Why audiophiles are different (explained with color)
A very interesting video on color and color perception. How it comes into being.
In the act of doing so, it illustrates how the complexity of the high end audio world comes into existence..
at the same time it explains how we end up with almost what you would call 'violent detractors'. Negative detractors.
People unable to discern nuance. Audio haters. As in .....non evolved people, regarding audio.
This is not a put down, it merely uses the words to describe the position in life they are in at the time. They may evolve more into the given audio directions, or they may not. It is a matter of will, choice, time, and innate capacity to do so.
Something I have been saying for a long time now. Not just me, either. I got it from Robert Harley’s excellent The Complete Guide to High End Audio. There’s a whole chapter devoted to a glossary of audiophile terms for the way things sound and the importance and value in being able to recognize them.
So for example take grain, the term we use for a sound that has a rough texture. Grain can be rough like gravel or fine like sand or even finer like a powder. When all the grain is gone the sound is smooth and liquid.
The video guy talks about cultures always going through stages starting with black and white, then red, yellow/green, and finally blue. This is just like what I was saying a while back about the audiophile stages.
Everyone starts out being able to discern volume. Most everyone can tell which is louder. Then comes frequency response or tone. This is a variation on volume, basically evaluating if the volume is the same at every frequency. Almost all audiophiles get this, and it explains perfectly why so many are so caught up in EQ and frequency response. Many (not all) are stuck and never get past this intermediate stage.
Then we have imaging, the ability to locate a sound in 3D space. This is innate in human beings and so if the system is set up properly (far from certain) many audiophiles will hear imaging. Still, notice how many arguments there are among audiophiles about imaging, from people who don’t hear it, many of whom are convinced it does not exist at all!
Just like the Greeks who are blind to blue, these audiophiles are deaf to imaging.
The last and highest stages of listening involve the ability to discern fine details- and not fine in terms of volume necessarily but fine in terms of character. The gradations of grain to liquid mentioned earlier are one aspect of this.
Take something like warm up. Cold gear is grainy. The same component after thorough warm up is much smoother. A lot of the difference between freebie rubber power cords and quality wire is grain. Yes also dynamics, imaging, etc. Whole long list. But notice, almost everything on the list is the same sort of higher level last things we learn to hear sort of attribute!
Little wonder then that so many debate so vociferously whether these things do anything at all. No wonder we have these people throwing snake oil around. Blind to blue.
Said it a million times: listening is a skill. Skills can be learned. Skills you can get better at. If you cannot tell the difference between two wires, or think they are tone controls, or maybe don’t even think these things exist, all that means is you are blind to blue. But the good news here is, you don’t have to be. You can open your eyes and see. You just have to make the effort to learn how.
It makes me think of the "Pink room", they use to use to calm people down. BUT if they stay in the room over the 15 minutes, they become agitated again, even more so..
We are what we see? I don’t know about that, but beautiful things sure make the music sound better..
Joe Cockers "Leave your hat on" comes to mind.. Not the best lookin’ fellow, BUT that song and "The girl" that use to dance to it for me (Buffy the belly dancer) were pure RED, like smokin’ RED, fire engine red... So I guess the "First color" works very well, primal in origin.
Then BLUE is last, what happen to the friggin rainbow? The colors in that.. Left out violet all together, that is why the old guys and girls didn’t mention it, They couldn’t make it, why on earth name it..
VIOLET though, and the description of "Scarlet" is throughout history...From enlightenment and self-awareness, if only in a positive (violet) or negative (Scarlet) way. LOL though dismissed behind closed doors.. Surely the latter "Scarlet" is an action not a color..:-)
Colors count, darken the room, and listen, to "Dark side of the moon" bright lights and that kind of music just won’t go together..
Vice Versa too. I hear Yoko Ono, I think of anything BUT color, pastels least of all.. More like pine pitch, something irritating. BUT pine pitch has a purpose.. :-) I can honestly say her voice can cause people to react, like bigger Shi#heads, than they already were.. YUP..
