It's not so much an audiophile thing, but sound (music or noise) is experienced by everyone differently. For example, my wife simply cannot ignore any source or sound/noise and as a result doesn't like loud music. On the other hand, I can tune out just about any reasonable noise and focus on whatever I'm wanting to do. I like to joke that I learned this by working construction in high school and college and hating country music. I can tune my kids noise out in the car while my wife simply cannot.
How Audiphiles are Different
So, I can’t spell Audiophile. Doh.
Again, moving this to a new thread to avoid polluting the OP that got me thinking about this.
A couple of events have intersected for me which made me realize just how very different audiophiles can be. Not just in their tastes but the very way in which the ear/brain mechanism is wired for them. This then profoundly affects their priorities in equipment and rooms. There is no one right way to be but those who argue purity of reproduction is the only reason to be an audiphile, well, I have news for you...
At a show many years ago the rooms varied a great deal in the amount of acoustic treatments. Some very expensive gear was in some really poor sounding rooms. From a couple of these rooms I overheard several participants talk about how great the demos were. I was a little surprised. I couldn’t hear anything. All I could hear was the ocean spray of the room.
After this somewhere I read about how exhausting meeting room and class rooms can be. Our brain is always listening through the room acoustics for words. This takes effort. In a reflective room we literally burn more calories just listening than we do in a dampened room. It makes it harder to study or listen, and we get tired more quickly. I’ve also thought about how musicians listen and how many of them don’t hear the recording or the room, they hear the musician's technique. Their brain’s entire symbol system and language is wired to feel technique and expression.
I have hypothesized these things:
- Some of us can listen through bad room acoustics much more easily than others
- Being able to hear minute differences (say in DACs) which don’t appear in steady state tests may very well be possible given long term averaging or some other feature we replicate in modern machine learning/neural networks.
- We train ourselves to be different types of listeners.
And as a result:
- Different listeners have different ear / brain wiring which focuses their preferences one way or another.
- At least to some degree this must be something we learn/train ourselves to do.
- If this is something we can train ourselves to do maybe we should be careful to train ourselves to listen for musical enjoyment rather than discriminating across equipment.
- We should embrace the diversity of audiophiles rather than claim a single purity of purpose.
- Charlatans and snake oil salesmen will never go away.
All of this is just about ear / brain mechanisms. It’s also possible some of us have physical receptors or a combination of different ears/different brains which cause us to hear differently. I remember chatting with a rare lady who was an audiophile and she pointed out that for years she couldn’t listen to DAC’s. They gave her headaches. This was about the same time that DAC’s started getting good at Redbook playback.
What are your thoughts?
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Hi @mceljo - Of course, audiophiles are human, but being human means we become different types of audiophiles, and that's what I was trying to get to. |
I agree with you erik. Your OP is well thought out and stated. It is apparent to me that no two of us hear the same or enjoy the same sound or music. The idea that there is one right system or type of music or sound that is best for everyone is misguided. If you consider how different people are in just about every aspect of their beings, how could there be one best (or preferable) for everyone in music/audio? I read an article where a hearing specialist said that if you brought him 10 people with identical hearing profiles, all 10 would want their hearing aids tuned differently. We do train our hearing and listening too. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. I hope this becomes a lengthy thread and results in fewer: speaker A is the best available / no it isn’t, I heard it myself and it sucks type discussions, although that might be the end of this forum. |
Generally yes. In the beginning I trained myself to listen for minute differences in details and slam… a hold over from college. This drove my purchases.
