Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

First off, this post is not going to list music we recommend. Sorry.

In fact, we don’t really recommend music, per se, and this post is going to talk about why.

First, although I think we both enjoy it when someone else plays their canned selection of tracks… THIS one shows awesome mid bass, that one shows how wonderful female voices are etc. – it is a terrible way to evaluate a system and I think a dishonest way to try and sell a system.

That midbass is nice and deep and rich, yes, but won’t it sound like that on almost all systems? Maybe it sounds better, in actual fact, on most other systems and this system actually sucks.

That it is the track itself that is extraordinary, not the system.

And when friends play us these kinds of tracks, and they not trying to sell us something :-), this is probably their main point – that it is the track itself that is great, yes… “but doesn’t it sound great on my system!” with a big smile on their faces.

There are two ways that we use to select music to evaluate a system.

1. One is the way Peter Qvortrup of Audio Note recommends: using a wide selection of music you have never heard before [or at least do not listen to very often]. This is great for people stuck in a musical rut, usually only playing 3 or 4-piece jazz bands with female vocals because that is the only stuff that sounds good on the systems they are familiar with. By playing more complex music at random – they will actually be able to recognize when they come across a high-quality system that can play many, if not all, kinds of music well. For people NOT stuck in a rut 🙂 this method works [and is required for any real in-depth evaluation], but it takes a lot longer to evaluate a system this way than…

2. Playing a select group of tracks [songs] or varying ‘complexity’ that you are VERY familiar with to test various aspects of the system.

Not sure that complexity is the right word.

There is a continuum of music with varying degrees of… ‘difficulty’, say, stretching from music that sounds good on every system, just about, music from which only a few clues about the quality of the system can be judged [so called audiophile music – but it is really useless-for-audiophiles music] to that which sounds unpleasant on most systems below a certain quality.

[i.e. some music sounds about the same on most systems, and some sounds very different on different systems – to exaggerate a bit]

And this is why it is hard if not impossible to recommend music – we can talk about how track #16 shows wonderful decay and amazing separation between 16 different instruments being played simultaneously, for example. But it requires a certain amount of quality in the system to render the music like this – and people who listen to it on a lesser system, they will either think we are nuts or, instead, will imagine that they too hear such amazing things – that their system is up to the task when it is, in actual fact, not.

So what we do is, when it is our turn to pick music to demo our system to someone, and we are done with playing music they are really familiar with [approach #2 above. BTW So many people are embarrassed to admit their favorite music! What a world we live in] , we just pick music we like at the time [which serves as approach #1, above, for the listener].

When I play music to evaluate someone else’s system – I play any Radiohead track that I am VERY familiar with and then something natural, real world stuff, that I am familiar with: classical or world music or whatever. After these two I can rate the system based on separation, depth, imaging, soundstage, tonal quality, detail, and stuff like harmonic detail, imaging sizing, etc [all from Radiohead] and also whether the sound is grounded in reality. This only works because [besides Radiohead being deceptively complex] I have heard a these few Radiohead tracks on a number of very high-quality systems – and others – that I listened to with full attention – and so know kind of just What Can Happen… what these tracks REALLY should sound like [kind of. Think of a graph, lesser system sounds on the left, better systems sounds stretching to to the right. The graph is trending up, so one can extrapolate that there might be better systems someday that will extend the graph farther to the right. This anticipation of what Radiohead etc. will sound like over in the uncharted areas on the right side of the graph is one of the things that keeps me playing with this stuff :-)].

OK, summarizing the last few posts and comments…

I am of the opinion that:

1. It is a disservice to audiophiles and the equipment/systems to lump everything into more or less two categories: good and pretty good but that this is the state of affairs for 99% of the reporting by both laypeople and reviewers.

2. That simple numerical ranking, and Stereophile’s grading system, are very slightly better [much better than the Golden Ear-type approaches] but still fails because of A. taking into account the cost [a $3K class A component is not as good as a $100K class A component [even though there is a significant percentage in our hobby who INSIST this mythical component MUST exist, somewhere, somehow and they keep looking and buying a heckuva lot of $3K components] and B. not describing why it belongs in the class they have assigned it to [yeah, they refer us to the orig review but those reviews do not put the sound in context, see #3].

3. That comparative analysis that compares components to each other is the only approach that makes any sense – not on the basis of This is better than That [which would drive away the advertisers who are paying for the review] – but at a more detailed level that is completely agnostic about what is ‘better’.

