Cerebral versus Visceral?

Gee, if only I had a system with Marantz and JBL components...
wait a minute, I do. 👍

Like SG says, it sounds right within the first 10 seconds. Almost every time. It's a system I don't have to think about unless the upgrade bug is bitting and even then, whatever I'm listening to lulls me back to the music and I just give up on the thought of that MacBook with the Holo Spring DAC and drift off.

It's music that I can feel even at moderate levels and I'm not talking about bass or SPLs.. It's everything. If your system can't elicit some kind of sensation that you can feel in your skin, your body, engaging your emotions, without turning things up to lease breaking levels, then there's something amiss with your system.

Sure, the mind is always working as audiophiles are never content but as the music plays, those thoughts should dissipate into the ether and the right system will do it. 

All the best,
Nonoise

Thank god...a new either/or to kick around. Bye bye Laurel/Yanni, hello visceral/cerebral.

I want to expand on @nonoise point.

One really interesting idea I've been thinking about for a while is where exactly in our body do we perceive music? 

The idea that the ear/brain mechanism is the only part of the equation may not be fully accurate. By this, I don't mean where do we feel emotion. I literally mean, does our skin, and the nerves in that and our viscera play a part in our perception and interpretation of music? 

Like Freud, who over emphasized the mind, and cognition, without taking into account the part our brain/skin/body played in our sense of self and well being, do we do the same with music? I think this may be among the most fascinating future topics. 

Best,

Erik 

@erik_squires 

I feel that the skin is a receptor in more ways than we give it credit for. There's touch(ing), feel(ing), and the like for navigating our bodies on a daily basis. There's levels of that for everything from simple tasks to making love to playing sports to life and death scenarios. 

It's our skin that was the first organ to deal with life as we evolved and our ears that eventually became the finely tuned instruments that they are. There's still some purpose of hearing left in the skin on a rudimentary level that works in concert with our ears. It's not just the bones in our skulls that aid in hearing, as I see it.

That accounts for frisson, which I've brought up a couple of times before and it looks like now it's relevant, again. It could be that through simple disuse coupled with technology that we don't rely on our skin's hearing ability as we used to but some of us are still in touch (pardon the pun) with that innate ability as simply crunching the numbers statistically would bear out. It couldn't just cease in all of us at the same time. 

Food for thought.
All the best,
Nonoise