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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 1 response by jdoris

jdoris
972 posts
 
Completely agree, hilde!
I call it the "partner test": if my partner, who enjoys music a lot, but is not a hobbyist, could not hear an upgrade, I'd start to think I was "squinting" to see a difference to justify the expense.  If it's an improvement subtle enough to require "trained ears" to hear it, I'm happy enough to get it, but I don't want to pay much for it.  (Subtle improvements might generally be the only ones available at the outer reaches of the hobby, but most of us aren't there.)

I once immediately moved on from a 3x$ CDP upgrade, when the "improvement" only seemed audible with concerted effort, on some tracks.
As you suggest, I find the same thing with wine: people can actually taste a lot, and appreciate excellent samples, even if they claim to not know anything about wine.  They can't identify the vineyard by taste, but neither can I.
(PS:  Reductio ad absurdem and Hume in one day -- you're elevating the discourse around here!)


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