For those who would like to read about things such as "burn in" and warm up, I direct you to my article "Audiophile Law: Thou Shalt Not Overemphasize Burn In". There is discussion of warm up as well. It is at Dagogo.com
And by the way it is not exactly the same phenomenon , music is not sound and sound is not music....For those who need an example, politic is not ideology, ideology is not politic.... 😁
Two things can be completely distinctive without being separable....Like husband and wife or the yin and yang or the positive and the negative.... 😁
I just transform completely my room replacing a 1/4 inches lenght sloosh beverage straw in my 8 foot Helmholtz bottle homemade plumber tube by a regular straw of 1/4 inches lenght also... ASTOUNDING result...
A sound wave with a speed of 343 meters per second cross my room of 3.9 meter, 88 times each second....Many times then each fraction of second ...
Imagine your room like a very tense string on a violin, the slightest change make it vibrate differently.... Your room acoustic space is like a tense string indeed.....The physician Helmholtz is the real father of room acoustic indeed....
Listening to the Empire Brass ensemble playing Gabrielli after the straw change, and the tuba 35 hertz was coming alive completely from my 7 inches driver Mission Cyrus speakers.... Who need a subwoofer? the audible effect is across all bass frequencies range and over....
i dont listen cinema at all....Only music.... 😁 Then i dont need to listen bombs or planes.....i need to listen the bassier piano notes perfectly tough....
An audiophile is someone who can transform TOTALLY his room with 1/4 inches straw lenghth.... I guess i am one.... 😉
A consumer is someone who will spend many thousand of dollars to do the same thing.... 😎
Only superstitious conditioned mind or professional sellers think that audiophile experience is money invested directly related....I listen to a bad system whose value was 300,000 bucks.... You know why? They lack a straw at the right spot....
Acoustic is an experimental science, not a consumer costly product.... Try your own experiment....
Dont upgrade anything, embed everything rightfully.... Dont throw money, use your ears, and be creative....
Discussions of the interdependence of language and perception goes back as far as the pre-Socratics. More recent, influential work was done by Sellars, who argued that the idea of a "given" (in other words, reality telling us how it must be interpreted) is a myth. See, e.g., https://iep.utm.edu/epis-per/
What we call the given, and what we modern call the Imaginary, are correlated and regulated one another in the space of what Cassirer inspired by Goethe called the symbolic form....
The "given" perceived, posit to be objectively perceived, is an idea that come from the domination of the nominalism and of the cartesianism after him, culminating in the technological and theoretic science before quantum mechanic....The "given" is not a myth strictly speaking tough,it is a new correlation and a new regulation between the fundamental polarities of the symbolic forms themselves who always mediate between a "pure" knowledge which never exist and "pure" spontaneous action which never exist either separated absolutely from one another .... Reality is always appearing as perspectival symbolic form itself...
Goethe is the first phenomenologist to experience it consciusly with his plant morphology, and in his color theory....Cassirer being more a disciple of Goethe than even of Kant unbeknownst to most....
@teo_audio - Another interesting topic is how we are engaged in statistics when we listen and recognise voices, instruments, spacial information (imaging) are all skills used with statistical interpretation. I'm undoubtedly fascinated by the world around us, so.. Thanks mate. (two thumbs up)
I only found this topic when I followed one of the posters who made the only intelligent post in another thread. I see he, or she, did the same in this topic. Y'all let me know when you run a 90 minute marathon, or an 8 second 100 meter, or for most of ya, hear 20KHz again. There is some large differences in intelligence, this topic makes that a bit obvious, but our physical abilities are all real close. Ya know the word for pink and it helps you pick out pink since you spent a lifetime classifying pink. Does not mean you can see better in the dark or see ultraviolet light. Heck a lifetime of listening to music hasn't helped one of ya to know that grain can be noise, or harmonic distortion or any number of other types of distortion, but ya lump it all together cause ya don't know the difference. When ya can't even get the basics right, ya probably should be a little more humble and think twice, three times for some of ya, before posting this elitist drivel.
One can go back through old threads and see just how outraged and indignant some are at the descriptions used to convey what we hear. Complaints of over the top language and hyperbole are disparaged with the heat of a thousand suns.
