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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

Showing 2 responses by mikelavigne

mikelavigne
2,161 posts
 

thank you @danager and ​​​​@mahgister for the kind words.

trying to be self aware, i view myself as an audiophile who is all in with maximum effort to enjoy every part of the hobby, serious room and system building, and the music. secondarily i have committed lots of resources to support my efforts. i’d like to think i’m known for my commitment, not my budget, but i know that’s not how the forums work. i accept that.

onto the topic, "how audiophiles are different"....especially how they listen. here are my thoughts.

my views are that there are multiple natural perspectives for any listener. natural selection/evolution has resulted in our ability to listen selectively. for an audiophile it’s a skill that can be learned and improved. we can hear around things. vinyl listeners are able to ignore noise not associated with the music, but are sensitive to noise changing the music. we teach ourselves this. or....we cannot teach ourselves this and reject vinyl as noisy. it’s the way it is.

but how does this effect system building and listening to gear? again; it can be learned. with practice we can find references to use to hear important differences. and maybe we have progressed sufficiently in our learning to have an aural memory in our head of particular music we hold up as a template.

another level is to recognize how our body and all it’s senses are affected by the music. typically this requires longer listening sessions, where our feelings about the gear and music can evolve and settle. does the quick first impression hold up over longer time. it’s also why so few serious audiophiles use blind testing. that interferes with our natural normal reaction to the music. it adds a disturbance clouding reality of our feelings. adds stress.

i can’t really say how other audiophiles process what they hear. but the above is how i do it. it how i make system and music decisions. and i love my process. it keeps me fully engaged.

mikelavigne
2,161 posts
 

My intended point was only that we all experience sound differently, so it should be expected that audiophiles would all appreciate different systems/sounds and poor acoustics might be more critical for some than others.

i think with experience we recognize when the circumstances limit the value of what we hear. the lack of room<->speaker synergy, or too high SPL’s, or non musical source or musical choice.....or......those things all together.....as sometimes happen.

or maybe we are not in the mood to open our minds and ears. i find it good at shows to return to a room multiple times if i have an interest to give myself multiple times so it was not me. i rarely trust my first impression as i carry baggage into the session and i have to get past that.....and wake up to the music and get past my head space. let the music come to me as just music, not sounds. how do i feel?

these situations happen at people’s homes, at shows, at dealers. it’s part of learning. and many times it takes time to ’get--understand’ the system balance and intentions. it might have completely different type of balance than your system so you need to be able to embrace that part of it. and it’s hard sometimes. it might not be just different, it could be bad. it can happen.

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