Over time I learned what real acoustic music sounded like and this took over my decision making and led to me building a much better, incredibly musical system that made all genera sound better and is incredibly engaging. One of the many learning avenues in this complex and multi-disciplinary pursuit. |
Nice one Eric, same reasons nearly all of us have different gear and approach this hobby with different angles. Same reasons we get emotionally involved by a different song or by a different part of same song. Same reasons we have different tastes in clothing and food. All things are not happening through a straight line in our head but through many touch and go's. That's fun. I really enjoy late night listening when the voices of the world are muted (not my family), and have learned to operate in a non treated room, yet. |
Excellent, thought-provoking, and well-written post. In philosophy, my field, these observations fit into the category of theories which argue that perception and interpretation cannot be separated. In practice, they are simultaneous acts. We see the apple as an "apple." If this is true, then arguments based on measurement of specific factors must already presume -- even if they're not explicit about it -- a certain manner of hearing. They presume at least a certain range of interpretations about what it means to hear. The same would be true about vocabulary used to describe sound; again, already interpretation-laden. |
@hilde45 Yes indeed. While I wasn’t intending to get into phenomenology directly with the OP I certainly couldn’t avoid it. One experiment I encourage others to do is to record some one else talking in an average room. Then listen to that recording with headphones. The reality of the sound in the room is entirely different from our memory of hearing the speaker. Our brain is doing so much work that we are unaware in the moment of fist listening that room acoustics are present. Only after we can hear it again and again can we hear the room is very much present in what we first heard. But!!! Here is the cool part, after we become aware of the difference we can then go back that room, ask the speaker to repeat their original words and now we are able to selectively hear the room, or not. |
Do we truly listen through bad room acoustics better (and why the heck as audiophiles are we), or have we just heard most pieces we have listened to so many times that much of what we are hearing is high level memory, not low level detail? Most audiophiles experience from what I can tell is their systems, trade-shows, and a the odd dealer system which is usually less than optimal. Many audiophiles are amazed at what a good acoustic space sounds like because they have rarely experienced it for reproduction. I find for critical listening it removes listener fatigue because you are not bombarded with a cacophony of discordant sound. However, for less critical listening, some fake emphasized ambience can be very pleasant. I enjoy being able to do both with the same system. When I look at the multi tone IMD tests, of which 32 seems to be somewhat standard, I see a recreated waveform that looks like it could be music in its complexity. It is hard to consider that a simple steady state test. |
How can you make that statement Eric for a 32 tone multi-tone test Eric? That is 32 tones, independent, mixed together, which measure volume will swing from low to high at they reinforce and cancel, and then the total result is captures and measured and compared to what the result should be. That strikes me as a very powerful tool. What do you think would provide a better indication of "what we hear"? |
Can you please explain the correlations between those measurements and what I like, or what any other audiophile likes? How were 32 tones selected? Is there a certain number of bones in the human head which corresponds to 32? Am I more susceptible to the middle, beginning or last of those 32 tones? Does it change with age? That isn’t a test which helps explain what I hear. It is yet another stress test which is self-referenced to the inputs. A test about human experience would be referenced to the listener instead.
Also, my name is right in front of you and it is not Eric. |
Not just as audiophiles be we as humans are all different with different approaches and solutions. Just observe how different people count nickels. Some count them individually or in groups some in stacks and then group them. The good news is we all get to the same number. Audiophiles should all get to the same place which is the enjoyment of music but we all approach it really differently. Look at two contributors here @mikelavigne vs @mahgister. Completely different approaches but I don't think that either enjoys the music any more than the other. There's no right or wrong as long as makes you happy. |
You are creating a false equivalence. How many tones, what frequency, etc. really does not matter if the artifacts are below human detectable limits which they appear for many products (not all) to be well below especially considering that loud sounds make quiet sounds at the same time impossible to hear. w.r.t. "what you like", that is a matter of taste, not a matter of reproduction. Why would I spend 10, 20, 30K+ for a piece of equipment that colors the music in a fixed way (that I may not always like), when I could get equipment that has no audible artifacts and color it myself, based on my mood and what music I am listening too? How does one even test for the right color, when most audiophiles don't adequately and certainly don't consistently do acoustics in their room so insisting on a test for flavor of a single component seems pointless and out of place. I would posit this is the failure of audio reviews, and reviewers and the ad-hoc ones on audiophile sites. The review of any component is just the end results of a collection of errors and the odds of you having the same errors are slim. When comparing two products that likely sound exactly the same, the brains invents a difference which too many gladly accept. |
You are right! By the way i admired mikelavigne dedication... Our way are different but i am sure we will understand each other... I work with low cost devices and basic acoustic and psycho-acoustic... He work with high end gear in a dedicated acoustic... Different means same goal... By the way i am not envious at all about any audio system on earth.... Why? Because i am glad to be on the top low Price/S.Q. ratio... My system is average but not my three embeddings workings controls... My listening experience is not average at all... For sure it is not lavigne system but we can live without in our own sonic paradise...
