by Michael

Neil Young is our most famous champion

Neil Young is our most famous champion; so audiophiles… don’t you eff with him.

In the New York Post there was a recent article (yes, I know, it is the NYP, but I think they are representative of the hordes who we do expect to eventually join our community,  albeit perhaps as causal imbibers as opposed to addicts like the rest of us)

Engineers at Neil Young’s company admit doubts on music player

This is typical Luddite fodder. First declare Neil as the Audiophile’s champion, then have what he champions, and how he champions it, appear to be ridiculed by people who are close to him, work for him or who are members of the Audiophile community itself.

They even poo poo 4K video in this article, also as ‘too advanced’ for real people to ever care about [I’ve had a large 4K monitor on my desk for a decade, and of course the size and resolution does not give me a competitive advantage :-)]

This article takes a ‘high-resolution is worthless’ position.

They interview Chesky, who explains what improvements high-res can bring [presumably on devices that can handle the higher bandwidth. Like Neil Young’s  Pono]. Yay David!

They interview Lukasz Fikus, digital audio designer at Lampizator [a relatively new and relatively unknown, but rising, brand. Their room at THE SHOW Las  Vegas  2014 sounded decent] , who explains “the difference is so miniscule that it’s not even worth talking about”. Not… worth.. talking… about… Well, I guess we better close down the blog,  since that is  ALL we talk about. Perhaps someone who thinks these differences are so minuscule does not a great digital audio designer make? I don’t know.

Hey, everybody has their favorite approach to digital audio technology.

Audio Note likes Red Book just fine. They do well with it 🙂 [We are certainly enjoying the poop out of their very expensive 16-bit CDT-5 transport and DAC5 Signature]

EMM Labs like extremely high resolution, and they do well themselves. But, if I remember correctly, feel that most players out there that  support the high-res formats do not have the horsepower [powerful enough DSP  chip and support  structures] to properly handle the higher bandwidth required.

The real situation is that most players that say they support high-resolution, like 24×192 etc, are typically better built than those that do not. They care about catering to the audiophile community, unlike that vast majority of everyday consumer electronics out there. They are making a least a small nod in the direction of people who think the quality of the sound MATTERS.

Pono_Music_Player_Black_01

And so the  Pono, by supporting higher resolution formats, is saying that they care about the sound, unlike the other mainstream digital audio players out there.

And, let’s face it, it is a mathematical certainty that higher res sounds better than low resolution…. All Else Being Equal. And the vast majority of people can perceive higher resolution quite easily  [both audio and video]. And they really like it.

All Else Being Equal.

Of course, if  you have to remaster to bring the media to the higher res format –  well, mastering often has a larger, more beneficial, effect on quality than resolution.  So does upgrading your speakers or headphones. Or cables. Or power supply. Or power supply or circuit architecture. Etc.

So higher resolution isn’t the ONLY way to improve playback sound. I am sure the Pono does other things to improve sound quality as well. Just as I am sure one could  find ‘engineers’ who question what capacitors are used, and the thickness and width of the traces used. And whether they are curved or rectilinear …

—–

Neil was on Fallon a few night ago.

His approach was to say  that the Pono [has a higher quality  sound that] is for ‘music lovers’ but not everybody is a music lover; some people like to listen to music in the background.

🙂

Them’s fighting words…

Told you he was our champion…:-)

 

 

 

 

in Sounding Off 0 comments
 by Michael

Body-caressing Sound

Body-caressing Sound – when the richness of the music, and perhaps slight changes in ambient pressure caused by the music, evoke an actual physical experience with the music.

This the second part in a 3-part series on Ear-caressing Sound, Body-caressing Sound and Soul-caressing Sound.

As expected, after reading the first post, Neli wasn’t too sure I hadn’t gone over to join the loonies and crazies that seem to be reproducing like mad on the Internet these days.

But no. Rare as it is, Ear-caressing Sound exists. And so does Body-caressing Sound.

In fact, I’ve experienced Body-caressing Sound many times, though I did not have a name for it. I had not labeled it, had not identified it as a separate identifiable experience, which pretty much meant that I ignored it for the longest time.

I experienced it again recently, and I’ll describe the circumstances. Hopefully they will be familiar to you, as well, and you will realize that you too have experienced this.

The situation was downstairs here, listening to the smaller Audio Note system. It was loud, loud enough to be at least, to some medium degree, pressurizing the room [the doors were closed, but the stairway to the 2nd floor cannot be closed off. So room pressurizing is always gong to be a little weak in this room, but better than upstairs, which is open to the dining room].

