Running further away from Slav’s and Austrian’s “expressed sound” in music, walking across the Brucknerian soft monochromic fields I found myself lately to have very different interests in the sound that I am after. Well, I know how to make good sound, let not to be too modest – whoever was in my listening room last year and hit the “good electricity period” know that I am not just running my mouth. However this sound has own hated by me Mahlerian expressiveness. It just depicts all possible existing the recording moments in their most desirable way, the desirable in trims of listening experiences. I admit that it is an accomplishment itself but during the last year six month my interests shifted in different direction.

I almost seen myself if not a conductor of the music the I play but at least a coordinator and organizer- ether way I see myself as a person who utilizing my audio methods is responsible for how music would be played in my room. Playing music on my audio lately shifted on two major segments – live music from FM and playing my CD/LP. In term of audio the live FM gave me mostly the “music of Mahlerian expressiveness”. I do very little to think about “conducting” or organizing this music. I take that sound “as is”. However, the other my listening- from my CD/LP is a maters of totally different intention – this music I listen with very deep and purposeful intention  and while I do so I am looking for other meaning of Sound and Audio  expressiveness.

The CD/LP that I listen are practically never the Mahlerian colorful music but mostly the recordings from 20s to end very end of 40s, with 1939-49 being the most interning years. I would like to live aside all aspects of good conductors sand phenomenal players and to look only at the pure audio elements of sound. Good, how good is it! I do feel that in sound of heavy saturated tapes of Koussevitzky and Furtwängler orchestras lives more “information” then in well-bread sound to better orchestras of today. This is not only attributing to the great contactors and their given interpretations but rather an argument that their Audio Sound was more potent.

I have a lot of ideas on the subject and one of them is a concept of “Rational Masking” or something that I call more generally as “Implied Sound”.  The “Rational Masking” is a situation when audio element intentionally blurs specific aspect of audio presentation, implying that there are hidden elements out there. That yanks listening perception and it is incredibly powerful and tool as it teases listening awareness, forcing it to become from a passive consumer of event to an active collaborator of event. Remember how attractive and swallowable a naked woman looks in her panties and how less exiting she might look completely naked? The “Implied Sound” works in the same way. Surely, to implement within a playback an active “Rational Masking” mechanism is incredibly difficult but we have where to learn – the recordings from 40s.

This is very much not another idiotic thread about resolution vs. musicality. The “Implied Sound” has no relation to ether of them. There is however an interesting catche in there. The “Rational Masking” mechanism might be “engaged” but there is also a mechanism of “fantasies catalysis” and some other sides of audio do have some control over it. Did I say too much or too little? You decide…

Well, surely everything might be explained, or more precisely to say justified, by the presumptions that all listeners practicing audio may seeking subjective experiences that reflect variable neurophysiology of various individual brains.  I would not agree with it. I argue that absolutely dominating majorly of listeners practicing audio deal with accidental results that do not reflect their I individuals intentions and this audio do not reflect the specifies of the neurophysiologic demands. Audio people in masses are just a pack of sheeps that were given a generic herbivorous mass and taught a stupid cult of fraternities.  Observing and cataloging differences and identifying what one like or not is very much not the same then establishing specific and defined demand and perusing them…

Anyhow it is not the subject of the thread. In the subject I would like to point out that my initial post was a second layer. We spend a lot of efforts in audio the shape the “expressed sound” – something that represents the “auditable” but we not spend a whole a lot of efforts to  deal with something that I call the “Shadow Audio”, or with something that  the human response. The industry is under presumption that only music itself is something that is responsible for human response but I disagree. The industry claim it they are ignorant, uninformed, limited and because their objectives and interests do not go further then saleable commodities. In realty human response and moderation of listing perception shell be the only thing that distincts regular hi-fi audio from high-end audio aims.

drdna wrote:

1. The listener with a preference for euphony.  This person's brain deals poorly with audio "blind spots"/subtractive error and cannot fill in the gap as well.  Conversely, this listener's brain may be better able to process additive error.  Consequently, this listener is more willing to accept distortions and colorations in audio, so long as more of the original signal is also transmitted intact along with any added distortions. 2. The listener with a preference for dry, analytical sound.  This person's brain is very good with subtractive error or not very good with additive error.  They cannot process colorations well, but can fill in the missing gaps in musical signals well.  Thus, they prefer audio with more subtractive error: audio which has minimal added distortions, even if this means more of the original signal is truncated as well.

el`Ol wrote:

At the University of Heidelberg they found an other aspect that distinguishes two kinds of listeners. They called them the fundamental listeners and the overtone listeners. It refers to perception of rising vs. falling tone intervals. They established a test that also found its way into the aditional CD of a German hifi magazine. It consisted of a number of artificially created sounds where the fundamental was not present. Instead they consisted of a formant lying at higher overtones. In every sound example (consisting of two following tones) if the virtual fundamental was rising the formant was falling vice versa. The result was that if a fundamential listener percept the interval as rising the overtone listener percept it as falling vice versa. The hifi magazine did an online evaluation to determine the hifi equipment the two kind of listers prefered.

Extremely interesting! Are they natural or acquired capacities? Is any place where is it possible to read about it in English?

Paul S wrote:

Re-reading Romy's posts I find myself thinking of the great old black and white films and the way I have responded to them over the years.

From my point of view it is a very good association. The memoires about the none-existing colors of Casablanca are more powerful than the actual colors of the "Come and see"

some months ago. It was posted at AA about a year ago or so. I keep the "solutions" if someone interested wants to know his scoring and how much of a "fundamentalist" or "overtonist" is.

The only interesting thing about it is how being one or the other can shape your music and audio preferences, but anyone who's a regular poster of this site and has some little "ear training" will notice how every pair of sounds is "shaped" and would score as fundamentals or overtones listener at his will. At least that was my case.

I presented this test to some acquaintancies and funnily enough, the ones preferring rock over other music styles, people who like punchy bass and bright treble -JBL and Grado kind of sound- were all synthetic listeners, which means they listen more to the fundamentals than the overtones.

Rgrds