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I disagree with this so much, but it is so far afield from my core point that I will not answer it here. |
Reproduction is an ideal in electronic engineering...It does not exist in the same simplistic way in acoustic/psycho-acoustic... In acoustic experience, the recording trade-off choices of the sound engineer are taken mathematically exactly like they are ( reproduced from analog to digital or the reverse thanks to Fourier) but TRANSLATED in the specific speakers/ specific room acoustic "lingo " for a specific pair of ears.... There is no reproduction at the end but an acoustic/psycho-acoustic translation.... It is in this possible personal translation where the human subjective interpretative factor reside in the recreation of his own experience... What i like is now for the last 10 years in my case the results of my listening experiments...It is not ARBITRARY nor universal.... We must learn to listen, and it is not and never will be just a question about "accuracy"...Acoustic concepts are not reducible to electrical measures...Sorry... Accuracy is a multidimensional concept in acoustic/psycho-acoustic... Not so much in electrical engineering... Accuracy of timbre...Of dynamics... Of the ratio of LEV/ASW, accuracy of imaging.... Accuracy of what?
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thank you @danager and @mahgister for the kind words. trying to be self aware, i view myself as an audiophile who is all in with maximum effort to enjoy every part of the hobby, serious room and system building, and the music. secondarily i have committed lots of resources to support my efforts. i’d like to think i’m known for my commitment, not my budget, but i know that’s not how the forums work. i accept that. onto the topic, "how audiophiles are different"....especially how they listen. here are my thoughts. my views are that there are multiple natural perspectives for any listener. natural selection/evolution has resulted in our ability to listen selectively. for an audiophile it’s a skill that can be learned and improved. we can hear around things. vinyl listeners are able to ignore noise not associated with the music, but are sensitive to noise changing the music. we teach ourselves this. or....we cannot teach ourselves this and reject vinyl as noisy. it’s the way it is. but how does this effect system building and listening to gear? again; it can be learned. with practice we can find references to use to hear important differences. and maybe we have progressed sufficiently in our learning to have an aural memory in our head of particular music we hold up as a template. another level is to recognize how our body and all it’s senses are affected by the music. typically this requires longer listening sessions, where our feelings about the gear and music can evolve and settle. does the quick first impression hold up over longer time. it’s also why so few serious audiophiles use blind testing. that interferes with our natural normal reaction to the music. it adds a disturbance clouding reality of our feelings. adds stress. i can’t really say how other audiophiles process what they hear. but the above is how i do it. it how i make system and music decisions. and i love my process. it keeps me fully engaged. |
I agree we can train ourselves to be better, or at least more discriminating listeners. So, for those who've gone through many systems and system iterations over the years, I wonder if those systems have progressed in such a way to only be subjectively better, in the sense it correlates better with only that person's listening preferences ? Or, have they progressed in a more objective trajectory, conforming to a wider audience's listening preferences? I suppose this also impacts audio manufacturers as well, at least those who voice their final product. Is there an ever growing wider disparity in equipment voicing, or is equipment evolving toward a mean, sounding more alike than different?