In the Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy, we do exactly this at a level that the layperson can grok [rereading Stranger in a Strange Land. Last read it when I was 12 (from this same paperback!)]. Emotion, Impressive, Natural/Organic… where Magical/Spiritual really just means that there are some depth to the component and that it will take time to understand and that the listener will be given the opportunity to ‘greatly enhance’ their appreciation of music.

Beyond the layperson-accessible approach, we audiophiles can use terms like ‘detail’, or more precisely, micro-, midi- and macro- detail, with which we can compare and describe components using such references as the Wilson speakers, Levinson amps, etc. and beyond (helps to use components most people have heard – but the beauty of it is – this is NOT a requirement! Humans are great at figuring out where things go in their special ‘buy list’ without having to live with each and every object in the list, if GIVEN ENOUGH COMPARATIVE DATA to work with). This approach would eventually sketch out the world of audio components: both the compared and compared-to become more well-defined through this technique. There is no inherently better and worse here – though an audiophile who is at all familiar with their own preferences, and that of the average listener, will KNOW which is best for them (and the average guy and gal).

This exposes the way components actually sound to the light of day – let the chips fall where they may. I will post some real-world examples in the next few posts.

[before I get to that… Yes, we do plan on reviving Spintricity at some point. Right now the High End Audio channel on Mattters is doing somewhat better than Spintricity did [except for show reports :-)] and about the same as Dagogo [on average]. There are also channels for the laypeople like Home Audio and even Home Theater for those that like technology for the eyes as well as the ears].

Anyone who reads the average show report, the average review or any forum runs into the dreaded ‘blowed me away’ or “best I’ve ever heard” or even the infamous ‘best ever’ mixed with your usual sprinkle of awesomes and wows.

To some extent this is the fault of the English language – mathematics is much better at quantifying things. And certainly the culture at large, at least here in the U.S., encourages such obfuscation, equating, for example, the horror of killing 40M people with the local tax collector or the latest starlet driving too fast after a drinking a beer with – well, nothing holds a candle to this particular crime against humanity.

The point is that some audio equipment is significantly better than others, and some systems sound much better than others. Yet any causal, or even in depth, perusal of the information available would have one believe that everything is pretty darn great. That it is all about budget and aesthetics and what is ‘hot’ right now on the forums, or recommended by Stereophile or written up by some Joe who pins a ‘reviewer’ tag on their shirt.

Speaking of Stereophile, at least they TRY to classify things a little – though with their emphasis on measurements, their taking price into consideration, and their lack of long-term reviewing – their A, B, etc. grading is not so very useful. The Golden Ear Awards, as another example [not to pick on them… almost ALL of the online mags do something like this] is a completely random walk through components by people with completely random powers of observation and skill and experience.

I know, I know, people say that quality is in the ear of the beholder. I say that people who use this argument are lazy and are afraid of taking a stand 🙂 I say that there is indeed ABSOLUTE quality that is irrespective of listener and we may or may not be able to measure it today – most likely not – but that it is of a kind of quality that is *theoretically* measurable – that one can imagine that one might be able to measure it someday – given enough time, brains and money.

Sure, we all enjoy the Bose car stereo sometimes. Enjoy it a lot. Sometimes as much, say, as a $1M rig. We also might enjoy the smell of a wild rose in a random alley, as well as the gardens of La roseraie, say. One can hardly equate the quality of the two – but both can be equally enjoyable at certain times under certain circumstances. The point is that quality of audio should not be measured by whether someone MIGHT enjoy it once in awhile [one might make an argument that enjoyment over an EXTENDED period of time should be included in some kind of subjective quality measurement] – that there is an intrinsic quality that is NOT relative to the listener, just like the quality of a garden – that there are a number of measurable and not-yet measurable qualities that set a wild rose garden apart from one of the world’s most cared-for rose gardens. That there is difference between an amp, say, made by someone who then markets it on the forums versus someone who has spent their whole lives building amps and studying what good amps do and don’t do and who TRIES to do the best that CAN BE DONE at a price point, or on an acre, as opposed to ‘good enough’.

It is this contrast, of the not so good with the extremely excellent – that makes life wonderfully fascinating and I would say that the contrasts themselves are also quite… enjoyable. It gives life ‘color’ – these graduations in quality. And it is the descriptions of audio equipment, through incompetence, fear, duplicitousness, ignorance, hive mentality or whatever, who compress everything into a category of ‘good’ – that are drowning us in meaninglessness – that are robbing the hobby, and all of our audiophile lives, of some of its real potential for enjoyment.