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How Has Your Finely Tuned Audiophile Dexterity Helped You in Your "Other" Life?

Listening. Observing. Trying. Failing. Perceiving the nuances. And, sledge hammer impacts. Developing a new vocubulary. (As well as using very familiar terms when things don’t go as expected), Sorting through tons of data. Skillfully differentiating between the things that matter, and things that don’t. To us, anyway.

So, how have these skills (and, being a generally good person) helped you in life? Or, others?

Here’s one to start:

Wine Pouring:

My wife and I like to drink wine. Landing a enjoyable wine in the single digits (after all discounts applied) is a big win for us. Our evening of wine allocation and enjoyment generally takes on the following cadence: Pour One. Pour two (making sure to save just a little in the bottle). Then, the highly anticipated "desperation pour". The last 2 sips for each poured from the bottle. This way we take a pause, and take the time to fully appreciate those last two sips. Silly, but it’s what we do.

Frankly, I’ve gotten pretty good at this wine allocation thing. Equal pours, every time. For a while there, I thought I was just "lucky" and timed it just right. But, recently, I’ve concluded it’s something more. My "finely tuned audiophile" dexterity.

As we have all observed, when you fill a vessel with liquid, the frequency of the sound changes as the space in the vessel becomes occupied with more liquid. I was unaware that I was paying attention to those frequencies and my brain remembered the frequency at the conclusion of the last pour. So, when filling the second glass, I just listened and stopped when the frequency of the last pour was matched. Seems to work for me (within a tolerance of a few Hz/Mls). This doens’t help when you’re camping in near darkness and miss the glass completely, but has worked for us in a workable domestic sense for quite some time. Now I thank Sal Marantz, Frank McIntosh, and others after those (nearly) perfect pours.

waytoomuchstuff

Showing 2 responses by ghdprentice

ghdprentice
7,690 posts
 

@waytoomuchstuff

Yes. Times change. Vietnam is now a great tourist destination. I’ve worked in Japan for a couple years finding the Japanese to be incredibly friendly, especially to Americans. Walking around Hiroshima was humbling.

I worked in Germany as well. I became really good friends with some executives. One looked and acted as you would imagine a nazi officer would be like. In a gray suit with brilliant intelligent blue eyes, he could wither people into submission with a look from across the room. A really scary individual… well, unless you got to be friends. So, I asked him, what he thought of World War 2. This was in Stuttgart, he was 8 years old when a bomb landed in his front yard giving him a scar on his face. He said, “We started it, we deserved it, got our asses kicked.”

There is a graveyard in Singapore that is on a distant hill overlooking the city. There are hundred of graves of the Indian Gurkhas troops that attempted to defend the city. Even the thought of this place brings tears to my eyes. What a waste.

When I was young and stupid I thought different cultures were naturally prone to do bad things. I have little recourse other than repeat, I was young and stupid. It is a terrible flaw in humans with the right circumstances.

 

ghdprentice
7,690 posts
 

For me it is a chicken and egg thing.

I love very complex highly ambiguous problems where just getting your feet on the ground and bearings are hard. I love and thrive in this environment. So high end audio, and my job as electro-mechanical engineer (with the objective of being an inventor), scientist given only a goal and no guidance what so ever, and a corporate executive given massive global projects to do things that no one had done before, for me were all things I loved.

My experience with high end audio… establishing goals, separating the bs from reality, experimenting… the same as what I did professionally… so clearly my audio experiences helped with work and visa versa.

The really funny thing is for decades, completely by accident I ended up working in companies that are primary sources of high end subcomponents for high end audio… Burr-Brown Corp and Texas Instruments. So all wrapped together for me.

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