by Michael

Feng Shui – Audiophile Style

The setting where we listen is important to the enjoyment and appreciation of the music. How important? I think more important than what people, on average, think it is. In fact, I think it is very important.

Even if you typically close your eyes while listening – lingering smells of that fish dinner you had 2 days ago, or a hard chair, or your neighbors arguing in he background about whether to watch Kung Fu Panda or Return 2 Madagascar [both are great] – will affect how we are hearing what we are listening to.

Feng Shui as currently practiced seems to avoid the consideration of sound systems, sound quality and, in fact, basic listening room functionality, in their designs. Or maybe it is just practiced by people hostile to audiophiles. [after looking up more information, it appears to be a somewhat unstructured and undisciplined practice – its greatest asset seeming to be that it actually brings some kind of human aesthetic, livability, into what had been exclusively economically-driven decision making. In fact, we may switch to calling this Livability just to side-step some of the Feng Shui hype]

So what we will do, over several posts, is to try and come up with our own Feng Shui for our listening rooms.

Let’s start by listing some of the things that can make listening to high-end audio not quite as pleasant as it might otherwise be [in no specific order, and some people are really affected by some of these, and some of us are not]:

System

1. Visual Cable Spaghetti [oh, we are SO bad at this]
2. Cables one has to walk over
3. Dust bunny build-up [:-)]
4. A cluttered equipment rack
5. Equipment on the rack with different colored faceplates
6. Equipment on the rack with different colored LEDs
7. Equipment on the rack with LEDs
8. Unattractive or overly large speakers

Seating

This is something I really care about and Neli not so much.

1. Seating too high or low
2. Seating too soft or hard
3. Seating reclined too far or with bad lumbar support
4. Seating with a reflective surface up near the ears
5. Seating that allows sunshine to get in the eyes
6. Seating that faces away from an awesome view of some kind

View

We wrote about this before. Ever-changing nature views [or solid colors] seem to be preferable so that a person does not get completely bored with what they are looking at. [Yes, some people just listen in the dark, which is another option].

1. A boring view
2. A view lacking some kind of symmetry
3. A view that reminds us of other things we have to be doing [e.g. mowing the grass]

Ambiance

Choose an overall ambiance and try and be consistent:

a. Lap of luxury,
b. Rustic,
c. Modern,
d. Homey,
e. Comfortable,
f. Historical,
g. Theme-based [for example, covering the walls in Grateful Dead posters, or LPs, or Native American art or…]

Positioning

It is my supposition that getting to the listening chair is not as important as it might be in other applications [i.e.offices, where the dynamics between the person behind the desk and visitors coming and going is of primary importance] . This is because, like home theaters, one, generally, spends 99% of their time in the listening/viewing chairs and not coming and going from the room – so having the chair with its back to the door is appropriate [Livable] as well as functional.

Next… example turnkey Audiophile Feng Shui setups.

in Feng Shui / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Philosophy 0 comments
 by Michael

And one song rules them all

Sometimes I hear a song on one of our systems here and I think “This song… THIS song makes it all worthwhile”.

Sometimes it is a song and sometimes it is an album.

Yesterday it was Dark Side of the Moon

It was on a somewhat modest system here these days: EMM Labs XDS1 into a EMM Labs PRE2 into the Audio Note Kegon amps on the Marten Coltrane Supreme speakers.

I attribute my overwhelming emotional response to the Kegons finally ‘settling in’ on these speakers and, primarily, that it has been my personal unfounded but hard to shake sneaking suspicion that the EMM Labs players were, like, DESIGNED to play this one SACD really, really well, ever since I first heard it on their old red-label CDSD/DCC2 back-in-the-day.

A lot of the power that this particular album has, for me, is that I heard it so darn many times growing up [still growing up, I know… or is that out? or gray? or comfortably numb?] that I can flash back to those days of hearing it, if one can call it that, on all sorts of inferior equipment and how, OMG, if I had only heard it like THIS back then, if I had only known just how awesome these songs really ARE…!

But there are other songs/albums that – by themselves – make this all worthwhile – and other reasons for their power over me.

Several months ago [or has it been a year already? Time is going by at warp speed, and warp 9 at that], it was a bootleg, and coincidentally Pink Floyd again – of one of their Meddle [i.e. Echos] tours. This was on a much more expensive Audio Note UK front end: CDT-Five transport, Fifth Element DAC and M9 Phono preamp.

In this case it was just the ability to hear this rare concert from the late 60s, hear the musical innovation and exploration that Pink Floyd was doing back then that just about nobody has equaled [except Miles Davis, who was also exploring the underpinnings of music at the same time, for awhile – Pangaea, Agharta, etc.. Oh! and the Grateful Dead – Dark Star etc. Can’t think of anybody else.], and hear it in such a manner as to be overwhelmingly confident that I am getting very close to the full impact of actually Being There.

In both these cases there was both an emotional and intellectual underpinning, as well as a historical perspective and the knowing that it really can’t sound much better than this – that tipped me over the edge. …

… where I think: it really was worth spending lots of dollar signs $$$, to me, JUST to hear this whenever I want, JUST to have these intense feelings, the joy and the awe, in my life..

We have talked about drug-like sound, and striving to get to those euphoric musical states of mind. This is that.

But… it was one of those REALLY good trips [,man :-)].

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Philosophy 0 comments
 by Michael

Comparing High-end Audio to Photography

I think we can see some of the problems with defining the Absolute Sound by comparing Music Reproduction with Photography.

Both have something real they are trying to reproduce by technical means. Both involve some aspects of art and aspects of science.

I think it makes sense for this metaphor [or is it an analogy?] to compare a digital image file with a CD [essentially a digital music file].

Now lets consider Photoshop 🙂

You bring the image in and correct for any color issues that your camera has. You correct for inadequate lighting. You correct for lens aberrations because you were too close to, or at an angle to, your subject.

Then you can do some fancy layering filters to make the subject look more 3D. To make the colors more evident. To hide some of the grain in the original image….

You do all this because you KNOW what the subject [say it is a face] looks like. You know about flesh colors and that the head is a 3D thing. You want to bring out the [Einsteinian] sparkle in their eyes that you know is there. The affect their laugh lines have on people in real life, etc.

The point is two fold:

1. All this touching up is to make this technical artifact look more like the Real Thing. It flies in the face of ideological pundants that say “You MUST NOT Tinker With the Flaws in the Material”. Or “digital images just are going to look bad so don’t you do anything to make it look more real / better”.

Those pundants are silly, right? And so I think that the things people do to their high-end audio system are likewise OK if they bring out more of what reality is all about: 3D, rhythm, harmonics, etc.

2. The Real Thing is hard to define. Just how 3D is that face you saw last [imaging] ? Just how evident WERE those crinkles [dynamics] ? and those color blotches [harmonic color] ? And could you really see each hair on their head if you had the desire [and temerity to be OK with looking a little wacky while peering intently at someone’s hear follicles] to actually look at it and focus your attention trying to see each hair [detail and resolution].

So deciding whether something is the Absolute Sound or not is difficult if not impossible [another recent post on this topic posted about how all the room issues at any real Absolute Sound recitals making sure that no one has ever heard the Absolute Sound in all of history ;-)] .

* Often, the Absolute Sound these days has become an ideological pursuit and has more to do with the technology and brands used and the means [looking at things like THD and progeny] by which sound is reproduced, whereas the Real Thing is a musical event, where being ‘like the Real Thing’ means that you create a musical event that is both musical(!) and in several important [to humans, not to some clunky measuring device] ways very closely resembles the Real Thing.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Philosophy / Sounding Off 0 comments