Could it be that that is the latent underpinnings of the refusals to accept what is described? Can objectivists be so limited that anything other than a measurement can set them off? Think back on the movie, Contact, when Jodi Foster's character (a scientist who relies on measurements) tries to describe a beautiful celestial event and fails, and then goes onto to say, "They should have sent a poet."
Consider also, the movie, Arrival, where the more a linguist learns an alien language, the more she begins to think and process like one. We all see and hear things somewhat differently depending on our own life experiences and how we're wired. Some just resist too hard.
Some are simply not wired to be particularly discerning; generally, in some cases and specifically in others. One comes across this in relation to different areas of life and not only as concerns sound. As the OP points out this is not a put down, and why is it surprising to anyone that this should be the case? It is possible to develop the ability, but first one has to be open to the reality and the possibility.
Related to the subject of perception and discernment of nuance, one aspect of sound which seldom receives enough attention is rhythmic nuance in music. Spatial and frequency response information is often discussed in detail and there is plenty of reasonably adequate language used to describe these; even if as has been pointed out, some turn indignant at its use. Timbre, which along with rhythm/dynamic nuance are the most foundational aspects of the sound of music, receives some attention; although still not with the kind of detail that it deserves given its importance. However, for some reason rhythm (dynamic nuance) receives scant consideration and has the least developed vocabulary used to describe the very fine details of its musical expression. The somewhat commonly used “PRAT” does not do justice nearly well enough to the details of rhythmic nuance in a musical performance which are every bit as numerous and varied as those describing issues of frequency response and sound staging.
Complaints of over the top language and hyperbole are disparaged with the heat of a thousand suns.
haha - we wouldn’t want to disappoint.
rhythmic nuance in a musical performance which are every bit as numerous and varied as those describing issues of frequency response and sound staging.
Are you talking about the style of the rhythm the music is performed as, or how it’s portrayed in playback systems? I’m not sure what you’re talking about? I’ve been dancing Latin styles for close to 20 years now, and the nuances in the style and tempo largely determine how I interpret the music into a series of movements related to what I am hearing, and in turn my dance partner is lead into the moves. She also uses queues in the style of the music for her taking direction and moving with the music. @frogman Recognising these nuances doesn’t appear to me to pertain particularly to the playback of music? Please elaborate on what specifically you mean?
When I run "elitist drivel" through my trusty decoder ring it comes out, "So far beyond my comprehension I will throw an insult and hope nobody notices how mindless it is."
No such luck.
Language/perception is another good one covered by Harley. He uses the example of an x-ray, which is nothing but shades of gray, and how when you learn enough about the underlying anatomy, and pathology, and the physics of x-ray after a while it is almost like you can see in 3D. It was little more than a neat metaphor at the time. But now having gone through the program, learned x-ray, and getting quite good at reading films I have to say he was really onto something.
There is a very real debate to be had about which comes first, the word or the understanding. If you read the bible, In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. So there was word, simultaneously God. Which would have to be, since at this point there was no Man, so how could there even be word, in the normal sense of word?
This isn’t just some pie in the sky nonsense either, certainly not elitist drivel (although it may well be hard to follow) because it is our everyday experience.
In the beginning I could not for the life of me hear any difference between CD players. They all sounded exactly the same. I even was in a demo one time where the customer compared and he couldn’t hear any difference either. So I know this is not super easy or innate but rather takes a bit of skill.
At the same time I was reading and trying to learn the glossary of audio terms I was listening and trying to figure out what they meant. How to connect the words to the experience.
It was all very frustrating until suddenly one day, Aha! That is what it is! Something flipped and I knew what I was hearing and was sure of it, and could describe it. Talk about it. Before it was all just, Well it sounds expensive. Better. Vague, like that.
I don’t know how other people get there. I don’t know that a lot of them ever do. Many may well go their whole lives ridiculing "elitist drivel" without ever understanding a word of it. Oh well.
Even if we have a word for the object "gorilla" we can miss the perception of the gorilla crossing the theater scene where it is completely unexpected...It is a very well known experiment in psychology...
Then imagine you dont have even a word for a new concept, how could you perceive it consciously ore be attentive to the phenomenon described by this concept for which no word exist then no expectation?
It will be difficult.....
