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I usually do not particularly care about compliments of my visitors about my playback – I know whatever they know, not to mention that ordinary audio people are so inept to talk about Sound that to get any more or less stimulating critical feedback about what they heard from my playback is very complicated without waterboarding.

One of the greatest compliments that I am getting from time to time is when some people comment how specific music played by my playback makes them to think about the specific piece of music or a specific performance differently than they thought before.  I really appreciate when somebody listen what I would like to show off and ask “Where does this come from?”, or “Do you think it shell be this way?”, or “Why this was played this way but not that way?”, or “What would it be if this or that would be presented in this or that way?”, or just intelligently to object what they heard. A playback is expressive tool and my playback in particularly does a lot of things actively very differently then it usually done by the supporter of so common Masochistic Audio.

I have to admit that I am not so spoiled with abundance of intelligent visitor-listeners with whom I might be interested to collaborate the idiosyncrasies of MY sound or THIER sound of the PERFORMED sound. Most of them are ordinary audio listening ballast and they are clueless what they hear, have no attitude about what they would like to hear and the most important they have no objectives HOW they would like to hear. I found them boring…

I frequently play to people a piece that they do not know and ask them what they do not like in this performance. It is very important that they shell not have knowledge about the given piece of music and their perception of the music shall be built by the way how the performer and my playback present the given musical pieces. After getting the comment from a listener about what was right and wrong I usually play ether other performance of the same music or do some adjustment in my playback to present the piece differently the second time. Usually this second/third play sets the things straight right the way: about the understanding of the listeners of what s/he listens, about the amplitude of my playback’s capacity to interpret messages and about our both cultural/artistic references and understanding.

As much as it is incredibly difficult to found an installation that has that “active thinking ingredient” imbedded into itself as much it is difficult to found civilized listeners with evolved expectation and noble audio listening experiences. Over my audio life I met 6 people who I would conditionally considered “civilized listeners” and the all the rest I recognize as guinea pigs for studying the audio-Pavlovian reflexes. Even among those 6 only 2 of them were able to hear a playback and to say “I see what you mean” without me saying what I would like to say.

Anyhow, the “Thinkability of playback” is not just underrated or mostly unknown element of audio but rather the audio thinkability of playback’s owner is a very rare commodity among audio people. As the result the numbness and expressive impotency of those people paybacks is just a reflection of the owner’s apathy toward to audio-thinkability.

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