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Second opinions — how have others (including non-audiophiles) helped you?

Have been building a system since December 2020, just about at a place where I can rest for a while. Very enjoyable process of researching, trying, listening. Last phase, room treatments, are just about done.

Along the way, it's been very useful to bring in other family members and some close friends to listen and tell me what they hear. Most are non-audiophiles. But what jumped out to them helped me recalibrate what I was attending to and listen anew.

I was really trying to listen critically — sometimes with checklists of qualities to pay attention to. But myopia is a hard problem to see around, if you will. In some very important moment (including speaker tryouts), they pointed to obvious problems which I was missing.

Here's one recent example. I had been trying to tame some bass peaks and loaded the front of the room up with panels. I got those peaks under control — tight bass, well placed imaging, natural sounding instruments. Then, I had my wife sit down, and in a couple of seconds she noticed that things sounded "constrained" and "missing air." I pulled a couple bass traps out of there and things opened up — "Ah, that's better," she said. As I sat to listen, she was right. Better reverb, more space, lightness.

That's just one example. My question to anyone wanting to share is how other people (including non-audiophiles) helped you improve your system.
hilde45

Showing 7 responses by hilde45

hilde45's avatar
hilde45 OP
5,425 posts
 
I have a sense that many people are much more experienced than mastering92 gives them credit for. They need some direction as to what to pay attention to and how to describe it. After all, people already use their hearing quite carefully to get around in the world and most love music. They have a lot of practice in careful listening. What they need is some direction from audiophiles about how to describe what we're especially interested in. That's the point of my post -- to ask how people who have been able to address your concerns (with or without your help) have helped you improve your system.

I read an article long ago which pushed back against the idea that people had lost most of their sense of smell. What researchers discovered was that people lacked the language to designate what they were experiencing, and that with some training in olfactory vocabulary, their sense of smell seemed to improve. Of course, their senses were fine -- what improved was their communication about their senses. And as any wine expert can tell you, this can feed back into their ability to discriminate. Hume wrote about this long ago, by the way.
hilde45's avatar
hilde45 OP
5,425 posts
 
Phenomenal responses! Loving this! Please, keep them coming.

xeolith -- would love to hear more when you have a moment.
millercarbon -- so glad you chimed in with such a generous response. I've benefited from many other recountings of yours; glad to hear you dilate on my OP. Thanks.

(And by the by, someone (maybe Guttenberg) said once that when one is listening critically to audio to alternate close focus with more peripheral attention. Take our your phone, check your email, browse a magazine, etc. How does the system sound when you’re not staring at it, so to speak? Often stories of great quality systems will be ones that call people over or startle them when they’re focused on other things. There’s something to cultivating a sideways glance.)

Thanks for the compliment, Mesch. Much appreciated coming from you!
hilde45's avatar
hilde45 OP
5,425 posts
 
@calvinandhobbes That's great that you have two close family members able to help. Are they particularly good with words? I find the vocabulary to be very vague but sometimes people not using that jargon use metaphors or describe what they're hearing with whatever they can come up with. 
hilde45's avatar
hilde45 OP
5,425 posts
 
@boxer12  Enjoyed your response. I also enjoy tweaking, though since I'm still trying to discover the initial potential of my system, I feel like this is "pre-tweaking." It's like getting one's new car out on a straight rural highway and "seeing what she can do." Until one does that, one is still pre-tweaking, I reckon. Regarding "perfection traits" -- well, there's a way in which constant *worrying* is a psychiatric condition for audiophiles, and no one is better than audiophiles at confessing to it and claiming some shame. BUT, I love to play with the room, the stereo, etc. In a more forgiving spirit, the word for that is "tinkering," and it's a way of being involved with machines and systems that I have loved since I was a boy. I have no impulse to write it off as a "tic" of my personality. (Not that you said I should.)

@daj  Exactly my thought -- the notion that perception needs language to exist "adequately" (whatever that means) is, I think, a wrongful importation of the conceptual into something which is, if not completely pre-conceptual, at least pre-linguistic. And the stories people are telling here about non-audiophiles speaks volumes for their fully adequate perceptions *regardless* of their ability to express or describe them.
hilde45's avatar
hilde45 OP
5,425 posts
 
@audioguy85  Good for you. Not me. I need help expanding what I notice, from time to time. Even the best writers need a second pair of eyes, but if you're self-sufficient and happy, that's all that matters.
hilde45's avatar
hilde45 OP
5,425 posts
 
@stevewharton great reminder that the emotional reaction is a big clue about where our system is, evolution-wise. Alas, it only tells us “yes” or “no.”  Still, that’s helpful. 
hilde45's avatar
hilde45 OP
5,425 posts
 
Thank you, @xenolith for what amounts to your audio system CV! Wonderful. I don't want to introduce a detour to the OP, but "the recreation of the recorded event in our living room" is an idea I understand but it cannot, of course, be taken literally. The sound of an orchestra in your living room would have to be miniaturized; no one wants the Ramones in there, either; heavily produced multi-track recordings are not events but collages, and so what is to be produced by a system? Some kind of rendition-that-is-pleasing but not a "recreation." And EDM or ambient music, same thing. There are some ensembles that a system could be seeking to recreate -- a duo or trio, etc. But most people want their systems to do more than just create a holo-deck version of that limited menu of "recreate-ables." I do think there's something to the concept of "fidelity" -- a clarinet sounds like a clarinet in timbre and tonality and even spaciousness. But that is less than what some take to be implied by "recreation." Cheers!
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