Ye Who Listen
with Credulity...
In my review of the Sennheiser HD 600 headphones, I
allude to the well-known but generally ignored fact that people don't all listen for the
same thing. Of course they don't -- taste in listening, like any sort of taste, is highly
subjective.
Yet, we audiophiles tend to ignore listening and
concentrate on hearing. Some of us get hearing tests regularly, but I don't know anyone
who takes listening tests. The way we listen is like background noise -- so omnipresent
we're not even aware of it. That's too bad, because I suspect that a lot of any
audiophile's happiness rests in how he or she listens -- and whether or not his or her
expectations are in line with that tendency.
I know some audiophiles who can't wait to tell you
everything that's wrong with your system, their system, all systems. What's
surprising is that many of these people aren't unhappy in the slightest. All systems suck
-- they know this and every time they have this tenet confirmed, they are content.
All is right in the world.
I've never understood the appeal of this viewpoint, but who
am I to question anyone else's sanity?
Where this cozy little scenario breaks down is when someone
who believes that all systems suck also tries to believe in the perfectibility of systems.
This is doomed to end badly. But if you run into one of these audiophiles, keep in touch
-- sooner or later this one is going to leave the hobby in disgust and you'll want to get
to the tag sale early.
Then there's the addict in denial. You know, the guy with
twenty records who insists he's not really into the equipment. Oh heavens no, he's in it
for the music. But so what? If it makes him happy….
Then there's, ummm, me, for instance. I tend to like
most systems I've heard. No, I don't mean that I like just about any combination of
equipment. No indeedy. What I mean by system is a combination of equipment assembled by an
audiophile around his or her particular set of values and, of course, budget.
Not all of these systems are to my taste, exactly, but if
you listen long enough and hard enough, you can generally see what the audiophile was
after. It may not match your listening priorities, but it can be fascinating to
listen through another person's value system. Sometimes it can be an epiphany.
When I was an audio salesman, I once watched someone
undergo such an epiphany. I was working in a huge barn of a store and we always tried to
have several working systems set up in each loft-like room. Not all of these systems made
sense -- once we had a British Fidelity A1 integrated amp and a pair of Stax EL-84
loudspeakers left over after we'd connected everything else in the room -- so we turned
'em into a system. An appallingly bad one, combining as it did a 10W class-A amplifier
with a current-hungry loudspeaker. It made everything sound like it was going through my
old Big Muff fuzzbox.
But sometimes we hit the audio jackpot, as we did when we
combined a pair of Acoustat 1+1 electrostatic loudspeakers with a pair of Meitner 100W
monoblocks and a CD player I no longer remember. The sound was detailed and holographic.
The soundstage was huge and remarkably deep. We were playing Chesky's CD of the Reiner/CSO
Scheherazade and a walk-in customer was mesmerized. First he examined the speakers,
which were narrow, shallow and six feet tall. Obviously he'd never seen anything like 'em
before. He walked around them a few times and was obviously startled that they made as
much noise back towards the wall as they did towards the listener. After examining the
system closely, he sat down between the speakers and closed his eyes. He slumped back in
the chair, totally immersed in the music. I smiled. This, I thought, is how
audiophiles are made.
When Scheherazade ended it took him a minute to come
back to himself. He looked up and said, "That's the most amazing thing I've ever
heard."
And before I could say a word, an audiophile browsing
through the used records jumped in. "Oh no, that was horrible. All those
strings blended together! In a real system, you should hear each string individually, as a
separate player. And the bass was muffled and indistinct. These speakers are really quite
inadequate and you shouldn't even be listening to CD, you should hear how good an LP of
this sounds. And not the reissue either, but a 1S/1S stamper."
The walk-in visibly shrank into himself and did what any
sane individual would do. He fled the crazy man as fast as he could.
'Cause you see there's another type of listener and he's
the reason we audiophiles have such a bad reputation. He's the man who always knows better
than you do. He takes no pleasure from music itself, only in knowing more about it than
you do. And the sad thing is, I think there's a little of him in all of us.
But we can fight this little monster from the id -- and we
must if we want people to share our passion. Do your part -- no matter how you listen,
introduce some magic into the lives of the people around you. Share your love of music.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
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