Nice one Eric, same reasons nearly all of us have different gear and approach this hobby with different angles. Same reasons we get emotionally involved by a different song or by a different part of same song. Same reasons we have different tastes in clothing and food. All things are not happening through a straight line in our head but through many touch and go's. That's fun. I really enjoy late night listening when the voices of the world are muted (not my family), and have learned to operate in a non treated room, yet.
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?
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Excellent, thought-provoking, and well-written post. In philosophy, my field, these observations fit into the category of theories which argue that perception and interpretation cannot be separated. In practice, they are simultaneous acts. We see the apple as an "apple." If this is true, then arguments based on measurement of specific factors must already presume -- even if they're not explicit about it -- a certain manner of hearing. They presume at least a certain range of interpretations about what it means to hear. The same would be true about vocabulary used to describe sound; again, already interpretation-laden. |
@hilde45 Yes indeed. While I wasn’t intending to get into phenomenology directly with the OP I certainly couldn’t avoid it. One experiment I encourage others to do is to record some one else talking in an average room. Then listen to that recording with headphones. The reality of the sound in the room is entirely different from our memory of hearing the speaker. Our brain is doing so much work that we are unaware in the moment of fist listening that room acoustics are present. Only after we can hear it again and again can we hear the room is very much present in what we first heard. But!!! Here is the cool part, after we become aware of the difference we can then go back that room, ask the speaker to repeat their original words and now we are able to selectively hear the room, or not. |
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