Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

We all learned in school about how, as we came out of the middle ages, instead of using superstition or religion to explain things that were happening all around us, we applied the Scientific Method:

Step 1. Observe what is going on

Step 2. Hypothesize why and how

Step 3. Come up with an experiment to test the hypothesis

Step 4. Perform the experiment to either prove or disprove the hypothesis.

Unfotunately, most people start and stop at step 2 when they hear what audiophiles do with their systems.

Everybody with a stereo system, PhD’s, Physicists, and other people who should know better rely on extrapolating from sketchy knowledge about the domain of psychoacoustics to describe why the published observations of repeatable experiments simply could not have been observed.

Put simply, they do not understand something, so they insist on shouting, pointing to their credentials, that it simply cannot happen, because THEY do not understand it.

Pushed further, their argument relies on the assumption that the scientific community, this year, now knows everything about acoustics and its affect on the human mind – that nothing exists beyond what science knows now, and, specifically, beyond what these people learned when they went to school.

Let me tell you something about scientists, PhDs, and what have you. We have worked with some of the smartest people in the country. People who do not have to tell everyone that they are PhDs, because that was so long ago in their career, and they have progessed so far beyond it, that it is like us telling people that we graduated from 1st grade.

These people, like Lawyers, Doctors, Plumbers, and Audiophiles, are just people. There are the ones who know what they are doing, …and then you got the others. People are smart in different ways. Don’t be intimidated by people who thrust their credentials in your face – you are just as smart as they are. You can perform experiements, gather results, speculate on what will happen next, and perform another experiment.

We all do it almost every day when we try out new cables, put them in different places in the system, try them in different directions, put them on break-in decices, or suspend them in air.

The only difference between an audiophile and a physicist is that we do not have adequate measuring devices. None have been built yet. We only have our ears. Perhaps if we had billion dollar budgets we could build some darn cool stuff. But we don’t.

But someday our measuring devices will improve, and we will be able to measure dynamic response continuously across input frequencies and magnitudes. We will be able to measure the impact of frequencies above 20K Hz on the frequencies below 20K Hz. And on and on.

But, more than scientists, audiophiles who put together high-end audio systems are engineers. There is the level of craftsmanship , and artistic flair that comes into play with engineering.

Bridges not only have a measurable function, they can be beautiful, or impressive. Or ugly and harsh, and unpleasant. Similarly with software and other engineering disciplines, there are humans you want to be able to enjoy the thing after it is built.

So, next time you read some guy pontificate that all cables sound the same, or some such nonsense, just realize that all young professions go through this period of dissrespect, from the lay person and intelligencia both.

But, eventually, over time, respect will come.

Audiophiles seem to be divided into two major camps:

1. Those that like to play Jazz (and light pop, new age, and percussion music like drums)

2. Those that like to play Classical and Opera music.

Those that fall into camp 1, besides appreciating the music as just great music, also appreciate the fact that it sounds really good on their system. It sounds better because it is often recorded better and it is easier for the stereo system to reproduce the music well.

Those that fall into camp 2, besides also appreciating the music as just great music, apprecatiate the difficulty of reproducing this music – it is a challenge for ANY system to make sound really good. From the other directions, a) if you love classical music you will almost certainly need some kind of good equipment to really hear it sound good and b) if you have a great system you eventually try classical music and say to yourself, ‘Hey! that ain’t half bad!’ Especially opera.

Want to start a new topic category here. Not sure if this is the right name for the category, yet…

This category will address both honest questions about, and callous attempts to ridcule, our hobby. It will also help point out how audiophiles can and should stop both unconsciously or callously attempting to ridicule non-audiophiles.

For example: The Furutech DeMAG at gizmodo:

CES 2007: Furutech DeMag Demagnetizes Your Money Away

and

and Mike L’s room article over at Digg:

Now THAT’s a Music Room

So, far be it from me to try and defend Mike’s choices in setup for his room, I disagree with many of them, but there are some key points here that we need to address:

1. Rampant ignorance about the high-end and audiophiles in general

2. Open hostility towards us and our hobby

Before we start the posts that will try to explain to people why we do what we do, and how we ourselves can be better members of the music-loving community at large, it would be good to make a quick summary of what the basic issues are:

1. In this technical age we live in, people try to extrapolate from whatever knowledge they have, things they think they understand, to reach conclusions about something they don’t understand or haven’t experienced first hand. We call this ‘listening with the mind instead of the ears’.

The more we talk about the need, and provide opportunites, to hear, to Test Drive, good systems, the more people will understand what we are all about. Whether they become audiophiles or not, after they hear a decently setup system at least they will have some basis for their opinions.

2. People perceive audiophiles as being judgemental, especially about the type of equipment that lots of non-audiophiles own and are likely very proud of. This hurts their feelings and they, in turn, lash out at us and our hobby. Some of the most vindictive and hateful posts get the highest scores on the Digg thread.

We need a way to speak very plainly about the limitations of some of the equipment out there, but without unnecessarily offending the owners of this equipment who are the exact people we want to show that there is stuff a lot better out there, at about the same price – and that working together we can force the industry to make better stuff still.

3. Audiohpiles are perceived as off in their own world. It is not quite that they think us elitist, or wacko, or suckers – but that they think of it as Us and Them. Some of this has to do with the times we live in – but some of it has to do with the way the music, over the years, sometimes takes people and audiophiles in different directions.

Those audiophiles, (like me!) who like the kinds of music most people like: Pop, Rock & Roll, Rap, Techno, Alternative, Punk, can help bridge the gap here – make no mistake, almost every sngle person on the planet loves music, this shared love of music is something that has drawn the audiophile community into the mainstream in the past – and it would be good for the audiophile community to not look down on these types of music as much as it does.