The greek perception of the ocean and of the wine were the product of a cenesthesical association between the lost of balance at sea, the effect of the wine on balance, and the darker color of the 2....
The greeks live in a world where their intimate participation in the world was more intense than today, and the powerful cenesthesia linking different phenomena prevented them to separate the wine experience for example and the sea experience by a new word for the distinctive color of the sea... separating the 2 phenomena by an abstract color qualification was not possible for them....
The effect of the sea on the body, the enebriation of navigating and of drinking wine, like of the wine darker color like of the darker color of the sea and action on the balance of the body by the wine and the sea navigation was too powerful to separate the 2 by a more abstract distinction...The color experience of the sea and of the wine cannot be separated from the lost of balance and enebriation and joy of drinking and navigating...
Then a perceptive difference is always associated with other aspects of perception, it takes an act of distantiation, a less participative stance, to create a new word/concept for a new conscious experience....
Language implicate the lost of the world where the animal is immersed completely...Individual consciousness and abstract experience is linked to language....
Without expecting for a bear to cross the theater scene, most people wont see it at all.... And furthermnore without the word/concept "bear" no one will see it, the brain will erase it from the scene, unable to imagine it at all...
Like the Indians of South America never see a "boat" when they see Hernando Cortes, they see gods at best....Unkonwn powerful indescriptible phenomenon...
The greeks drinking wine and navigating experience the 2 powerfully together without thinking a moment to dissociate the 2 with a new color concept that will separate them completely....
rixthetrick, of course it refers to how it’s portrayed in playback systems. Style of music is not the issue; nor is dancing, although I suspect that a good dancer reacts to what I refer to.
Some pieces of gear simply do a much better job of portraying rhythm than others do, and they do this in different ways. I will leave the possible technical reasons to others, but some gear sounds much more rhythmically alive while, at the other extreme, some sounds practically rhythmically dead by comparison. Some do well at higher volume settings, but not so well at low volume settings. There is gear with every level of competence in between in this aspect of music. This is all a generalization.
I’ve experienced gear that sounds very alive through the midrange, but is sluggish in the bass range; even when the bass reproduction is pretty good tonally (not overblown). I’ve also experienced gear/systems that portray, for instance, the crescendo that a well recorded orchestral string section makes in a segmented (for lack of a better word) way as opposed to a seamless and gradual incremental crescendo from very soft to very loud. Lesser gear might get the low volume content and the high volume peaks just fine, but not what happens in between. In a Jazz quintet, for instance, there might be a beautiful interplay between the piano players left hand and the bass player that while heard volume wise does not give the listener the sense that the piano player and bass player are “locked in” and listening very intently to each other while the saxophone solos. Some gear does let you hear this and some doesn’t do it as well. IMO, this can all be attributed to how well gear portrays micro-dynamics in music. Hope this clarifies.
My gear is average but very well embedded and in a room under controls...
Timbre experience was my relatively large bandwith response feed back from the room/speakers to help me fine tune the Helmholtz mechanical equalizer...
But any average system like mine even in a very well mastered room has some limit...
Some gear does let you hear this and some doesn’t do it as well. IMO, this can all be attributed to how well gear portrays micro-dynamics in music.
This microdynamic expressing gesture of playing between 2 instruments locked one with the other by their "rythmical resonance" is after timbre experience the most important criteria about an audio system for me...
It is the only reason why i would upgrade, if i could afford it, my 500 bucks system to a 15,000 bucks one...( yes i calculate the price even if i could never afford it) But happily i have a "minimal" experience of this microdynamics ONLY because my system is well controlled...I can live with my actual system without killing myself...
But a "minimal" experience is not an optimal experience... For sure...
I console myself with this minimum and anyway most people dont live this experience even with system way more costly than mine....microdynamics is harder to get than timbre experience which is his acoustical basis....
The perception of microdynamics is less the perception of separate details by some costly piece of gear able to act like a microscope, than an ability by the system/room to link the part and the whole in a rythmical way....It is why it remind me of a rythmical playing "resonance" ... Details are not separate from the body of sound like a fractal effect but experienced together distinctively but never separate more like hues of color..
Thanks frogman to this important post about microdynamics...
