The questions posed in the last post are difficult questions… well, the answers are difficult, anyway.

But there are a few guiding principles we think one can use to navigate the process of system evaluation and upgrades:

1. Recognize the absolute failure of magazine reviews and online forum consensus to consistantly recommend components of a high quality.

There are a lot of reasons behind these failures… we mentioned a few a couple of posts back.

2. Most components are good at ‘something’ – just make sure you know what that something is and how it relates to #3

3. Understand your personal preferences and trade-offs – and understand that they will change both with life maturity and as the number of your audiophile experiences increase.

Nobody is rich enough to buy the perfect system. No, even hiring a live bands won’t give one a ‘perfect sound’ [for example, Jimi and Mozart just ain’t gonna be able to make it that early in the day, sorry].

So there ARE going to be tradeoffs – things that you will have to accept which are not going to be perfect. Know which things are OK for you personally if they aren’t top-notch.

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How does one know what sound one really, really, really wants?

Saying it is the absolute sound (of a live acoustic instrument) is a cop out. For one, many of us like amplified music – which often sounds ‘better’ in our homes than it ever did live. Second – where are we sitting at this acoustic event? A close-mic’d recording would have us sitting in Yo Yo Mah’s lap.

Besides, do we even like Cello music? At what time of day? Do we like it as loud as it is live? Louder? Do we want the player to play with experience or with passion? Do we want them to play without mistakes – or do we want to feel like the player is extending themselves and makes a few mistakes in order to reach heretofore unheard of heights of skill with their instrument?

But all this is perhaps irrelevent.

What we really want in a sound is governed by how we want it to impact us.

Sometimes we want it to stir up the adrenaline – to make us feel bold and powerful.

Sometimes we want it to remind us of the beauty that still exists in this world.

Sometimes we want it to surprise us.

Sometimes just to entertain us.

Always to make us FEEL SOMETHING.

What do we want to feel? How can we tell? Is it like food – do we need a well-balanced diet of musically-induced emotional / psychological experiences? How do these interact with /affect / get affected by / replace feelings we get from other experiences in life?

I’ll say one thing – musically-induced experiences seem to have a higher quality, a more aesthetically pleasing as well as a ‘higher consciousness’ if you will, about them than the everyday events in our lives. Well, I find that to be true in my life anyway 🙂

[It is my opinion that most high-end systems and components target the listeners who they think want to be impressed by the technical aspects of an audio reproduction system – so that often a system does not induce any deep, complex responses in the listener at all – nothing except an appreciation of the technical wizardry of 21st Century humans and a latent feeling of annoyance with a dash of mild headache].

Last post broke down the optimization process into three main steps:

1. Recognizing that a system needs improvement and that it cannot be improved without some radical changes
2. Choosing what those changes should be
3. Evaluating the resultant system for sound quality improvements (or lack thereof )

Hopefully after some thought we might be able to apply some of the techniques from Simulated Annealing algorithms to our dilema here.

Looking more deeply at step 1.

*** Some people are happy with what they have and no matter what other system they hear, they are able to always convince themselves that their system is ‘better’. These people should not be reading this 🙂

*** Some people read the trade magazines are the online forums and hear about how just absolutely wonderful something is and this gives them an urge to upgrade. There is nothing that they can hear that is wrong with their system, but that ephemeral ‘better component’ haunts them – making them wonder if their system may not be so good after all.

How to debunk what they are reading so that they don’t feel like they need to upgrade all the time?

How to learn to differentiate between needing a system upgrade and just reviewer-inspired equipment lust?

How to stop this imagining all the time as they listen to each song about how the song would sound probably so much better if their system just had X, Y and or Z?

*** Romy [if I understand him correctly :-)], at the GoodSoundClub, thinks that a person should always have a clear idea of exactly how they want to improve their system, what property of the sound that they want more of and what they want less of, before they start upgrading.

How does one know how they want to improve their system?

How does one differentiate between infatuation with a different sound a natural preference for a particular sound?

How does one know beforehand whether a particular sound will help one grow in their depth of mucisal appreication, and what is just sugar coating that will take one into on a detour?

How does one know what sound one really, really, really wants?

*** Some people hear a system and they like something about it a lot in comparison with their system – perhaps the bass is better controlled, or more powerful, or the pacing is much more natural and engaging. Sometimes every aspect of this other system they have heard is appealing (in which case they should attempt to replace theirs with an exact copy of this other one, if they can afford it. Done, Finito.). But sometimes the other system sound also has aspects that are not as appealing.

Should they inquire further and see about upgrading their own system to get some of these positive attributes they are hearing?

They only heard this sound for a few minutes, maybe hours – what will it be like to live with? Will they learn to hate it?

How to get the good things from this other system into their own?

Which components in that other system are what is making this aspect of the sound that they are liking so much?

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Well these are all hard questions.

I know that other hobbies are also so inflicted. Electric guitarists buy and sell amps and guitars like there is no tomorrow (they call it having GAS – Gear Aquisition Syndrome). Looking for that particular ‘sound’ that will both be ‘theirs’ and also be appealing to their audience. We don’t usually have much of an audience – though the ones that we do have, especially the non-audiophiles – should be listened to closely to see if we are anywhere in the ballpark of having a system that sounds enjoyable in a natural sense. Even the finest wine tastes good to a neophyte – so should our finest hifi systems sound good to the non-audiophile.

More next time on some ways to help think about maybe finding an approach that might work for some of the questions above…

For myself, the main question is and will always be:

How does one know what sound one really, really, really wants?

Or needs.

To summarize the previous, somewhat rambling, post:

There exists an optimization technique called Simulated Annealing, based on certain techniques of metallurgy, which can be applied (often unqittingly) to optimizing a High-Fidelity Audio System.

This optimization technique has a large number of problems it has been applied to, but in general it is a practical technique and every application is customized for the problem at hand.

Using this technique should get one to a better system faster than just the brute force technique of trying everything.

The optimzation process in our case consists of three steps:

1. Recognizing that a system needs improvement and that it cannot be improved without some radical changes
2. Choosing what those changes should be
3. Evaluating the resultant system for sound quality improvements (or lack thereof :-))

Gettng to step one often entails an emotional rejection of the current system, causing confusion resulting in step two being flubbed, and ending up with a system that fails at step 3 (or whose improvment is not as significant as desired). Rinse and repeat.