Some sound tastes BAD. This kind of sound is discussed often and widely.

Some sound tastes sweet.

Some has a strong taste – and many people (usually males) who like strong sound do not care what it actually tastes like, just that it is stong.

But, after one has learned to cook up a good system that tastes pretty good, what is left?

Nourishment.

Without nourishment, no matter how good the sound tastes, one is eventually left with an empty feeling. Over time, this empty feeling grows and grows. This feeling that SOMETHING IS MISSING.

Eventually one (‘s passion) may up and die without all the essential ingredients necessary for a healthy sonic existance.

Can we come up with the X basic sound groups necessary for a healthy sound system?

Perhaps our Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy speaker, amp, digital and preamp tables might be a starting place:

Impressive, Enjoyable, Emotional, Natural, Sweet, Real, and Magical.

A healthy system should have a appropriate percentage of all these sound groups.

Perhaps that percentage changes over time, as one ages, and/or as one grows to be more of a sonic connoisseur .

I do think there is indeed a real sensitivity as one matures to the absence of, or an imbalance of some sort, with one or more the basic sound groups in a system. A system can taste… great, but….. it has too little protein, or too much, or it has too much fat, or too much salt, or too much…

Can there be too much enjoyability? or real? or natural? or magic?

Seems like the problem is usually with too little of one or more of the sound groups with respect to the other groups…

We are like Goldilocks, the key is balance.

Or maybe.. the Coneheads.

Perhaps the goal, in a well-balanced diet of course, is to be a Soundhead – ‘consuming mass quantities’ of ALL of the sonic food groups?

To MAXIMIZE each and every key ingredient of the sound as much as possible….?

Just asking…

A number of things are going on here behind the scenes.

The last month was one of our best months ever . Thank you, everybody, very much. We apprecitate your business and support.

We also anticipate being able to announce a major addition or two here any time now. Yes, it may involve speakers.

And the website, hopefully our internet guests (you!) enjoy our presentation of an audiophile’s-ear-view and audiophile’s-eye-view of ‘high technology in service of the music lover’. And hopefully it helps make worthy buying decisions.

We use a multidisciplinary approach using high quality digital photography guided by a couple of very passionate audiophiles (aka us), decades of professional software and HCI design research, combined with the near ubiquity of relatively high-bandwidth connectivity and relatively inexpensive large computer monitors.

The Audio Federation Home page on the new DELL 30007 FPW 30″ monitor.

A tremendous amount of effort is expended to make our webpages load as fast as possible, while keeping the quality of the site and content, and the resolution and size of the photos, at, hopefully, Oh-My-Gawd levels.

To this end we continue to update the website, adding gallery pages for many of the lines we carry (and some that we don’t), expanding the high-gloss Catalog, enhancing the magazine-style Price Lists, and growing the Recommended Systems review pages. It is not as good as actually hearing what something sounds like, but at least we will get to show you what it really looks like in addition to, succinctly, describing what it really sounds like.

Well, we try hard, anyway.

The Audio Federation Recommended Systems Page on the DELL 30″ monitor.

Enjoy!

Now, I should preface this by admitting that I do not know everything there is to know about video. But I do know some things; I read the trade magazines and forums and scope out various video technologies every so often, so I think my points will be valid, to some extent anyway.

This post was inspired by a casual thought I had that video technologies were objectively better at doing their job than audio technologies. That videophiles didn’t seem to have all these wars over how close XYZ technology was to being objectively real as opposed to being subjectively ‘somewhat like reality’.

But is this really true?

The idea here is to compare video technology to audio technology in terms of how close they are to reproducing the ‘real thing’.

Both technologies have products that are ‘warm’ (Pioneer Elite, some CRT projectors and I think LCOS as well).

Both technologies have products that are overly detailed (Mitsubishi, some might say DLP as well).

But in the audio world people often build systems for the types of music they like (rock & roll, classical, jazz all have different system profiles and only the best systems can do all genres well), but I am unaware of people designing their video systems to best display specific genres; say sci-fi movies, or love stories, or horror movies. Is this because video technologies all reproduce subject matter objectively so well, that they are way beyond this need to tailor the technology to the subject matter type?

I wonder….

Though they advertise that some of the new LCD display technologies are like ‘looking out a window’, they have not fooled a single person as far as I know (the 102 inch flat panel at CES was really amazing, but it wasn’t REAL. It wasn’t capable of fooling someone). But I have read of several audio demonstrations where people were easily fooled into thinking that the sound came from real musicans and not the stereo system behind the curtain which was really generating the sound.

Are our ears just more easily fooled?

Or is audio just inherently easier to reproduce?

I think that when the day comes that videophiles are arguing about video technologies that fool people into thinking, say, a persons face is real – but fool them in different ways – well, I imagine that day is still a goodly distance in the future.

Will they someday determine that enlarging the red pixels a little and shrinking the blue will make horror movies scarier?

So we audiophiles should be happy (yeah, right) that we have got it pretty darn good. We can reproduce the sound of a guitar, some singers, and most percussion so that it fools people, even people who are skilled listeners.

Not too shabby.