Its ALL Technological Mumbo Jumbo
[This is a hard concept to get across. Suffice it to say that humans know very, very, very little of the science behind what makes a good sound system – and hold on to your wallet around people who imply otherwise]
Now here I go defending Reviewers, after blasting them last post. Just goes to show that things can always get worse.
Most reviewers (there are exceptions) seem to be able to avoid the ‘self-appointed technological expert’ syndrome which is for all intents and purposes almost indisinguishable from the ‘sales techno-babble daze and confuse them in buying what you are selling’ approach.
To put it simply – Whenever someone says that a product is better than another because of some technological detail – they are lying.
This is true in any technological arena – and any real expert will tell you that we as a species don’t know diddly and what we do know has so many qualifications and constraints thatr we might as well not know anything – and in the end it is all just theories and models. That is just the way science works, sorry.
So then we have the Audio Perfectionist, whose role apparently is to, well in the automobile universe it would be to berate auto reviewers for not spending their time informing their readers that the Porsche is a very badly engineered product (in comparison with the Honda and Toyota, for example) and is therefore not worth 1/10 of the asking price (i.e. the car or product should sell for little more than the cost of its constituent parts).
For example, to state that time-aligned speakers are better than non time-aligned speakers is B.S. Even saying that they are more accurate is B.S.
What is not B.S., but verging on meaninglessness, is to say “From what we know about human hearing, a time-aligned speaker will seem to image better and seem more realistically dynamic than a non-time-aligned speaker, all else being equal”.
“All else being equal” requires us to imagine two speakers that are absolutelyidentical except one is time-aligned and one is not. Of course, making the one speaker time-aligned will in actual reality cause side-effects that might render the speaker less ‘real’ and distort imaging – just those areas that time-alignment is trying to improve, so this statement means very little in the real world where you and I listen to and buy speakers.
And we can go on. Suffice it to say that ‘statements’ like the B.S. above, are only true, if they are true anywhere, in an extremely simplified imaginary view of the world. I am not sure that people really want to spend their hard earned dollars on something whose value is based on somebody else’s fantasy life,
whose only goal seems to be the evangelistic promotion of our era’s archaic definition of what accurate sound reproduction is, from spinning aluminum and vinyl disks no less.
Archaic because scientists know almost nothing compared to what they will know in decades and centuries hence – so evaluating equipment based on what is essentually voodoo may not be very smart if you are technologically minded. And things like…uh…. musicality and enjoyment do not appear anywhere in these kind of voodoo doctor proclamations of what has ‘quality’.
It just seems like a bad buying decision to me to buy something you do not like. Hey! It took me a lot of years, and a lot of cars and speakers and cables… to figure this out. Everyday we talk to people who are seriously considering products based on specifications, build quality, measured performance, reviews….people who are just like me.
That is why it is important to actually go for a test-drive and listen to something to see if you like it and not just read the specs or a reviewer’s description of the component’s construction and measured performance.
[Then we have Romy’s critique of the same Wilson MAXX II speakers, coming from a more experiential perspective, much more in the line of how we think speakers and systems need to be evaluated. Why he liked the referenced Audio Perfectionist article, I couldn’t tell ya]
*There are so many examples of this. Another is: “This amps sounds more organic BECAUSE it is using 1% Vishay resistors” B.S. Does it sound more organic? Listen to it! More organic than what? Than no-name cheap-as-dirt resistors from the Far East? Well, I guess it is nice of them to spend the extra buck. But what else is in the system that we are supposed to be listening for the sound of a few resistors in? The electrical music signal is going though a LOT of things, even inside all but the most simple of components. And the system! It is one gigantic, very, very complex technological-ecosystem; it all must work together in harmony. Each component is affected by every other component. Still trying to pin-point the sound of those resistors the saleperson is touting?
The best scientists using the biggest super-computers in the world can only partially simulate a tiny fraction of this system. And gurus, and salespeople, and manufacturers can’t tell you why it sounds exactly the way it does, either.
All you can do is listen. For yourself. It’s OK, take your time. Enjoy the music while you’re at it.
Hello,
i have read Romy’s and the Audio Perfectionist so it is nice to have your comments on them both. i am steadily growing more interested to know more specifics about your evolution through audiophildom. for example when you mentioned that you went from the dunlavy to the sonus.. what did you get from that period that you learned to persue and avoid.. i like the fact that your candidness can be counted on and you seem to have a clear set of objectives and principle that you work with. so that being the case even if one didn’t share the same objectives as you there is a reliable relativeness in your perspective.