Bottom line. Are trained audiophiles evolving in a more or less differentiated pattern? |
Well, certainly tube equipment seems to be moving in the direction of the mean IME. The tube equipment I owned in early 2000's was of the golden glow variety, extreme colorations. More recently various push pulls and SET's more alike than different, all going more toward a more neutral signature, far less significant colorations than I expected. |
MikeLavigne, your knowledge, commitment, efforts, passion is what I appreciate, You can have a budget without knowledge, passions and commitment to this hobby is useless.It takes times to learn this hobby , money alone can’t do it, Like Steve Job said on his death bed with all his money and succes he can make people do what he wants, but his money and success he can’t make anyone die for Him. |
@erik_squires - My intended point was only that we all experience sound differently, so it should be expected that audiophiles would all appreciate different systems/sounds and poor acoustics might be more critical for some than others. |
Mike. Thanks for your post. You come across as very much the essence of an audiophile. What is important is dedication and open mindedness… then approaching getting the best sound by whatever method (frequently massive effort with a small budget when young and with greater budget as is available later in life). The objective maximum sound quality and enjoyment of music. I am listening to an Afro Celt album… one that I enjoyed so much when I was working in Japan… on a state of the art portable system with headphones in the mid 1990’s. It completely wraps me up in the memory and emotional context of the time. Everything about the sound I am hearing is so mesmerizing… my system is so many times better than thirty years ago… what does this have to do with your question? Nothing. Just really enjoying listening to,my system. |
i think with experience we recognize when the circumstances limit the value of what we hear. the lack of room<->speaker synergy, or too high SPL’s, or non musical source or musical choice.....or......those things all together.....as sometimes happen. or maybe we are not in the mood to open our minds and ears. i find it good at shows to return to a room multiple times if i have an interest to give myself multiple times so it was not me. i rarely trust my first impression as i carry baggage into the session and i have to get past that.....and wake up to the music and get past my head space. let the music come to me as just music, not sounds. how do i feel? these situations happen at people’s homes, at shows, at dealers. it’s part of learning. and many times it takes time to ’get--understand’ the system balance and intentions. it might have completely different type of balance than your system so you need to be able to embrace that part of it. and it’s hard sometimes. it might not be just different, it could be bad. it can happen. |
If audiophiles have personal preference for sound quality, and therefore we differ in how sound is perceived, how do you explain that most of the time we do agree on what good recording sound is like: we do agree on which music halls, around the world, do sound wonderful and the ones’s ( most of them) which don’t sound so good. ; and we do agree even that the Munich hi-fi show has by far the best possible sound quality rooms to offer and draws many audiophiles from around the world. Keep in mind that these are objective observations and not subjective based opinions. |
Musicians are trained to hear intervals, chords, arpeggios, BPM, the 16 known basic rhythms and their variations, intonation, pitch, technique and position. There may be other things to learn such as stage moves (taught as a serious elective at Musician’s Institute - GIT, BIT etc.), but expression is not a quantifiable discipline. It won’t be on the Ear Training final exam where in most schools, you’ll be transcribing an entire song in standard musical notation. And yes, ears and ear drums vary in size and sensitivity. Damage plays a part as well. There is also a phenomenon that some experience where they fill in the implied notes and do not realize until told, they are only implied. There is now a name for it, which escapes me at the moment. |
my mind can push acoustics into the background for the most part. but what i can't seem to tune out - is noise, esp. if it is percussive in character [phonographic crackle]. that is the thing that got me to become an audio restoration technician. i never understood how some people can describe phonographic playback as coming from "a black background" when surface noise for me stands out like a sore thumb even on golden-ear systems. |
Listening is also a test. An assumption is being made here to a degree that machine measurements are the objective truth, and that if one heard accurately the listening test would be identical to the mechanical test. The question is whether sound equipment is being made for ears or for machines. Anyway, here's another test, which I assume everyone has done at one time or another. Start listening to a recording on stereo equipment, then cup your hands behind your ears and note the difference. Then, recall that everyone's earlobes are shaped differently. |
Some excellent points being made. Agree with points of OP. I think an important take away is that even expert advice may not be suitable for anyone else except those that "hear" like they do. Unless the two parties know each others' style of listening abilities and can express things in a way for the other's consumption. Another "noise" I have trouble with is visual. Yes, for me I can hardly hear the nuances of my music during a session if my room is too well lit, or new surroundings. I'm a visual-first person so this has to be squelched or my mind is distracted/overloaded. Just me maybe. It's why I like my rarely used, blank TV screen front and center and not art. |
