Why audiophiles are different (explained with color)

Very colorful explanation for a vivid imagination. 

Excellent!

Something I have been saying for a long time now. Not just me, either. I got it from Robert Harley’s excellent The Complete Guide to High End Audio. There’s a whole chapter devoted to a glossary of audiophile terms for the way things sound and the importance and value in being able to recognize them.

So for example take grain, the term we use for a sound that has a rough texture. Grain can be rough like gravel or fine like sand or even finer like a powder. When all the grain is gone the sound is smooth and liquid.

The video guy talks about cultures always going through stages starting with black and white, then red, yellow/green, and finally blue. This is just like what I was saying a while back about the audiophile stages.

Everyone starts out being able to discern volume. Most everyone can tell which is louder. Then comes frequency response or tone. This is a variation on volume, basically evaluating if the volume is the same at every frequency. Almost all audiophiles get this, and it explains perfectly why so many are so caught up in EQ and frequency response. Many (not all) are stuck and never get past this intermediate stage.

Then we have imaging, the ability to locate a sound in 3D space. This is innate in human beings and so if the system is set up properly (far from certain) many audiophiles will hear imaging. Still, notice how many arguments there are among audiophiles about imaging, from people who don’t hear it, many of whom are convinced it does not exist at all!

Just like the Greeks who are blind to blue, these audiophiles are deaf to imaging.

The last and highest stages of listening involve the ability to discern fine details- and not fine in terms of volume necessarily but fine in terms of character. The gradations of grain to liquid mentioned earlier are one aspect of this.

Take something like warm up. Cold gear is grainy. The same component after thorough warm up is much smoother. A lot of the difference between freebie rubber power cords and quality wire is grain. Yes also dynamics, imaging, etc. Whole long list. But notice, almost everything on the list is the same sort of higher level last things we learn to hear sort of attribute!  

Little wonder then that so many debate so vociferously whether these things do anything at all. No wonder we have these people throwing snake oil around. Blind to blue. 

Said it a million times: listening is a skill. Skills can be learned. Skills you can get better at. If you cannot tell the difference between two wires, or think they are tone controls, or maybe don’t even think these things exist, all that means is you are blind to blue. But the good news here is, you don’t have to be. You can open your eyes and see. You just have to make the effort to learn how.