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The Targeted Audio Listening has nothing to do with general music listening and it is just an ingredient of a very narrow audio evolutions.  It might be as stupid as just brainless acknowledgment of individual sound or as complex as assessment of specific intricate dynamics and chromic accents – it all depended from the objectives and the reference points of a person who do listening. Important is, that many audio people, in accordance to own understanding of complexity , use discretization-quantization  (Dis-Qu) assessment techniques to as a complementary to other assessment techniques.  The subject of interpretation of the discretization-quantization assessment techniques is very complex and I would leave it out of scope. What however I discovered recently that the Dis-Qu techniques very much use by very experienced cooks.

I was once observing a local friend of mine do cooking.  He is not just a good professional cook but one of those who get the cooking talent from God – the guy really what he is doing.  He is retired but sometimes he cooks part-time “just for fun” in a one of the Boston restaurants. What I find that I felt a lot of fun to observe HOW he is cooking. Mind you that I have absolutely no interest in cooking itself. What however I was fascinated that his cooking techniques are very similar to my Targeted Audio Listening techniques.  We have a lot of conversation about the some methodological shortcuts and he (let call him the Cook) and I absolutely independently created and those shortcuts showed to be remarkable similar.

The Cook does not taste his food. I never saw him to eating the meals he cooked. He claims that he know how they taste. What he however does taste are some obscured elements of the semi-cooked ingredients that are not necessary have a direct relation to the final taste.  He might for instance to taste the pepperchini liquid and based upon the result he completely change the way how he prepares one of his very complex sauces. Interesting is that the final sauce was not tested. Then we reversed the process. He teases the final source and based upon the result he make a collision that the same pepperchini were dehydrated before they were used.  He insists that the dry pepperchini shall be handled differently to yield the best result with the given type of pork and in a given idea of sauces. It is not an absolutely insistence of course BUT he is able to DEMONSTRATE and to PREDICTABLY PROVE what he is stating.

We do the very same in audio.  We define for ourselves some Dis-Qu check-points and we based upon them we define some absolute judgment about playback capacity. Let to take for instance a very simplistic example. Let look into the much-disputed cymbal clash in the adagio of the Bruckner 7. The enormous, massive Bruckner-style, monochromic orchestral climax, play is loud-enough and most of playbacks are in double digits of distortions (tube amps dive in grid currents, drivers are near Xmax, SS amps are fur in B class, rooms choke with pressure and so on). Then, while the playback is stressed the cymbals are lighting the scene up. The intermodulations of playback electronics and drivers under normal circumstances would flatten the cymbals, spreading them across orchestral sound. Now, try to play the same no with a single full-range drives but multi-driver playback with multi-amping. The cymbals get completely different new license to live and completely different expressive meaning…

The Targeted Audio Listening is like cooking and I do like very much to hear HOW my friend-cook is thinking about cooking. Unfortunately I do not cook but for somebody why do practice high-end cooking and high-end audio it might be an interesting mix…

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