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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
erik_squires OP
16,049 posts
 

@hilde45 Yes indeed. While I wasn’t intending to get into phenomenology directly with the OP I certainly couldn’t avoid it.

One experiment I encourage others to do is to record some one else talking in an average room. Then listen to that recording with headphones. The reality of the sound in the room is entirely different from our memory of hearing the speaker. Our brain is doing so much work that we are unaware in the moment of fist listening that room acoustics are present. Only after we can hear it again and again can we hear the room is very much present in what we first heard.

But!!! Here is the cool part, after we become aware of the difference we can then go back that room, ask the speaker to repeat their original words and now we are able to selectively hear the room, or not.

erik_squires OP
16,049 posts
 

PS- In the title I meant to ask how audiophiles vary from each other.  Not necessarily that audiophiles are different than your average person.

deludedaudiophile
493 posts
 

Do we truly listen through bad room acoustics better (and why the heck as audiophiles are we), or have we just heard most pieces we have listened to so many times that much of what we are hearing is high level memory, not low level detail? Most audiophiles experience from what I can tell is their systems, trade-shows, and a the odd dealer system which is usually less than optimal. Many audiophiles are amazed at what a good acoustic space sounds like because they have rarely experienced it for reproduction. I find for critical listening it removes listener fatigue because you are not bombarded with a cacophony of discordant sound. However, for less critical listening, some fake emphasized ambience can be very pleasant. I enjoy being able to do both with the same system.

When I look at the multi tone IMD tests, of which 32 seems to be somewhat standard, I see a recreated waveform that looks like it could be music in its complexity. It is hard to consider that a simple steady state test.

erik_squires OP
16,049 posts
 

I still put IMD tests back at the "vintage" rather than "progressive" category of measurements.   Useful, old, and not helping us better understand what else we hear. 

deludedaudiophile
493 posts
 

How can you make that statement Eric for a 32 tone multi-tone test Eric?  That is 32 tones, independent, mixed together, which measure volume will swing from low to high at they reinforce and cancel, and then the total result is captures and measured and compared to what the result should be. That strikes me as a very powerful tool.

What do you think would provide a better indication of "what we hear"?

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