This jazz album illustrate well for me what i have in mind by this microdynamics rythmical resonance between 2 players...
If a system catch well the living subtle variation of these 2 instruments playing together, the constant mingling and rythmical departure from note to note.... The system do well....
Or in classical any well recorded quartet like this one:
Auryn quartet Haydn quatuors, with a sound so well recorded that this microdynamics is more easily expressed and perceived... We must feel this rythmical resonance between the gestures of the string instrument speaking with one another...it is no more the proper timbre only but the inflective and reflective gesture through the tonal timbre playing and answering to another one, like one respiration or as if there was one instrument only ....
Great music, mahgister. Brilliant spontaneous creativity and wonderful Haydn. Thanks
Thanks frogman.... Happy that you like my choices...
To add for the microdynamic resonant rythmical or pulsative experience , i just listened tonight to this absolutely perfect and marvellous transcriptions for a quatuor of brass to die for , the recording is out of the ordinary and reveal this dynamic micro texture at plays between each instrument, we feel on an ocean where each wave think by itself through the others....
Elite drivel was too kind but I am a nice guy. Look at y'all patting yourselves on the back meanwhile everything you know about audio would fit into a thimble. Simple concept is too much for you. You can learn listening skills but that grain comment tells me you have never worked hard enough to know what to listen for. Too busy acting superior to spend the time learning and too busy acting superior to realize what ya don't know. Ya make fun of others but ya done nothing to better yourself. Give me a kid off the street and 1/2 a day and he could tell me more about what is wrong with a system than any of you.
Ya see what I mean. Not just elite drivel but bullies that show their stripes when someone stands up to them. Can't talk about audio so they gotta be bullies.
Talking Schiff? You were doing so well until that. How much right wing cool-aid do you consume on a daily basis? It's bad enough that snratio is a recidivist troll who proves our point but do you just have to spew such silly nonsense?
Some scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries claimed that the Greeks did not see colours. They saw them, and well, but they only described them in a different way, surely people's eyes are always the same and will remain the same. Case is that ears are functioning the same way. The colours were, for the Greeks, primarily life and light: an experience completely human and not natural, visual, which has nothing to do with the colour spectrum of the prism, as defined by Isaac Newton. Very interesting thread @teo_audio, food for thought for some.
Some scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries claimed that the Greeks did not see colours. They saw them, and well, but they only described them in a different way, surely people’s eyes are always the same and will remain the same.
The greeks see the color but experienced them completely differently....The eyes/brain interpretation pathway was not in the same state ...
it is called a collectively induced synesthesia, they associated the wine color and sea color with other qualities like the lost of balance and never think to associate wine and sea, 2 dark objects, with a different particular color...
Qualities are never totally separate "animals"....
Some here associate harshness, and higher frequencies with the adjective "cold" light clean and detailed... and warmer soft with dark unclean and distorted ....
This is a vocabulary existing in audio not in musical history for all musical history....
An instrument has a " tonal timbre" , an amplifier in the contrary is characterized in another way...Same for the speakers.... It is an induced habit coming from audio engineering not music or musicians... It is an induced cenesthesia associated with a particular object: an audio system...
Humans changed with culture and conditioning... But cenesthesia stay....Cenesthesia is an expression of the child state plasticity of the brain and can be collectively expressed ...
Most people in the world associated mountain peaks or a zig zag mark with a sharp qualities like a saw and a string of clouds with a soft feeling....
Even each vocal sounds induce his own cenesthesia, sometimes very different for different people....
it is a universal cenesthesia in one case, and someimes a particular cenesthesia...
Any perception of a phenomenon changed the body/brain state....It is a two way business...The phenomenon is changed too in many ways...
The greek were not wrong and Newton right, they 2 ignored, contrary to Goethe, the physiology and psychology of the perception....
Scientific research on synesthesia is a very new field that has only developed in the last 20 or so years. Before that i believe it was called only a phenomenon.
Do we just make up our own meaning for words here? Is that how it works for y’all. That is not what induced synaesthesia is and synaesthesia has nothing to do with the Greeks and the color blue. If we are just gonna make things up why have a forum? Calling a sound warm does not mean ya feel physically warm no matter how many times ya repeat it. Maybe if I put ya under a heat lamp when I turned up the bass then ya would have an argument. Ya gone and taken a simple act of learned classification, like blue or pink with what that color represents and gone ran off the end of the world with it.
