Why audiophiles are different (explained with color)

The gorilla experiment is the tip of a very big iceberg.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBoF8URq1cw

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.

You can lead a horse to water. But you can't make him think.

Excellent!

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.