Why audiophiles are different (explained with color)

@mahgister,

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....


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)

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This is THE major problem with this hobby.

Gaining that last bit of improvement (especially when it comes to timbral accuracy) might well mean you have to spend 30 times more!

I will never upgrade my 500 bucks system...

Everybody listening to it knowing my S.Q. /price ratio is flabbergasted...

If i upgrade to 15,000 bucks for an improvement , no one will be so impressed, they will say it is a good system... Now they cannot believe what i have for the price...

There is a ceiling in S.Q. quality, after it you improve but with an exponential increase in price...

Elementary mechanics of vibration control, electrical noise floor basic facts, acoustical treatment and controls MAY cost nothing at all...

Then.....

Even if i could have the money i will not upgrade because i am too proud of my actual peanuts cost system S.Q.




Thanks God i did not have the money 7 years back to buy plug and play and dreaming to upgrade the month after....

Be creative and forget money....

Embed everything rightfully instead of upgrading and before it....Perhaps you will no more need to upgrade after that...


This is my point....




«Black is the color of joy because any pinpoint of arising light or sound consume everything»-Anonymus Smith

We need words to communicate but words help us to engage in a pointed direction , like a maestro with his words and gestures conducting an orchestra.... But they are not the experience nor the music...

The Vocabulary of audio is useful to describe the electronic performance of the gear....thats all...

The performance of a system cannot be judged by amplified music or electrical music...

Why?

Because we are designed for a long time now to hear timbre voices in speech recognition....This is an evolutive fact...

All our music come from human voice not from electronic moog synthetiser....

I trust my ears listening subtle piano cues or voices in a choir to decide if my audio system is optimal not his way to give a great rock concert with electrical guitars in decibels and bass ....

Recognizing sounds frequencies is one thing, recognizing timbre is completely another thing and the two are not superimposable with one another or dont overlay completely with one another....

This is psychoacoustic scientific fact....

Music is not sound but through sound , and music is not also only signals in a sea of noise....Music is from another time than the physical clock, and from another space than the usual geometry of the physical world...And music speak about other colors than the one we know of in the physical world , like the precise color of the mother voice in Mahler kindertotenlieder....Listen in your heart and memory to the colored voice of your own mother adressing you when hurted to have an idea about music....Speaking of sound with acousti vocabulary after that is ridiculous...

Colors are not color they are world in itself....like a musical tone....And they are together a new body....

The great composers create new cosmos.... The great musician recreate our body.....It is what i look for....

All people here a too different from one another to be  rounded up on a square and bagged up in the same bag....

Calling this bag "audiophiles" will  not  always  help....

 It is not because people are interested by improving their sound in many different way fron one another that they loose their individual character to suddenly transform in some mythical beasts named "audiophiles"


 In the same way human perceive colors the best if they name it first, it is for example scientifically proven that distinguishing a shade of color by name help and speed up tremendously any objects classifying task...

In audio it is the same, we must learn many words pertaining to sound...

 But you are right, music is not sound and many people here, not necessarily ONLY  "audiophiles" must learn to listen to music passing  over their habits and taste....

Sound is not necessarily music, and music manifest  through sound but is not sound....

My best to you....

The greek could see "blue" but associated it with other external and internal phenomena....

And seing a color is not only seeing something external but translating it physiologically and interpretating it.....

Then our "blue" is not their "blue".....The lack of the word"blue" is a sign they associate this color with other impactful phenomena then they did mever feel the need to detach it from these phenomena and name the "blue" abstractly with a specific word refering only to colors like they did for others colors... Probably the physical color blue impact then very much , so much, that it was not only a "color" but a more powerful phenomenon ....

By the way you can interpret turquoise like a green shade not a blue shade....

This is my explanation...

But i am not a specialist for sure....

Good night my friend.....

People usually always put down what they do not understand or get into but just because they can not appreciate music the way an audiophile does, does not give them the right to talk down to us like they do, but at the same time, we have no right to talk down to them, but i believe that they just can not discern the differences we hear at all.

You are more wise than i am...

You are right.....

My deepest regards

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.»

https://sites.oxy.edu/clint/physio/article/Definingsynaesthesia.pdf







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)»

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18340605/



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:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TDIAObsqcs

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....

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....


Canadian Brass "Brahms on brass"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMnmUoWkGYM

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....

Walt Dickerson, Sun Ra "Vision"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEz8NZzffX8

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 ....


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQZNCyib3Cc

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...

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....

Thanks interesting article....

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....

Not only listening music must be learned....

Listening sounds must be learned also.....

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....