Principles

shin, that was a great film funny as hell...

 

hmmmn

hi richard,
nice thought provoking thread.
i guess in my view that i have learnt to choose hifi equipment that enables me to enjoy as much of my collection as i can at as long time periods as possible.
this to me means that i am one getting spirtual value from the musicians message , two getting a value for money in cost of software / hardware that pleases my conscience , three a sense of smug satifaction that there are people who buy hi fi equipment that costs an outrageous amount of money and they do not enjoy using it and so blabber on endlessly about science this and measurement that. wrong !!!
i still don't see making hi fi equipment as an art form except maybe in the visual aesthetic sense.

many moons ago i posted a comment here that was misunderstood by numerous people.

who would you rather listen too julian bream on a £25 acoustic guitar from argos or my nan on a beautiful top of the range hand crafted artisan bespoke guitar. oh and my nan is deaf and can't play a note for toffee.
in other words the harmonically distorted, buzzing and rattling guitar will still sound better musically than the beautiful guitar played by an inferior player. this is the only law of music.

of course you would want to listen to the better guitarist !!! ( not my nan.)
but many people choose not to get hi fi gear in this way.

i am a musician , dj , songwriter , producer and engineer to so according to most hi fi buffs i know zilch about hi fi.
suits me fine as music is my business not hi fi.
cest la vie.

just my opinion.
regards.
darryl

 

Two people expressing different opinions about the same sound (which is what you're talking about) is not the same thing as one person claiming to be able to distinguish two identical sounds (which is what I was talking about). For example, the sound produced by an orchestra playing in a concert hall is not changed to any remotely meaningful extent by the presence in the hall of a microphone, yet some people claim that it 'destroys the musicality' of the sound. If Richard really wants to have a discussion with some of these 'musical listening' people, he'd be better off looking at PFM - as I indicated earlier.

Which is pretty much what I was trying to get at above. Sticking cotton wool in your ears reduces overall sound levels and filters out high frequencies - a simple, deterministic difference, applied equally to all sounds you hear, and hence it doesn't make any difference to 'musicality' because 'musicality' depends on much more flexible, fluid and complicated differences in all kinds of parameters, and you can easily 'hear through' the cotton wool to pick up the musical nuances. The differences between different amplifiers or different speakers are slightly more complex than that, but still nowhere remotely near subtle enough (in terms of hundreds of different physical parameters varied in a time-dependent fashion) or context-sensitive enough to have any meaningful influence on 'musicality'.

The expectation that different pieces of kit have different 'musicality' simply arises from an understandable but misguided anthropomorphic analogy, as I've explained above - and of course, once people expect to hear things, they usually do, but that's another story...

 

Pete, I think a good way to describe what you are saying is a 'dynamic difference' (musician) vs. a 'constant difference' (amp or cotton wool).

I think where I really struggle with this whole thing is the concept of 'musicality'. What is it?! There are a number of people who talk about it. I have asked some what it is exactly and they say stuff like it needs to play music, have groove and express what the music is saying....

I can understand what that means, but the problem is there’s no special factor called 'musical' or ‘groove’. It is only ones individual response and interpretation of many other real and definable characteristics of a system. The factors required to be ‘musical’ or ‘groovy’ will be different for everybody. So, learn what those factors are, and one will be able to create a system that ‘does it’ for them every time (as well as talk about it with others).

Now I’m not claiming to know that even for myself, let alone anybody else, but I am getting an idea. As I try new and different factors I learn more about myself and what I find makes a system ‘musical’.

Thats how I see it anyway...

 

i guess

its like the difference between a master tape and a 2nd generation master tape , it's that some hi fi gets you closer to the event recorded than others. have you not ever compared a first generation vinyl pressing to a later one or from a later copy of the master. they 'sound' very similar but the original 'sound' is better reproduced there is a slight better focus , detail and dynamic expression which actually sounds like better musicians performing.

 

Indeed, it sounds more involving. The cause of that subjective assessment is an objective thing though - less dynamic range, higher noise floor etc...

The trick, as I said right at the start, is to learn what objective variables give certain subjective responses in that individual - you, the only one that matters.

 

yes

the tapes don't really change in that way i know i have master tapes that i've worked on.
i get what your saying but if you do not have say master tape 1 and mastertape later version 2 to do a back to back comparison with how can you perceive if one will sound better or more musical than the other ?
in other words how can you judge the quality of a hi fi , are you suggesting we measure as many parameters then choose whatever one has the best figures top trumps style !!!!

 

pete, the only way i'd agree with you is if the sounds are pure tones anything more complex such as music (not made by richard d james i presume as a lot of his stuff is just pure tones) involves personal interpretation - even if there is some form of placebo in effect such as cables or dacs or whatever the fact that the observer has heard a difference and expressed a preference means that, to him, the difference is real. who are you to tell him what he has or hasn;t heard. perhaps he can hear the hum of a badly maintained microphone or the fact that a badly positioned mic stand is muffling a certain instrument for his seat.
i'm not saying that i'm throwing my lot in with the cable believers and kit dowsers but i'm not going to laugh at them, dismiss them or think their opinion any less valid when expressing a preference for a bit of kit. i may not agree with them but i'll respect their opinion, just as i'll respect the opinion of someone like yourself. at the end of the day i will make my own mind up - and so should everyone else.