I forget the exact music, but it was something rich and tuneful; a swelling and long beautifully drawn out note, like that made by a tuneful saxophone.

Maybe it was the actual room pressure changes, or maybe the wonderful emotional and harmonic richness of the note. It felt like I was being hugged in a warm, lightly affectionate, playful, loving embrace. In this instance it was from the back and encompassed most of the right side of my rib cage and about half of the left side. [like the previous post, one could make the analogy that this is like it must feel to be hugged by a loving parent when one is very small].

It is a highly pleasant experience, and to be desired [by me, anyway :-)]. It is a wonderfully human and pseudo-physical way to interact with the music. When it starts happening it works best if you open up to it and treat it like it was the anthropomorphized melody itself hugging you; it’s spirit, or perhaps it is the soul of Music itself.

It, logically, seems like this would be most likely to occur with small Jazz, with a rich sounding instrument, in a room that the sound can pressurize a bit. But I am sure I have experienced it with Rock and Roll, in open-spaces, and other kinds of perhaps non-optimal circumstances.

So, next time something weird like this happens to you, think about this post and relax. Enjoy. It may not be so weird after all. In fact, it is awesome. And probably one of the reasons why music has been with us for millennia.

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

Ear Caressing Sound

This one of three posts on Ear Caressing Sound, Body Caressing Sound and Soul Caressing Sound.

These are hard to describe, but we’ll give it a go. Of the three, I’ve found Ear Caressing to be the most rare, Body Caressing less so, and Soul Caressing the most often experienced of the three. But YMMV.

Ear caressing is partly a physical sensation and partly a sonic effect.

It occurs when the ears are buffeted by sound in such a way that it feels almost like someone is whispering in both your ears at the same time [or nearly the same time. The different arrival time of the caresses is not disturbing at all, but kind of playful, and much like waves in a swimming pool as they splash the sides of the pool – it feels like the caresses are part of a physical whole that is very organic in shape. Now that I think about it, it is very like having your ears slightly underwater near the edge of a pool, and the feeling of the water kind of ‘splashing the ears’ in a random, but very natural, rhythm].

It is this extremely intimate, very human, warm, perfectly natural feeling. As if there is a person whispering to you and it is your loving parent, spouse or lover.

You feel their ‘breath’ as ‘they’ speak to you, but their words are the music you are listening to.

It is kind of like a headphone effect if headphones could move that much air.

This has happened to me only a handful of times, and fairly recently at that – or perhaps it’s uniqueness has just not called attention to itself until recently.

If fact, it has only happened with the Acapella Atlas horn speakers, and only when they are setup a certain way. They are very close to being setup that way now, but not quite. I am not sure that Neli or Kevin heard this effect – and during setup all I have been able to do is mumble incoherently something like ‘Wait I think this position is interesting’ before they all talk about how one speaker ‘looks’ like it is too close, or pointing out instead of of in, or all the other hallucinations involving speakers in the uneven mostly octagonal-shaped room late at night.

I do not know what event or combination of circumstances have allowed me to experience Ear Caressing now.

Perhaps:

1. It requires horn speakers and their ability to create distinctive dynamic waves of sound and we haven’t had horn speakers here for 10 years or so

2. It has something to do with the shape of each of our ears and how they uniquely capture and guide sound waves into the ear canal – and I was just lucky that my particular ears interfaced this way with a particular setup position of these particular speakers.

3. We had the speakers setup here to within a fraction of an inch of where they are supposed to be, and that we rarely get this lucky where the speakers are setup so perfectly

4. It just didn’t ‘click’ that this ‘effect’ was an effect worth distinguishing from other ‘effects’. Certainly I know I have experienced Body Caressing Sound many times before, but did not think to identify is as something kind of unique until after I had thought about and called out Ear Caressing as a particular effect that could be discussed and … pursued.

And I *do* want to pursue this effect.

Sometimes it is a lot like our Mother whispering into our ears that they love us, when we were very, very little and trusting and could still believe that someone could really love us THAT much.  More often it is like she is whispering a fantastic tale, her warm breath gently playing on our young ears, in such a way that we could not help but believe that the story was true.

There is something about this kind of sound that gets around our usual defenses and cynical calculations and automatic emotional responses – to go right directly to the heart of us.

But I won’t be able to pursue it unless I can convince Neli that it actually exists [not an easy task will that be :-)]. Hmmmm…..

 

 

in Philosophy / Sounding Off 0 comments