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…

Axel wrote:

I have hundreds of records and the one mentioned seemed the outstanding example.

I do not find the example outstanding in any way. In the same adagio there are dozens of moments that I would like to be played in a certain way. In any symphony there are hundreds and hundreds of moments like this. It is all depends what you’re looking and what you expectations from audio. If you objectives are just to play sound as is (that would be similar for a cook just to heat up food above FDA regulation and provide a meal) then it is fine. However, if you use audio as an expressive tool for your performing objectives then this would be totally different story. 

The same Komkomer Sambal might be just a pile of cucumbers and it might make a person to go by up to the next meal. However, what if the objective is not juts feed a person but to make a person just by eating this food to experience a patriotic rush for own country, sort of Chopin’s Heroic Polonaise? How we are entering a very different domain of cooking!

Sure it might be different by indifference. My annoyingly beloved Gabriel Marquez in his “Love in the Time of Cholera” gave a stunning example of it composing something like this: “her food tasted like an open window”…

The very same is with audio. Only in audio we bounded to many restrictions and in away are very limited. The complexity is to associate the squashing of those Bruckner cymbals with the fact of intermodulations.  The intermodulations are normal thing during live sound but in audio intermodulations looks like behave differently and much more destructive. The multi-channeling helps with intermodulations tremendously and makes the multi-layering of sound much “fluffier”. I am sure that cooks have the same techniques with preparing ingredients and cooking their food. I think there is nothing outstanding in there. The shaping of higher objective and recognition the methods that would serve them is what distincts high-end audio from just boring Morons who just buy mindless expensive gear and play slaved sounds.

Writing a yesterday about Korean Silbatone Acoustics:

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?postID=15405

…I was thinking about a relationship between a nation cuisine and nation high-end sound.  I do not know if it possible to build this relation as Sound is not nationalistic properly but mostly a subordinate to a given individual.  Still, if conditionally accept this premise then I wonder where are the Koreans with this own Sound?

Among the all national cuisines I would remove Japanese from the list of comparatives - in term of food they are out of this Earth. Among the remaining cuisine at the very top of my list is Korean food. The Korean understanding of spice much wider and so much more divert meaning then western food has. In stupid US there is no cuisine – in US we have meals, where spice regulated by amount of Ketchup or 93 octane gasoline converted into a generic hot souse.  The Koreans have very different balance between hot and spice and their spice is a whole universe, at least to me, and I adore it tremendously. Being a hugely compulsive person for instance if I find a properly cooked Kimchi Pork Soup then I can eat it up to the point where I can’t move. But I wonder if Korean aversion tendency to high spice discrimination in food are able to translated in any way into high tonal discrimination in Audio?

We have a few Korean companies that are exposed in US: Emillé Labs, Alnic Audio, Song Audio and I am sure many others. Silbatone Acoustics also have a tendency to become a manufacturer, it look like. I wonder of somebody can detect and to recognize anything specific-Korean in the sound that Korean hi-fi produce. If you taste Chinese or Vietnamese food next to Korean then by the sophistication of spice you instantly get feeling where Korean food is. Is it projected somehow in Audio?