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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?

 

erik_squires
ghdprentice
6,993 posts
 

@2psyop 

True. I so much like it when we stay on light, helpful, respectful side.

nonoise's avatar
nonoise
10,875 posts
 

Great TED talk. We're all different because art, as they say, is subjective, and music is, if nothing else, the epitome of art. 

I guess that makes all of us a bit of a solipsist as we can only speak of ourselves when it comes to music appreciation. Try telling that to someone who only hears "measured sound". 👍

All the best,
Nonoise

chowkwan
167 posts
 

Have you ever been at a concert where the orchestra sounds better after the intermission? Did the orchestra or your hearing adjust to the room?

Have you ever been tucked away in the upper corner of the Musikverein in Vienna and found the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic to be just as ravishing as in the center stalls? Even though you couldn't see a single musician. There is magic in that hall.

Did you ever listen through the noise on the Unicorn recording of Furtwangler conducting Brahm's German Requiem? And been moved to tears.

* Mr. Rose of Pristine Recordings has worked miracles cleaning up this recording while preserving the emotion.

 

serjio's avatar
serjio
371 posts
 

nevertheless, the decisive factor is the availability of money and great life experience (at the same time) ...

Ag insider logo xs@2x
jji666
536 posts
 

This is a very interesting discussion.  We do hear things differently, and we also value different things. 

I value having access to so many different pieces of music and artists and being able to enjoy them in so many different ways - stereo audio, multichannel, concert video, through tubes, SS gear, planars, cones, subs, no subs, etc. In that way I don't necessary have a preference for one sound (although in general there is a gear configuration with my planars that I love the best) but rather enjoy tuning and configuring the system to best fit the media.  That's when I realize I've been being called to dinner for 30 minutes.  

I had an interesting experience a few months back.  My good friend has a pair of KEF R3 speakers he'd be talking up, and he wanted me to fly down to have a listen (and for his birthday, to be fair).  I said I'd come if he'd finally bite the bullet and buy some cost-effective separates to replace the Yamaha receiver he'd been using for 2 channel. 

When I arrived, he still had the KEFs on the Yammy and kept asking "don't they sound great?"  I could hear some pretty tones - felt the tweeter had some potential -- but I felt I could hear some form of stuffiness or compressive quality in the midrange and high bass.  The detail wasn't there, more like a traffic jam of sounds.  He had the sound running from his Firestick (!) to his TV via HDMI (!) then through the ARC (!) to the Yammy (!) then out to his speakers.  I feared I had some expectation bias given that awful signal path, and maybe was just confirming that with my feeling on the sound.

When we got the separates in place, it was no comparison and he could hear it too.  Everything was crisper and that traffic jam feeling I had was gone.

OK that's a good story about improving sound from a terrible signal path.  But what has stayed with me has been the question about what I heard in the before and after and how it wasn't frequency response, or volume, or timber, or even rhythm.  It was something else, and something I don't think I could have heard had I not spent the last 10 years listening to my system. And I wonder what the exact differences were (albeit obviously the difference was vast) between the two signal paths that created such dramatic results.  

Compared to our other senses, we don't have a good lexicon to describe what we hear.  And that goes not just to language but I think to our brains which don't do as well phenomenologically with audio as with our other senses.  We tend to use metaphors like "bright."  And in many ways the auditory memory seems more fleeting.  While the sense is there - I could clearly detect the traffic jam feeling -- pinning it down, describing it, analyzing it, permanently retaining that aspect, quite difficult. 

That's why, in the end, it does have to be all about the music. 

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