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The first level of listening perception is Static Level. At this level a listener perceives musical information as a collection of the individual sounds and a listening awareness tries to evaluate the “convince-ability” of those sounds. At this level the evaluations of Sound is not necessarily related to the preceding or following sounds/event and instead of Sound a listener deals with an array of  the secluded sounds/tones.

Certainly even the static sounds do have own dynamic/vibrant inner-life but it all included into a definition of Static Sounds at the First Level. Actually the best phrase to describe “it” would be not the Static Sounds but Disconnected or Isolated Sounds.  The ketch in here that any vibrant or “animated” tone without a reference to “something else” is completely irrelevant and has no pointers to its values. The “isolated tone” has just an instant charge, a modal value, it frozen in time and space and it has no relation to anything else. Therefore I called it Static, meaning having no progressive formation.

A listener during his/her playback evaluations at the Static Level pays primary attention to pitches, sharpness, harmonic context, tonal and timber authenticity, neutrality, transient characteristics, granularity and many other properties of reproduced sounds. Interesting that a listener, in fact, do not care about a correctness (how it compare to the “live”) of the reproduced Sounds but rather s/he concerns if s/he does not get within reproduces Sound something else, namely the Alien Sounds. A listener is unable to recognize destroyed sounds but only the original sounds and “something else”. This “something else”, the added superstructure atop the original sounds, is a delta between the  “correct” sounds and what a playback system presents to a listener (the distortions or aberrations). It is important to identify that those distortion/aberrations do not mix inside our consciousness with the  “correct” sounds and they just perceived as a totally separate recognizable-effective entry. So, while evaluating a playback at the Static Level a listener do not search, recognize or analyze the “correct” sounds, as those “correct” sounds are entirely transparent, “consumption-free” and non-detectable by our awareness (at the Static Level but the have own value at the higher levels).  What the listener’s awareness does is scanning the reproduced sound in search for those show-stopping Alien Sounds.

In the audio the primary contributors to Alien Sounds - the Static Level Detectable Differences are individual parts of the audio components, primary the passive parts. Each and single particle of audio signal (to name a few: resistors, capacitors, cables, magnetics, dielectrics, the spaces around the currents flow, electrical and mechanical signatures of active elements, contacts, diaphragms, suspensions and hundreds other contributors) do their contribution to the Sounds and do inject into Sound the Alien Amendments. The Amendments are the signatures of the mechanisms that invoked tem. As the result, we do not recognize the distortions themselves (in my vocabulary “distortions” are not the alternations of Sounds but an appendage of Sound with a residue of the linguistic manipulations) but we hear a language of the conversion processes that created the distortion, or according to the Beach Effect ™ the “language of a parallel process”.

Our listening awareness has an ability to filter out those amendments or to recognize them as the static, fixed amendments with a permanent delta. Sine the delta is acknowledged as delta, the listening awareness activates a static perceptional antidote, that sine it was called help to disregard the amendments or make their presents less influential. The effectiveness of the antidote is in direct dependence how the “language of a parallel process” differ from the language of Reality. If the languages use the similar linguistic algorithms then the effectiveness of the antidote is incredibly high and could completely compensate the presents of the Alien Sounds or the Amendments in Sound at the First Static Level. I have to note that some of the amendments at the Static Level have deep relationship with the amendments that take place at the Second, Dynamic Level (phase-related amendments) and the second-level amendments has way more powerful and more devastating affect to the listening awareness.

Well, if we have such a great ability to tune ourselves out from the Static Alien Sounds then what kind harm they could do? If to simplified everything tremendously and for a sake of illustration to compare our listing awareness with a computer then the awareness runs a multithreaded execution and the amount of cognizant force spent to run one thread take the juice (in case of a computer the processor time and a few other things) out of the parallel threads. Ironically our awareness acts almost similar and while we are filtering ourselves from the Alien Static Sounds we’re masking out  (minimizing) our capacity to be deal (be concentrated) with the content of the original messages.

The audiophiles call the Static Level’s Alien Sounds as the Sonic Colorations. The Colorations from their point of view are the “correct” sounds presented via a prism of Distortions but it is very far form Truth as the natural, original Sound of Reality never mix with the Alien Sounds of a Linguistic of Reality Transformations. Sound and the Sounds are recognized by our awareness separately. The Static Tonal Colorations are practically irrelevant; they have as much unconditional values as the none-existing murky Absolute Tempo in music. Therefore if a person evaluates a playback only at the Static Level then the result is totally extraneous and the person let itself to be engaged into a perpetual chaise of the meaningless and semi-hallucinational Static Level sonic differences.

The contemporary so-called audiophile movement and the entire audio industry concentrated and fully dedicated to analyses, recognition and selling to public the Static Level sonic differences. The audiophiles subscribe to one or to another pattern of Alien Sounds and perpetually chase the patterns as a dog chase own tail. The audio industry well understand this, wonderful for them, marketing situation and deploy an army of the ignorant-heaters-writers, whose audio-awareness are able to operate primary at the First Static Level. Those reviewers, the marketing cheerleaders, continuously propose to the prospective audiophiles-consumers the  “new remedies” or just the new psycho-virtual patterns of the Alien Sounds.

The industry operates quite simple: the most horrible audio element is and the more revolting pattern of the Alien Static Sounds it construct the less audio-intelligent person would be deployed to the “mission”. Any editor of audio publication knows how to mate a misery of a component (need to be “publicly evaluated”) with the personal audio-idiocy and ignorance of a prospective reviewer. The more horrible component get more loaded-with-Mormonism analyst-reviewer, and the “selected” reviewer uses his/her own “talents” to submit the poison-spreading-audio-gismo to public by building a necessary verbal wrap around a product. The consumers, with theirs consciousness operating at the First Static Level, mostly do not even buy into the different patterns at the Alien Static Sounds but they fish for a verbal marketing BS-wrapping around the Alien Static Sounds.

Based upon my experience and my unfortunate observation of those countless audiophiles, the so-called High-End audio has approximately 50% of its participants whose audio objectives concentrated explicitly at the First Static Level. I call them audio-zombies and they pretty much are a boring waste in audio. I have to note that there is no direct relation between the audio-zombies’ audio limitations and their general intellectual or spiritual competence. There is some indirect connection but to cover this subject is not the scope of my current application.

The next post will be covering the Second SLLB's Level: the Dynamic Level.

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