Thanks, Ben.
I am still at the beginning of codifying our principles and objectives a little bit better than just the somewhat less than perfectly descriptive ‘you know it when you hear it’. But that’s why we start with “Use the ears, Luke!”
Our speaker adventures seemed to make a stop at each of the various tourist attractions:
The Vandersteens were good speakers
The Dunlavys were impressive
The Extremas could make one cry
The Campaniles delivered the event to us and did all the above
The Triolons create a mind meld between you and the Music Spirits ….(oh, and do all the above, and do it better than any other speaker we have heard, but this has become a moot point, to me anyway)
The Bose radio in my Audi S8 also communicates the spirit of music… once…in…a…long…while. Just not on demand. And not with such soul wrenching depth and breadth.
Now it is our job to work backwards, and to classify the other, less costly elements of the audio universe in these terms and see just how far we can push them – now that we know exactly where we are going.
I think you are confuted with the courses and consequence regarding the subject. There are specific topological and implementation aspects of loudspeakers only the actual performance of a loudspeaker validates the benefit one or another topology or method. It is completely irrelevant how many 1% Vishay resistors were use if the amp for instance all-together does not perform well. The “1% Vishay resistors” are juts tools, the ingredients of a soup and everything derives not form develop concept of propagation currents in the circuits but form the reflection of the Master’s consciousness and how his/her consciousness reflect in the final result. Then, only then we could analyze the means and the methods but they could be view ONLY in the perspective of the complete result. The same words and letters made “Mein Kampf” and the “Gettysburg Address”, the author’s awareness made then to me what they are. Unfortunately many people do not understand that audio, as anything else, is not about Vishay resistors, components, time-alignment and fight at technological arenas but rather about people, this desires and way to achieve them. Hazat Inayat Khan in his book “Mysticism Sound and Music” said that tasting good it is possible to detect what was in the head of the cook. Sometimes listening the Wilson speakers (I ma talking about the “small Wilsons” and audiophiles generally do not know anything about the large Wilsons”) it is very possible to very defiantly say what was in the heads of this Masters. Not much different then what is in the heads of the people who sell them….
Rgs,
Romy the Cat
Hey Romy,
I think your soup analogy is a great one that many people will be able to grok: their soup may have the best oregano in the world, hand cultivated and pampered daily by sweet little old monks in a secret monestary in the wilds of Italy, but if there is also way too much salt in the soup, well then – that soup is going to be awful.
That’s one level.
Another is cause and effect, which I spoke about at length in the above post: the near impossibility of predicting the effect given a cause, and the extreme difficulty of determining the cause given the effect. Not that cause and effect should be ignored – like politicians do – but that people might want to watch out for it being trvialized for the sake of making a ‘sale’.
Then there is intentionalism – with which you close your post.
I hesitate to draw a on-to-one correspondance between the intention of a ‘master’ and their handiwork – very few people in the world can create in reality something that corresponds exactly, or even close, to their orignal goals – to what they intended to build. There are very few ‘masters’ who even think about what they want to build before they start building – preferring the ‘muse’ approach instead, popularized by various artists and authors.
But we, all of us, can look at the defacto result of the ‘master’s handiwork, which, whatever their intentions, exists here with us which we can, so to speak, kick the tires of and see that, whether or not it was their intention or just accidental (and there are many levels of micro intention and accident, both conscious and unconscious, at each aspect of product creation – for example ‘product reliability’ – which are mixed together in yet another kind of ‘soup’) – they have created a masterpiece or monstrosity or, most common, yet another paper-weight.
So all we can say for sure is that what goes out the door is by the ‘master’s consent, and, regardless of what they ‘intented’ to inflict on humanity, they are in fact inflicting what they are shipping – and from this perspective there is no question about what their intention is, it is right there in front of us.
Thanks for your post,
Mike.
*** I hesitate to draw a on-to-one correspondance between the intention of a ‘master’ and their handiwork – very few people in the world can create in reality something that corresponds exactly, or even close, to their orignal goals – to what they intended to build.
I very much disagree. Do not look at the results but at the intentions of the motivations. There is no discrepancy between intentions and expressive means. Yes, it is true the results are not always what intended but if one read from the results what the “master” intended to say (not necessary said due to multiple reasons) then everything is very much not accidental. That is why I rarely listen what a playback installation does (it would be nice but there are very few that can handle it) but rather what the system builder was trying to say by means of his playback (of course if s/he did has any noble intentions, that mostly is not the case).
Rgs,
Romy the Cat