There is no wavelength assigned to indigo. If you want a number, it's around 445 nanometers, but it doesn't appear on most spectra. There's a reason for this. English mathematician Isaac Newton (1643–1727) coined the word spectrum (Latin for "appearance") in his 1671 book "Opticks." He divided the spectrum into seven sections—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—in keeping with the Greek sophists, to connect the colors to days of the week, musical notes, and the known objects of the solar system.
So, the spectrum was first described with seven colors, but most people, even if they see color well, can't actually distinguish indigo from blue or violet. The modern spectrum typically omits indigo. In fact, there is evidence Newton's division of the spectrum doesn't even correspond to the colors we define by wavelengths. For example, Newton's indigo is the modern blue, while his blue corresponds to the color we refer to as cyan. Is your blue the same as my blue? Probably, but it may not be the same as Newton's.
Calling a sound warm does not mean ya feel physically warm no matter how many times ya repeat it.
Your own remark demonstrate easily that you have no clue about this phenomenon...
Synesthesia can refer to an association between touch and sound like between letter and color... What trigger this association is not necessarily a perceptive spatial cues in the case of letters and colors, but perhaps a translation of the body sensation from a cognitive pathway in the case of the touch and hearing in the audio phenomena for example... This is certainly a possibility....
Then insulting people AFTER 8 posts, demonstrating by this sentence that you have no understanding at All of what is synaesthesia, what do you think we think you are?
Synesthesia:
« One third piece of evidence that perceptual/sensory factors may subtly influence otherwise conceptually triggered synaesthesiae comes from Eagleman (2010). Eagleman has recently shown that the visual form of letters may have an impact on their colouring.His data suggest that letters that are similar in shape (e.g., E, 3) may be closer in colourthan those that differ in shape (e.g., E, X). In a similar way, Millset al.(2002; also Witthoft & Winawer, 2006) have shown that visual similarities in letters can dictate how colours are transferred across alphabets in bilingual synaesthetes (e.g., the Cyrillic letterIand the Arabic letter N tend to be coloured similarity for English-Russian bilingualsynaesthetes, as do�and R). In other words, synaesthetic systems appear to be built around perceptual features at least to some degree. However, the exact nature of this visual influence remains unclear. It is possible that perceptual/visual influences may play absolutely no role whatsoever in the actual triggering of the synaesthetic experience.»
This definition will help you and make you able to think WITHOUT insulting:
«According to Day (2005), there are two major categories of synaesthesia: 1. Cognitive synaesthesia: Photisms or other synaesthetic perceptions are induced by stimuli associated to symbolic meanings, transmitted within specific culture (graphemes, phonemes, people’s names, week days, etc.). 2. Synaesthesia “proper”: Stimuli of one sensory modality are perceived simultaneously and involuntarily through an additional sensory channel (e.g., seeing music)»
And perhaps a last clue to help you from the same areticle i can send to you free of charge:
«It is not an accident that various authors defend that synaesthesia research can bring new insights into our understanding of the neurological bases of metaphor and language (Cytowic, 2002; Marks, 1978; Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001b). Subjective reports reveal striking parallels between the synaesthesia and cross-modal associations reported by nonsynaesthetes. For instance, Ward, Huckstep, and Tsakanikos (2006) demonstrated that the associations of sounds to colours in synaesthesia showed the same pattern of correspondence between luminosity and tone pitch as in cross-modal associations of normal persons.»
Dont apologize.... But stop insulting anybody in your first posts.... Especially if your I.Q. is not what you think it is....
If you are unable to understand these articles because of your attention span limitation, which your insults demonstrate is perhaps a problem with you, i suggested a 4 minutes video which will not induce your anger against audiophiles:
One of the many things i love in audio is that definitions are so differently understood as the perception of sound. Also our perception varies drastically on visual equipment too, and i still wonder why so many people choose a TV that is showing the sea coloured blue on a rainy day and that is not a nuance but a big difference.
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