Fight or flight
Mapman wrote,
"I am a big believer in spirituality and how that affects how one
interacts with the world."
I don't doubt that you are a big believer or that spirituality affects how one
interacts with the world. However, I'm not referring to spirituality any more
than I'm referring to new ageism, Zen, placebo effect, expectation bias,
group hypnosis, Magik, subliminal advertising or long distance healing.
What I'm leading up to is the Idea that what we're hearing when we listen to
music on our stereo rigs is not really the sound that the system is
producing! We cannot hear the real sound of the system, we only hear a
cardboard facsimile of it, a more distorted, compressed and uninvolving
version.
The reason we cannot hear the real thing is because of many things in the
environment that produce stress or anxiety and degrade our sense of
hearing. As Ivan described, the fight or flight syndrome reduces sensory
perceptions as more important biological procesess take over. The
problem is that the fight or flight syndrome is always present because so
many things, even ordinary things, in the modern world produce it. Since
the mind-matter interaction is primarily subconscious or autonomous we
are not aware of it and cannot control it. Obviously, since everyone has
always been subject to this unfortunate circumstance we take it for granted.
We did not see this coming.
Have you ever turned up the volume and found the sound to be way too
distorted? That distortion you hear is not produced by the system, well a
little bit maybe. The distortion you hear is actually produced by the reaction
to the fight or flight syndrome. Because other biological functions have
priority the senses of hearing and vision degrade, so the distortion is a
manifestation of the degraded sense of hearing. The stress or anxiety is
produced by things that we interpret as threats. Obviously not everything in
the environment is a real threat but since the subconscious mind cannot
always be absolutely sure, it sometimes over-reacts. Better safe than
sorry.
An example of something that produces this effect is an ordinary telephone
book (of all things). Taking all telephone books out of the house will usually
be audible when you go back and listen to the system. Even if the
telephone books are in other rooms of the house, they should be removed.
The telephone book is perceived as an intruder by virtue of the fact that it is
linked to a strong Field created by the tens or hundreds of thousands of
identical telephone books. So, the link to that field can be eliminated by
removing the telephone books from the house, making the house Safe from
the telephone book "information field". That's enough
information for now, I suspect. :-)
All of this doesn't change the fact we still have the problem of deciding if or
how the same old things affect the sound, things like fuses, wire
directionality, burn-in, etc.
