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

I had it for years and did not read him yet...

 Thanks to remind me i must die soon and then must read it sooner...

 

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....

@mahgister 

Oh, my aging brain!  ;o/

I didn't intend to post such an incomplete (and possible cryptic) message. 

What I mean to to ask was whether you view "sweetness of tone" as inherent to the violin and regard any stridency as an artifact of poor audio performance or whether you have deliberately configured your headphone system to present a "sweeter" tonality simply because it's what you prefer, esthetically. 

What I mean to to ask was whether you view "sweetness of tone" as inherent to the violin and regard any stridency as an artifact of poor audio performance or whether you have deliberately configured your headphone system to present a "sweeter" tonality simply because it’s what you prefer, esthetically. 

 

Very good question! thanks.

I optimized my K340 (6 modifications ) in 6 months of experiments and thinking... I dont liked  it so much  after buying it , i experimented with it because i had no other choices after the selling of my house and my first dedicated room.

 One this is said i do not "reconfigured" the K340..

 The K340 has a dedicated cell for bass, a dedicated cell for highs frequencies..

I cannot reconfigure that without destructing his amazing properties linked to the right crossover point at 4,000 Hertz and to his dual acoustic chamber with 5 tuned resonators.

I only optimized it helping his working pieces to reach their peak potential...( --suppression of the protective thick grid, --right pads which is very important because the size of the pads and their acoustic properties are critical matter for the dual chamber optimal working,--equalization,--right amplification is critical,control of resonance and vibration with 2 different materials,-- a dac cleaner than warm )

 

Now when i spoke about the Highs as "honey" i was referring to exceptional recording of violin acoustically... (Tacet Vivaldi tube only recording for example )

With a bad recording i will not get this "flying" wings of angels with violin...

I had other recordings of violin way less spectacular...The highs are not as spectacular...They are only good without any stressing effect...

But i had none with stridency and stressful sound...

Stridency of violins result most of the times from the gear synergy or bad design in my experience...Or someimes but more rarely from  bad recordings i guess..

I remember the horrible highs of my planar Hifiman 400  driven by two dacs  and 2 amp very popular 10 years ago  which were strident and horrible, unnatural, especially badly driven...

Also my  low cost Stax presented unnatural highs... But not the Stax SR5 gold though which was good in tonality and timbre...Not as natural as the K340 at all though...

Naturalness of timbre is the most difficult factor to get right with headphone...

I never succeed with any of the three types of headphones  i owned (10 headphones) only the K340 did it for me, once i learned how to use this complex headphone, criticized once by reviewer who think that they can plug it on anything and call it job done..( they  described the integration of the 2 cells are unsuccessful. I know now why they experienced this )

i think AKG  discarded it  after few years because it was too costly to produce it and make big profit and too costly to optimize it and improve it... They created another flagship the K1000 (apparently no deep bass but good spatialization).

( Kennerton official few years ago say to me they do not go on with the idea to create a real good hybrid because of the ratio cost/profit for research and manufacturing  and the K340 is not a portable headphone  with a low impedence etc )

 

 

 

@mahgister ...an image search, and it's yours. ;)  Cover up that delicti corpus that age threatens all with....;)

Somehow I've managed to pass on the pudge ...127 @ 5'7", down from 150's @ 5'11"...always preferred nimble over strength, although the latter has usually been enough....
Just got the results of my lung CT:  No trace of cancer, despite my best bad efforts to get the rot....  COPD is under some sort of control, yay....

The carriage rattles 'n prattles along....music keeps the witless knitted to varied degrees.....

I like my bad habits....they seem to have kept yours unruly mostly heaped up.