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.

Stitch wrote:

Whenever I had contact with "Audiophiles" and I asked about the impressions about a component, I get 99% always the same answer: "....too analytical for me....whoa strong bass...I like it faster...I prefer more highs...I prefer more bass..." I think, I had some luck, at the beginning from my Hobby I met some record collectors (Living Stereo, Deccas....) and when I listened to these on their Systems, I never thought about Hardware, it went totally out of its way.

drdna wrote:

The vast majority of things that give us information about a performance of a musical piece are preserved or lost in the recording process, not in the reproduction by the audio system.

I would very much argue this. I would certainly do not deny that a large amount of information about a performance or the performance itself might be lost of screwed by recording process. But I would not accept this premise and something that demean the participation of reproduction chain. The word “starvation” has bad connotation, however there is a field of human knowledge and experiences when “starvation” is inflicted purposefully for medial and physiologist (not to mention mental) proposes. You might read Herbert Shelton’s writing on the subject among many others.

http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020127shelton.III/020127.ch1.htm

One of the points is that human body is a perfect self-regulated mechanism and any poisoning and contaminations that make it imbalanced come to outside, from wrongly combined food for instance. So, the periodical cycles of starvation are the mechanism to remove the bad contaminates form body and restore the organism to its self-regulated state. It is not the post about the benefit of starvation but it has to do with my very fundamental view about audio reproduction that I am advocating for years.

A properly-made (very loaded definition) playback of audio reproduction chain can act to “information about a performance” as starvation acts to health of human body. With proper structuring of playback it is possible the effect of recuperation when the problems and predicaments of recording chin and in some case even the performing chin might be detoxified and the certain subconscious sensations that we experience during the live event might find the entry point in our listing practice. If this premise of mine do not exist then the whole notion of high-end audio as I understand it worth absolutely nothing and one million people who practice high-end audio shell return back to practice philately and the stupid baseball watching. The problem with all of it is that I am correct and playback is a tool of impact on right hands instead of the tool of reflection of a recording misery.

Paul S wrote:

For a while there, every system change I made that "improved" the sound also limited my musical choices. But the most recent round of changes has had the opposite effect, much to my delight, and I have been amazed by how well great performances of great music survive even poor recordings.