 

Not at all, because some people will perfer systems with certian specs and others will not.

I'm suggesting that once you find out what paramitors you like in a system and the subjective impression they leave you with, you can choose Hi-Fi bassed on informed decision.

For example if you find that systems which are time-cohearnt nearly always make you feel involved in the music, that is has better soundstage and imaging, you can look for systems that are time-coheatant rahter than just having to listen and see if it has that mysterious factor of 'involvement' - which would be differnt for each person anyway as they find difefrnt things involveing.

Its the same way that a good designer of equipment can be asked to design an amp that sounds this way and that and they know what paramitors will give it that sound (at least to their ears).

 

The difference is the things you have talked about can make a change to the sound. What about when you have strictly controlled conditions where you know the two sounds (might be music) are the same, yet one person will claim to hear a difference between them? In that case it is the person that has changed. The problem seems to be that many people don’t like admitting this and look to external changes, however small and unlikely, to explain it. Occam's razor.

 

my real and

to the point answer is purely what i say to everybody.
if you have not heard it you cannot tell how it will sound, even if you follow the preachings of a particular hi fi guru , designer , sales person etc.
i find nowadays and the reason i left the hi fi industry is that people in general follow particular pet theorys and often end up with systems that fail to involve or captivate the listener.
currently its all this phase coherent baloney and digital this and that but its all just sales speak until you can assemble a system by listening to gear.
thats why i dislike many of the systems that people on here probably love and have paid lots of money for.
a little knowledge is a dangerous thing in hi fi.
its like the ferrous / non ferrous cases , stands etc arguments again.
not enough listening to music to much posturing over theorys and bull****.

 

We first have to find out how we exactly work.
And it seems that each of us work slightly differently.

 

that

is always the one constant ( everyone is an individual )
cue the python "i'm not" jokes.

 

We all function the same we intellectualise / visualise it differently.

Richard

 

That is all very true, but a little knowledge about yourself and the stimuli you respond to can help shift through a massive amount of gear you can be pretty sure you won't involve you for whatever reasons.

Rather than saying ‘I like valves’ try to find out what valves do that you like and you might find there are other options that give you those things as well.

 

The way we intellectualise / visualise if part of how we work, isn't it?

 

is that true of functioning organs !

hi richard,
is that a given,
as i am curious about this as years ago i had an accident that led me to fit and caused problems in my short term memory but had the bonus of making my long term memory much better than previous to the accident.
the fitting eventually stopped thankfully and the nerve damage improved but my short term memory is poor still compared to before.
how this affects me musically , well i am more ecletic in taste and i do find my attention can wander off with floyd type waffle and i now don't enjoy fusion unison passages of the fret **** variety, but it causes more ploblems playing with other musos when writing songs as i cant recall the chords that i had just played when writing a song so now i just score it all down on the computer and record it so i dont forget.
the brain is deffo a very complex device.
p.s. tenson not all valve amps sound the same why don't you just listen to the gear.
reading a list of specs on a box tells you nothing on the musical performance of the device.

 

Well it might depending how the mind reacts on them and depending on his experiences. I'm not referring specifically to Simon.

 

Oh dear... yes it does. As I just explained there is no such thing as 'musical' in regards to Hi-Fi. ‘Musical’ is your reaction to a 'list of specs on a box' - learn what specs help towards giving a 'musical' sound (which will be different for everybody) and you can get a lot closer to your ideal system because you are no longer doing the whole thing by trial and error. Of course there will be specs that are not available and things we probably don’t even know how to measure, but that is no reason to disregard what knowledge is available and pretend its all voodoo with this magic thing called ‘musical’.

Do it all by trial and error if you like, but I prefer to understand the way I react to certain things and learn from it.

 

It is all energy and how it is propogated or not (blocked). Back in the original nva thread I drew the anology with the way hi-fi works with the way we function as entities. In hi-fi terms the signal is dc current flow with a waveform superimposed on it. In the human sense the current is Chi (Qi) and the waveform is created by your mind and senses (which in my opinion are part of the same thing). Damage your hi-fi partially and you have distortion, damage yourself and you have distortion. It was working with these aspects in Hi-Fi that led me to working with it in the human body. With hi-fi you have to resolder and repair and replace damaged components to make the energy flow correctly. In the human case the repair system is built in and natural but it needs a hand and motivation occasionally especially if the system gets stuck and cannot retrieve the repair information from your genetic programming. Go to www.art-of-energetics.com and read the first page article. Qigong is a good long term training for this, short term visit a good acupuncturist, he / she if worth their salt should find the blocks even if they cannot break through them.

Richard