by Michael

The Right Song at the Right Time

I was driving in the car a few days ago and heard a song [classical, but with a lot of trumpets and with a Latin flair] that I knew was not going a be a song that I liked… and I loved it.

At that moment.

I’ve had enough of these experiences like that to know that if I went home and looked this piece up on Amazon and played a few clips, or worse yet, bought the CD, I would not like it all that much.

I remember hearing Bolero in the car one day, loving it, and then looking up the particular piece and… could take it or leave it.

All this is to say, for sake of argument, that at any time during our lives, there is an optimal song we could/should be listening to. That we would just LOVE at the particular moment.

You see, usually we just say we like a particular piece of music, a song, a group of musicians, because on average, we enjoy listening to their work.

Maybe we have listened to them enough that we have experienced this ‘right song at the right time’ phenomena while listening to them, which is some very positive reinforcement that we have chosen the right ‘favorite thing’ to be listening to a lot.

OK. So here it is, 12:05pm the Wednesday before Christmas. What would be the optimal song for me to be listening to now?

Is there any way to actually determine what it is?


Jerry Maguire: it takes a few tries, but he finally finds his Right Song at the Right Time

At the time of the most recent experience in the car, I was kind of spacing out, kind of bored, the landscape, albeit strikingly beautiful snow-covered pines in the Rocky Mountains, was black and white and dark green and coming across my brain as forbidding and soporific. The music, on the other hand, was upbeat and kind of tongue-in-cheek and simple enough to render OK on the Bose stereo.

So, can we just examine our mood and narrow down our choices of what to listen to, thereby increasing our chances of being able to hear The Right Song?

Through experience and observation, I think one can narrow down the genre where the Right Song, on average, might be found in the following circumstances/mood (YMMV):

Drunk: George Thorogood, Elvis Costello and other bar-band music
Tipsy: Country Music, Everything!
Morning brews: Bluegrass
Morning hangover: New Age
Leisurely long-term boredom: Classical
Stoned: Reggae, Everything!
Hallucinogens: Grateful Dead
Sad: The Blues [weird, I know]
Happy: Any one of your all time favorite songs [see Jerry Maguire clip]
Angry: Heavy Metal, Rap
Energetic: Rock & Roll

Are their other ways to narrow down and quickly find the Right Song? If you have ever tried to do this, and who hasn’t, you soon realize that the very process of trying to find the right song, even listening to a few that are NOT the right song, affects us so much that the Right Song will no doubt have changed from what it was to something completely different.

When we complain about ‘there is nothing to listen to, with 5000 CDs here, and untold 100,000s of songs online, we are really saying: “I have no idea what my Right Song for this moment is, and not knowing SUCKS!” 🙂

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