New digs

It's difficult to put a positive spin on moving. A recent survey ranked it as life's most stressful event, ahead of divorce, losing a job, or becoming a parent. Forty-two percent of respondents said it brought them to tears. Thirteen percent said it was worse than a week in jail.

- BY ALEX HALBERSTADT

There's no point in listing the well-documented hassles, humiliations, and expenses involved in changing homes, or point out the ample opportunities for things to go from predictably stressful to memorably horrific. It's the less obvious aspects that strike me as interesting. At the risk of sounding maudlin, I keep coming back to the sudden knowledge that the part of your life spent in your former home is now over and can no longer be rebranded, reimagined, or negotiated with. And then there's the sensation of uprootedness, so similar to grief, that for me manifests as a persistent desire to go home and the subsequent realization that the home I'm yearning to return to is no longer there. The only upside is that this doesn't last forever.

Moving also means exchanging a familiar sonic environment for an untested one.

For audiophiles, there's another layer of stress: Moving also means exchanging a familiar sonic environment for an untested one. When I gave up my loft last fall, I was saying goodbye to a listening room that I'd gotten to explore for 13 years. By the end, I knew most of its quirks and had grown to love listening to music in it. It offered the advantages of a really large, open space—first among them the opportunity to play music at near concert volumes and hear it reproduced with dynamics that sometimes approached those of the real thing.