Why audiophiles are different (explained with color)

When I run "elitist drivel" through my trusty decoder ring it comes out, "So far beyond my comprehension I will throw an insult and hope nobody notices how mindless it is."

No such luck.

Language/perception is another good one covered by Harley. He uses the example of an x-ray, which is nothing but shades of gray, and how when you learn enough about the underlying anatomy, and pathology, and the physics of x-ray after a while it is almost like you can see in 3D. It was little more than a neat metaphor at the time. But now having gone through the program, learned x-ray, and getting quite good at reading films I have to say he was really onto something.

There is a very real debate to be had about which comes first, the word or the understanding. If you read the bible, In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. So there was word, simultaneously God. Which would have to be, since at this point there was no Man, so how could there even be word, in the normal sense of word?

This isn’t just some pie in the sky nonsense either, certainly not elitist drivel (although it may well be hard to follow) because it is our everyday experience.

In the beginning I could not for the life of me hear any difference between CD players. They all sounded exactly the same. I even was in a demo one time where the customer compared and he couldn’t hear any difference either. So I know this is not super easy or innate but rather takes a bit of skill.

At the same time I was reading and trying to learn the glossary of audio terms I was listening and trying to figure out what they meant. How to connect the words to the experience.

It was all very frustrating until suddenly one day, Aha! That is what it is! Something flipped and I knew what I was hearing and was sure of it, and could describe it. Talk about it. Before it was all just, Well it sounds expensive. Better. Vague, like that.

I don’t know how other people get there. I don’t know that a lot of them ever do. Many may well go their whole lives ridiculing "elitist drivel" without ever understanding a word of it. Oh well.

Even if we have a word for the object "gorilla" we can miss the perception of the gorilla crossing the theater scene where it is completely unexpected...It is a very well known experiment in psychology...

Then imagine you dont have even a word for a new concept, how could you perceive it consciously ore be attentive to the phenomenon described by this concept for which no word exist then no expectation?

It will be difficult.....


The greek perception of the ocean and of the wine were the product of a cenesthesical association between the lost of balance at sea, the effect of the wine on balance, and the darker color of the 2....

The greeks live in a world where their intimate participation in the world was more intense than today, and the powerful cenesthesia linking different phenomena prevented them to separate the wine experience for example and the sea experience by a new word for the distinctive color of the sea... separating the 2 phenomena by an abstract color qualification was not possible for them....


The effect of the sea on the body, the enebriation of navigating and of drinking wine, like of the wine darker color like of the darker color of the sea and action on the balance of the body by the wine and the sea navigation was too powerful to separate the 2 by a more abstract distinction...The color experience of the sea and of the wine cannot be separated from the lost of balance and enebriation and joy of drinking and navigating...


Then a perceptive difference is always associated with other aspects of perception, it takes an act of distantiation, a less participative stance, to create a new word/concept for a new conscious experience....

Language implicate the lost of the world where the animal is immersed completely...Individual consciousness and abstract experience is linked to language....

Without expecting for a bear to cross the theater scene, most people wont see it at all.... And furthermnore without the word/concept "bear" no one will see it, the brain will erase it from the scene, unable to imagine it at all...

Like the Indians of South  America never see a "boat" when they see Hernando Cortes, they see gods at best....Unkonwn powerful indescriptible phenomenon...

The greeks drinking wine and navigating experience the 2 powerfully together without thinking a moment to dissociate the 2 with a new color concept that will separate them completely....

rixthetrick, of course it refers to how it’s portrayed in playback systems. Style of music is not the issue; nor is dancing, although I suspect that a good dancer reacts to what I refer to.

Some pieces of gear simply do a much better job of portraying rhythm than others do, and they do this in different ways. I will leave the possible technical reasons to others, but some gear sounds much more rhythmically alive while, at the other extreme, some sounds practically rhythmically dead by comparison. Some do well at higher volume settings, but not so well at low volume settings. There is gear with every level of competence in between in this aspect of music. This is all a generalization.

I’ve experienced gear that sounds very alive through the midrange, but is sluggish in the bass range; even when the bass reproduction is pretty good tonally (not overblown).  I’ve also experienced gear/systems that portray, for instance, the crescendo that a well recorded orchestral string section makes in a segmented (for lack of a better word) way as opposed to a seamless and gradual incremental crescendo from very soft to very loud. Lesser gear might get the low volume content and the high volume peaks just fine, but not what happens in between. In a Jazz quintet, for instance, there might be a beautiful interplay between the piano players left hand and the bass player that while heard volume wise does not give the listener the sense that the piano player and bass player are “locked in” and listening very intently to each other while the saxophone solos. Some gear does let you hear this and some doesn’t do it as well. IMO, this can all be attributed to how well gear portrays micro-dynamics in music.
Hope this clarifies.

The gorilla experiment is the tip of a very big iceberg.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBoF8URq1cw

My gear is average but very well embedded and in a room under controls...

Timbre experience was my relatively large bandwith response feed back from the room/speakers to help me fine tune the Helmholtz mechanical equalizer...

But any average system like mine even in a very well mastered room has some limit...

Some gear does let you hear this and some doesn’t do it as well. IMO, this can all be attributed to how well gear portrays micro-dynamics in music.

This microdynamic expressing gesture of playing between 2 instruments locked one with the other by their "rythmical resonance" is after timbre experience the most important criteria about an audio system for me...

It is the only reason why i would upgrade, if i could afford it, my 500 bucks system to a 15,000 bucks one...( yes i calculate the price even if i could never afford it) But happily i have a "minimal" experience of this microdynamics ONLY because my system is well controlled...I can live with my actual system without killing myself...

But a "minimal" experience is not an optimal experience... For sure...

I console myself with this minimum and anyway most people dont live this experience even with system way more costly than mine....microdynamics is harder to get than timbre experience which is his acoustical basis....

The perception of microdynamics is less the perception of separate details by some costly piece of gear able to act like a microscope, than an ability by the system/room to link the part and the whole in a rythmical way....It is why it remind me of a rythmical playing "resonance" ... Details are not separate from the body of sound like a fractal effect but experienced together distinctively but never separate more like hues of color..

Thanks frogman to this important post about microdynamics...