in later posts as well as a review of how it sounds altogether in more depth. The more deeply I delved into this hobby I realized the more I felt the compulsion to upgrade my setup. When this happens I plug in a pair of stock apple ibuds and listen to some of my music while reminding myself of the law of diminishing returns, then plug back in my headphones/IEMs and enjoy what I have. After all, that's what this hobby is really all about to me; enjoying my music. (That isn't to say I don't upgrade, I just upgrade less often now XD) Once in a while, I'll also post my informal impressions on movies I watch.

Wow, that post ended up being much longer than I intended and probably sounds really boring. I swear future posts will be more interesting. :P

Next up: My musical progression from past to present + informal review on the movie Soul Surfer.