A Question of Right and Wrong.

[pre65]

But surely, you have to take our hearing and brain into the equation ?

Do we all hear things the same ?

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

It is the same reality. Unless you are mad or deluded.

[pre65]

It is the same reality. Unless you are mad or deluded.

Can you expand on that statement please ? For the benefit of the mad and deluded.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

No - think about it.

[pre65]

No - think about it.

Mad and deluded persons have to have things explained.

[Ray P]

Yet when we go home and switch the Hi Fi on, we also switch into another part of the brain in order to actualise and intellectualise the experience.....we sit there thinking "wow, what a beautiful holographic image; you know that high frequency is really clean, and the bass is really deep" do you think this at a concert? NO you have an emotional experience! You are just there, and you perceive it.

I completely agree with you about the concert experience. When we go to a concert we are interacting with musicians performing and we have an emotional link to them. Speakers don't play music, they reproduce it and so we are only hearing a facsimile of the musician's performance, which is missing many of the emotional hooks (but can still give that tingle on occasions).

But, having separated the music from the performance we are able to start imposing our personal preferences on the reproduction and still achieve a valid musical reproduction.

[IslandPink]

Most of us want to make a guitar through some speakers sound like the real guitar. Or the band played through the speakers sound like the real band. We use the same ears to listen to the real thing or the thing played through the speakers - so we don't have to overcomplicate the business about not knowing about how each of us hears the sound.
The difference which sometimes explains the different speaker preferences is one person is listening to the vocalist in the band and another person is listening to the bassist. Since most loudspeakers are only partially successful, we get differences and arguments about which speakers are doing the best job.
Now & again we come across a speaker system that does nearly everything correctly, those events are less frequent !

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Yet when we go home and switch the Hi Fi on, we also switch into another part of the brain in order to actualise and intellectualise the experience.....we sit there thinking "wow, what a beautiful holographic image; you know that high frequency is really clean, and the bass is really deep" do you think this at a concert? NO you have an emotional experience! You are just there, and you perceive it.

I completely agree with you about the concert experience. When we go to a concert we are interacting with musicians performing and we have an emotional link to them. Speakers don't play music, they reproduce it and so we are only hearing a facsimile of the musician's performance, which is missing many of the emotional hooks (but can still give that tingle on occasions).

But, having separated the music from the performance we are able to start imposing our personal preferences on the reproduction and still achieve a valid musical reproduction.

.............as long as you are reproducing the music, so once again what is that music, why is it changed.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Most of us want to make a guitar through some speakers sound like the real guitar. Or the band played through the speakers sound like the real band. We use the same ears to listen to the real thing or the thing played through the speakers - so we don't have to overcomplicate the business about not knowing about how each of us hears the sound.
The difference which sometimes explains the different speaker preferences is one person is listening to the vocalist in the band and another person is listening to the bassist. Since most loudspeakers are only partially successful, we get differences and arguments about which speakers are doing the best job.
Now & again we come across a speaker system that does nearly everything correctly, those events are less frequent !

But are you listening to and for music or are you listening to a thing!

[Nick]

But surely, you have to take our hearing and brain into the equation ?

Do we all hear things the same ?

I think its a very safe assumption that yes we do, unless there is some physical deformity involved. We may pay more or less attention, we may respond more emotionally than intellectually, we may like different forms of music. But I think we all hear the same.

[MJK]

They are all wrong. If one speaker system got it exactly right we would all be able to hear and tell it was the best, we would all be listening to it in own homes, none of these debates would take place, and the forums would go silent.

Speakers at best try and provide an illusion of real music, and fail miserably. As we listen to the poor illusions we all look for different properties of the performance and find some pleasure in our own stereo system choices and music selections.

There are no absolutes even in complicated or simple crossover circuits.

OK back to Lee Morgan's "The Rajah" and lurking for another six months ..................

[Ray P]

But surely, you have to take our hearing and brain into the equation ?

Do we all hear things the same ?

I think its a very safe assumption that yes we do, unless there is some physical deformity involved. We may pay more or less attention, we may respond more emotionally than intellectually, we may like different forms of music. But I think we all hear the same.

We all hear the same things but do we all hear things the same; if you include the way we react to the signals arriving in our brains as part of the hearing experience maybe not.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

For those who have never seen a LS3/5a crossover.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Linn Kan crossover.

[Cressy Snr]

Most of us want to make a guitar through some speakers sound like the real guitar. Or the band played through the speakers sound like the real band. We use the same ears to listen to the real thing or the thing played through the speakers - so we don't have to overcomplicate the business about not knowing about how each of us hears the sound.
The difference which sometimes explains the different speaker preferences is one person is listening to the vocalist in the band and another person is listening to the bassist. Since most loudspeakers are only partially successful, we get differences and arguments about which speakers are doing the best job.
Now & again we come across a speaker system that does nearly everything correctly, those events are less frequent !

Agreed Mark.
If a speaker is reproducing music in a crap hi- fi way, for example a Kan or to be fair to Linn, an original Wharfedale Diamond (sheesh) then I dont want to listen to that either. There is no more point forking out for a speaker of that kind, than there is paying for a "hi-fi" speaker that bores you to tears.
I can listen happily to a mono table radio; in fact I would much rather listen to an unpretentious DAB radio for my music entertainment than an offensive squawk box. And at the heart of all this, is revealed in all its sunlit clarity, the reason for the disconnect between the hi-fi buff and everybody else.

We can fool ourselves all we like, with our several grand systems in our soundproofed, treated listening rooms but the simple fact of the matter is, that if out of our family, it is only we, who listen to our system and our other halves/kids, relatives treat it with bored indifference or contempt, then said system is not playing music..