As you'll see from my other blog, I'm currently a stay at home dad. I drop our four and a half year old off at school first thing, then spend the day following our one and a half year old around picking up toys, porridge, nappies etc. Which means I'm in that twilight zone of folk who spend their days at home with kids. Of course, in between mashing up pasta, I play with my own toys.
Much of my daily tinkering is around what to listen to while I'm sitting on the floor reading the same book over and over again. And how to make sure I can hear it when I could end it up anywhere in the house.
My CD collection was ripped long ago to FLAC and now sits on a network drive accesible from any computer in the house. It only really starts to live when heard through a decent DAC. Staggeringly, a seriously good DAC now costs about £50 (the equivalent of a £500 CD player I'd guess).
But even with 50 days worth of music to shuffle, I've found it a bit, well, soulless. The answer I've stumbled on is to go back to radio. Radio 4, obviously, is only bearable a few hours at a time. Radio 3 is ecstatic about one day solid a week. So, what to have on the rest of the time?
The other day I put on a high bit rate radio stream from record and hi-fi company Linn - Linn Radio. There's no presenter, no news, no weather. It's just the Linn record collection endlessly shuffled and genre filtered. And yet, the pleasure of listening to someone else's choice of music is strangely fulfilling and connects me with others far more than hitting my own shuffle button. A little trace of adult communication while I explain again that birdies and doggies are different things.
