For every severely devoted hobbyist that constantly tinkers with the items in their hobby, there has to be a moment when you are actually satisfied. Make no mistake, a tinkering hobbyist is different than a collector. A collector may reach points of satisfaction, but they tend to chase things around a lot and their collection (more often than not) just morphs around the idea of eventually being satisfied.
A tinkering hobbyist is the cyclist that is regularly taking parts on and off their bike, perhaps making it more rugged, or faster, or allowing it to add more-value-for-the-money. A tinkering chef may futz with gear a bit, but oftentimes they're experimenting with different herbs, sweeteners, rise times, roasting times, etc.
The tinkering audiophile may have an array of things they're chasing, but the most hardcore of them are trying to seek out truth. The truth? Yes, the truth. The accurate and real sound of instruments (they be percussion instruments, brass, woodwinds, strings, the human voice, or something else along those lines) is what the hardcore seek. A truly accurate replication of music from a time and place being played back in a living room. The aural truth of an event testifying over and over, at the whim of the audiophile, in his or her listening room.
People say sound is subjective. It is not. We sometimes put people away in jail (or to death!) based on audio recordings of their crimes. We recognize our friend's and family's voices from rooms we cannot see them if we hear them talking, Somewhere deep in our lizard brains we know the sound of a piano is different than the sound of a violin. We know the truth of these things because, with experience, they have characteristics that imprinted themselves on us, and thus define them in our aural memory for as long as we live. Instruments we hear pressurize air in a certain way. And depending on the environment (an empty room, or a room with lots of people talking, in a small room, etc), we know that these sounds we hear may sound different, but still instantly recognizable.
If you get a hearing test done, and you are able to hear in both ears at most of (if not the entire) frequency range that humans can hear at, then sound is not subjective. If you have impaired hearing, then sound will be subjective. But leaving the hearing impaired out of the conversation for a moment, the only other disadvantage that could be viewed as subjectivity is the 'untrained' ear.
The untrained ear may not pick up on sibilance, but the moment it is pointed out to the listener, they can easily pick up on it. So we all hear the same exact things, but we may not all be trained to articulate what we're hearing or sieze upon all the layers found in the waves in order to readily explain all of the nuances. A lack of vocabulary to describe sound (or a lack of skill to detect it) does not necessarily mean we hear differently.
Many audiophiles explain that they have preferences. They say things like, "I like a warm sound that is very musical". When they say things like that they are talking about the presentation of the music being played back through their system. Some audiophiles will say things like, "I try to have a very neutral presentation in my system". And then they have a few audiophile buddies over to hear that system and they gently tell their friend that his system is, "not so much neutral as it is a bit cold and sterile". Quite a confusing vocabulary!
But would the original audiophile with his preference for a 'neutral presentation' ever sit in front of a violinist and say something like, "please play me something with a neutral presentation". I think maybe the violinist would shake her head and laugh. WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN???
You dont get a "neutral presentation" from the violinist. You dont get something "warm and musical" from the violinist. You get a violin playing. You get the truth! So any audiophile that speaks in such a language of "golden glows" and "brittle highs" is either
a) imitating his buddies
b) imitating what he reads in magazines and audiophile review websites
c) still training his ears and doesnt know any better
d) legitimately knows why a system sounds wrong and has the proper vocabulary to describe it
It either sounds like the truth or not.
Now, one thing very few (if any?) systems will ever achieve is being able to play at the sound pressure level of louder unamplified instruments (think trombones, etc) . Nor will any system (ever?) be able to accurately replicate the sound of a full orchestra. However, there have been a few people that have tried over the decades, but we'll leave those endeavors out of this conversation for the moment.
When you put a system together, your first requirement should be that you can sit back and enjoy it (another top requirement should be whether you can afford it or not - please use common sense and dont go into debt for these things). Your next priority should be that it sounds relatively convincing from a tonal perspective. And perhaps a few final considerations should be how it looks, and how easy it is to operate.
A lot of audiophile will read that prior paragraph and be saying, "geez - why is he not talking about the room that the gear will be playing in", as one of the top priorities. I have not left that out. It is actually bundled into the first priority of "that you can sit back and enjoy it". If the speakers are too big for the room, then you wont enjoy it (crazy low end energy will dominate the listening sessions). If you have a small room and multi-driver speakers that you have to sit close to, then their respective sounds will not have a chance to integrate before they hit your ears. The scenarios go on and on with the wrong-system-for-the-room. Bottom line, if you have chosen gear for the room poorly, you will not enjoy the system.
Personally, after having a bad experience (and spending a criminal amount of money in the process to try and fix the problems) with room issues due to big speakers in a small room, I err on the side of smaller speakers for a rooms now. I'd rather come up shy in low frequencies than have them overpower and muddy everything else....but I have not had that problem for years. Anyway, my point is that "enjoying the system" means not having screwed up the system / room interplay.
So assuming that you've met the requirements of a system that you can enjoy, and that is sounds relatively convincing from a tonal perspective, now you can begin to tinker with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment