No, not us.

Well, yeah, I guess we are finicky too… But this is about finicky audio systems.

I’ve heard a recent $200K system sound like my old $3K (Adcom / ADS / Toshiba first generation CD player) system when a different transport was introduced into it. Slow, atonal, washed out, muddy, etc.

I’ve heard a different but similar system brought to its knees with an unbroken-in powercord was introduced on the DAC. Bright, glaring, headache-inducing.

I could go on, and you know that I do, sometimes, do go on. But I will spare us.

So, what does this mean that highly tuned systems can be detuned so easily?

1. That systems are highly dependent on each and every piece of equipment and cabling to sound their most optimally very best

2. That there is some level of instability involved in system configuration

3. that system optimization may be quite similar to optimzations in other fields, that there are locally maximum configurations and that to get from one to the other one will likely be ‘detuning’ the system along the way. That similar to Simulated Annealing optimization techniques, many people more or less randomize their system configuration and then let it settle, after which they test to see if the system is better than it was before. Unfortunately, I think this ends up to more of a Random Walk for many people – who use faulty scoring to determine what ‘best’ is, as well as what to ‘heat up’ to get to the next better configuration. [For those of you in Math, Engineering, Operations Research or Computer Science – this will all be wonderfully illuminating, humorous, and not really very useful as far as I can tell… at least not right out of the box].

4. That many people (aka reviewers) who seem to put random pieces of unbroken in equipment in their system – and like it – have very strange and chaotic interpretations of ‘better’ [unless this peice of equipment is either WAY better than the piece it is replacing OR the piece it was replacing wasn’t broken-in either and theis new one just sounds bad in a different way that is Oh Such A Relief because the old one was driving them crazy].

OK, Summer is over. It is cold here (55 degrees F here Saturday afternoon). It is getting dark around 7:30-8:00. Time to go back inside with a good sack of CDs/LPs/?s. [AKA the Blog will get updated more often]

Sounds strange, I know.

But when we have people up hear[sic] for auditions – we learn about the kind of sound they are looking for.

This kind of lets us listen through the lens of their personal preferences.

We could go on and on about preferences – most audiophiles seem to have them.

And most non-audiophiles don’t.

Besides the ‘does it play loud and have a lot of bass’ that non-audiophile men seem to look for first – their overriding concern is ‘does it sound good’? The problem these folks have is they have to judge if it ‘sounds good’ in comparison to other things they have heard, usually in the screetch-and-thump stores they know of- and so their life soon sucks, sound-system-wise.

But at least they are looking for something that sounds good, something that lights that fire of musical involvement, as opposed to a set of audiophile criteria gathered through years of reading and debating that are labeled ‘personal preferences’ but are perhaps have more to do with personal history than what we are really going to like, in the end.

For example, most people look for a new sound that is either very similar to the one they are used to, just ‘better’ in some specific attribute that they have decided that they now ‘need’ .. [Maybe for good reasons]

…….or something that is completely opposite from what they are used to – because they are sick of it ….or now just plain hate it. [Also, maybe for good reasons]

We used to do this. Cost us a lot of money, …..and grief, too. [Sonus Faber Electa monitors -> Dunlavy SC4 6 foot tall monsters -> better Sonus Faber Extrema monitors -> Acapella Campaniles 8-foot tall hybrids.]

[Of course, people might just think we now cheat and get one of everything… :-]

We just needed to listen…. with our ears and not with our eyes (what people write and say, like …this… blog), nor with our brain (the technical specs and what some people SAY the technical specs should be and the technologies used and what people SAY the technologies should be ….)

But hey, it is not just us. French wines cost more because…. everybody… ‘knows’… that… French.. wines… are…. better…. Right? Who needs to taste the stuff anymore? It has already been decided, said and done, for wine connoisseurs .

But me? I want to taste the stuff – see for myself.

So, to help us out here, please send samples to:

Yeah Right,
One Dry Mouth Road,
Boulder, CO