Critical listening and altered states


Ok, this is not a question about relaxing, but about listening to evaluate how the system (or a piece of gear is sounding).

What, in your experience, are the pluses and minuses of altering your state of mind for listening? This can include anything you've used to affect your everyday state of mind, from coffee, beer, scotch, tobacco, to much stronger — and psychoactive, dissociative — additives.

What do you gain by altering your consciousness in terms of what you notice, attend to, linger on, etc?
What causes more details to emerge?
What allows you to stick with a thread or, alternately, make new connections?

Or perhaps you like to keep all those things *out* of your listening; if that's you, please say a bit about why.

hilde45

You quoted me wrong sns..

This is my text :

The gear pieces design quality and synergy cannot be replaced  but only compensated by acoustics controls, mechanical one mainly in my case and also equalization and tone control.

But on the other hand no piece of gear can replace acoustic control impact to gain natural timbre and sound spatial characteristics...

 

 

 

 

Everybody knows that the first thing to solve is gear design quality and synergy and this cannot be replaced by acoustics magic...

But AFTER  the buying is done, nothing replace acoustics controls , no upgrade will improve the system room  so much importantly and effectively ...Even for an upgrade evaluation it is better to have a good acoustics control of the room...

 I had insisted on this because the "disease" of audio is upgrading gear race...And acoustics ignorance...

 
 

 

 

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@mahgister 

On my K340 it is celestial syrup of the most ethereal kind...Like a set of  colors distillation at the limit of the visible spectrum flowing and flying ...

 

 

 

I know

  it seems a ridiculous set of metaphors, especially out of his context, but it was what i felt listening to  it when my optimization process was completed. 

Remember that i never enjoyed the high frequencies on any of my system as i enjoyed bass and deep bass. It was the first time in all my audio journey. 

And these metaphors conveyed my subjective feelings of this moment. Now i am a highs frequencies head in a way... I like violin much more...

The point is an audiophile system must gave high frequencies enjoyable to the most level possible as well as deep bass..

 

 

I am just beginning to read Oliver Sack's book Musicophilia - Tales of Music and the Brain.  I bet it would interest many participants in this thread.  If you have read it, I would be interested in your thoughts....