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Maybe being discerning isn't that good for us?

A topic I touch on now and then, I think about what the average person hears, what I hear, and what it means to be discerning. What good is it for us, our community, and the industry?

I’ll touch on a couple of clear examples. I was at a mass DAC shoot out and spoke with one of the few ladies there. To paraphrase her, she said this:

Only with DACs made in the the last few years can I listen to digital music without getting a headache.

I never had that problem, but we both experienced a significant improvement in sound quality at about the same time. Lets take her statement as 100% true for this argument.

On the other hand, I am completely insensitive to absolute phase issues which some claim to be. I’m also VERY sensitive to room acoustics, which many fellow audiophiles can completely ignore.

Lets assume the following:

  • The lady really did get headaches due to some issue with older DACs
  • There really are people very sensitive to absolute phase.

I’ve also found the concept of machine learning, and neural networks in particular truly fascinating. In areas of medical imaging, in specific areas such as breast cancer detection, neural networks can be more accurate than trained pathologists. In the case of detecting early cancer, discernment has an obvious advantage: More accuracy equals fewer unnecessary procedures, and longer lives, with less cost. Outstanding!!

Now what if, like the trained neural networks, I could teach myself to be sensitive to absolute phase? This is really an analog for a lot of other things like room acoustics, cables, capacitors, frequency response, etc, but lets stick to this.

Am I better off? Did I not in fact just go down a rabbit hole which will cause me more grief and suffering? Was I not better before I could tell positive vs. negative recording polarity?

How do you, fellow a’gonner stop yourself, or choose which rabbit holes to go through? Ever wonder if you went down one too many and have to step back?
erik_squires
hilde45's avatar
hilde45
5,109 posts
 
@erik_squires I really love this question.

I suppose I'd just wonder about how you deal with other situations where you are able to shift your perceptual acuity into high or low resolution.

For example, when I go out for what a friend of mine calls "good-bad Chinese food," we know that we're going there to enjoy some grub, get filled up, have a good time. The food has to be decent but I set my expectations in the right place and I enjoy the heck out of it. And the occasion.

Other times, it's a nice meal for a special occasion or just to "dine out." Then, I'm expecting more, paying more, and judging more. I'm not a food snob or a restaurant critic, but I'm in a situation where I can be more critical without ruining the occasion. The quality of the food is relevant to the occasion.

The point of these analogies is to see what else you or others would add about how their listening might adjust based on occasion or even recording. I love that live Joni album, but it's badly recorded; nevertheless, when "Carey" comes on, I'm jamming with it. I forget the niceties and go with it because the music sets the occasion.

jbrrp1
423 posts
 
@cd318  

Yes, that was part of my education - - to learn that my finely tuned ear and reactions were over-active and miscalibrated for the normal people in my life.  They worked great in the special circumstances of a profoundly screwed up household, but don't translate so well elsewhere.

I also get that this hobby being mostly an encouragement to solitary experience fits in, too.  Yet my most favorite listening sessions are when another music head wants to immerse together for a multi-hour exploration.  Can't do that often enough!
edcyn
1,876 posts
 
It's okay to be totally crazed over stuff. Ya just have to know when to lighten up,
analogvm15's avatar
analogvm15
112 posts
 
 Beatles and others in early stereo had  vocals and instruments divided. I pushed the mono button on the preamp. Way better.
geof3
1,129 posts
 
Early stereo recordings did all sorts of crazy things with panning. Some of it had to do with the analog medium itself, tracking etc. Some of it had to do with simply the recordings themselves, as often they were live, all in the same room. In those early days room isolation didn’t exist, so in order to have music not be a complete mess, they would pan relative to position and mic bleed. Often they would put the dry vocal track panned full to one side and the effects panned full to the other, Zepp and the Beatles did this often.

And I would agree, most of us take this whole thing way to seriously. I think to some degree, the sheer amount of $$$ spent in this hobby forces a need to be overly discerning to justify the out lay. It’s very easy to get too wrapped up in all the crap and not just simply enjoy the music for what it is, how ever it was meant to be heard. The other thing I think we get WAY to wrapped up in, is trying to make recorded music sound “live”. That’s just a pipe dream, unfortunately. Systems can sound absolutely fantastic, but they are ALWAYS at the mercy of how the music was recorded, and how it was manipulated. So yeah, we get way to hung up on all this stuff... but really, isn’t that true for anything we are passionate about?
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