I think many listeners of my generation have developed an inbuilt noise rejection mechanism from decades of listening to vinyl. When someone points it out you can hear it, but otherwise it somehow vanishes into the subconscious part of the psyche. In a similar light, I live in part of Australia which abounds with several species of very noisy cockatoos*, parrots, crows and magpies. When I receive visitors they often point this out and I become aware of the incredible cacophony, however it soon blends into the background and I regain my tranquil state. *if you think heavy metal is hard on the eardrums try listening to a flock of sulphur crested cockatoos at close range… |
H.o., you could substitute 42 for 32 and it may be just as relevant in the long run.... The common element we all share is the enjoyment of music in all its' varied forms of approach and creation. This has been about us as a species since two rocks struck together made an interesting sound...and improved with a pattern of strikes. Not long after, the 'discussions' on How and with which rocks began.... ;) Siding with @mahgister, what and how I approach aural enjoyment is purely personal, as is what is played to accomplish that. You've yours, and more power to y'all. *G* As is what happens when the waveforms hit your ears and how you perceive that is entirely up to your synapses and the memories it stirs loose. Enjoyment of the hunt for what you use to recreate the music that does that follows the preferences you've developed.... You know what you want, but you don't know what you want....it just suks...wtf...*L* 'Equipment matching' X Listening environment / You = 42 ;) Or infinity. Pick your answer. Happy post-4th, J
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I would add that I am always struck by difference between my gear preferences and my musician friends. I have a few friends that are fairly prominent Classical Musicians and they could care less about playback equipment. I’ve always thought that their minds must fill what their playback equipment is missing |
@tannoy56 the answer to your question is obvious but does not match the original posts narrative. While we may have individual preferences around frequency response it seems, how we all hear is fundamentally exactly the same. |
My "ear" is an amalgam of having played music in concert bands, singing in choirs (school and church) and listening to all kinds of live and recorded music thanks to my parents. I can freely admit that some systems I’ve heard lately could be said to "sound better" than mine, but REALLY aren’t for me. What the "audiophile purity" standards lack is the literal feeling in your body of being within and amongst the sound. I’ve sat in a choir loft with pipe organ pipes very close-by. Or when I played sax, and our row was right in front of the lower brass instruments (trombones and tubas). If my speakers don’t give me any visceral feelings, if they don’t distort (to my expectations) the ways instruments do, I find them to be unreal and thus lacking in some way. (Not just loud volume, I know the difference) Accuracy is the most laughable term ever used by audiophiles, and we’re all sensitive to different distortions, differently. It’s true, we’re definitely not all seeking the same things. That’s the beauty of it, to me. |
Your speakers absolutely should not distort at all. If they do, then they are not going to accurately reproduce the distortion of the recorded instrument. If you want to recreate that instrument as you claim you cannot be adding additional distortions. If you do, it is not the recorded instrument you are hearing. Perhaps you like that but then your musical pedigree loses its value in the argument you are presenting. If you are listening from the choir loft next to the pipe organ you aren't hearing the same thing as the audience either. |
Great stuff! You are actually, in the main, are referring to The Perception of Hearing. Perhaps you and others will find an article on page 42 of HiFi Critic, Vol.12/No.1 (Jan-Mar 2018) of interest? It was written from my personal experience, with only the odd typo edited by the publisher. Cheers! BP |
We start with a common interest, audio and hi-fi, We comment here on forums and we share experience and opinions. But I think something else takes over that is more significant than our common interest in audio. The temperament, arrogance, humbleness, patience or impatience and other human qualities weave into the conversation and ugliness comes out. In my opinion, it’s like road rage because the personality and "true self" emerges of any individual. Your fellow "audiophile" can be helpful or can be very rude and inconsiderate. They can be dumb and mean. One can walk away with the feeling, "I could be friends with that fellow" or one could say "I think that guy is a total jerk". So IMO that aspect I just mention has the ability to quickly "over ride" or "over shadow" any ideas about "audiophiles are different". Audiophile is a much smaller aspect of who we are.... |
This is true, but there would be no industry and nothing to talk about without a lot of commonalities. We may be individuals, but we're not solipsists.
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+1 @denverfred Bill Evans...AWESOME! Great subject and discussion. Ultimately it is "To Each His Own..."
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