Do you think audiophiles have a much deeper appreciation of music than the general public? - Page 6

I've got stereos all through my house hooked into an Apple airport. Music streams 24/7. In the living room, it's a stereo with bookshelf speakers. In the bedroom it's a boombox. It's like muzak only good music.

I started this whole audiophile journey because I wanted to enjoy my music more than I already did. I loved music before ever getting my first good set of speakers or headphones.

 

I think that anybody would appreciate music more if they were given the equipment to enjoy it at it's fullest.

I'm a music lover first and formost. I was a member of music forums before I started to explore how best to get the sound I wanted through headphones, which brought me here.

 

I think anyone with a love of music is going to pay attention to how it's reproduced. A number of them may become audiophiles and start chasing ever diminishing returns but I'm not convinced that's driven by a greater love of music than those that hit mid fi love it and stay there.

 

There's nothing wrong with either perspective and it's not a competition.

 Exactly!  You loved music WAAAAY before you got into gear.  Your love of music is why you got into the gear and now they are both self-fulfilling.

I consider myself a music-phile considering that I love getting headphones that are are cheap as possible yet have great detail and a good sound signature.

 

But I have heard many LCD-2s, HD800s, etc. and great speaker setups at conventions, and monitors at studios and friend's desks.

My opinion is that it's easy to forget just how deeply detailed sound can be until you sit down in silence and listen.  Think about how people can have fun just sitting at a Steinway and press the same key over and over again with the sustain pedal on, because that one piano note just sounds so damn good with all its resonances and timbral complexity.

 

Accordingly, high-end gear listened in silence really brings out this kind of texture and nuances in each instrument.  This is something that is missing when you listen to skullcandies in a busy office - the sound becomes blurred by noise and distortion, so you can only appreciate the song/piece in a more general way.  

 

My experience is that when you have less distortion, a nice full frequency range, and fine detail, the sound of each instrument and note is so profoundly interesting on its own, and so the whole song feels like more of a masterpiece, not just in composition but sound too.

Wow.....that got me thinking there. My answer would be that they probably would not notice something about the sound quality. I started being an audiophile just in the beginning of this year and before that, I was ok with the ibuds. I thought I might be missing something when I'm listening to live recordings of my school band that I performed in.(not listening to those recordings for pleasure,they really don't Sound that good) and that's about it. Now, if I listen to a cheap earbud, I notice everything bad about them. So.. From our perspective, they are missing tons of satisfying elements of music, but since they don't have much to compare to, they probably won't think their missing something.

On the other hand. Spend a couple of weeks with some No-Fi and you stop caring.

 

It depends who has the stronger persuasion. For instance, my entire family cared nothing about hi-fidelity and were content with using apple earbuds. Now, they're using my headphones and planning on buying their own higher fidelity equipment.

I know i have higher appreciation to music than many else i know. I know plenty of people that don't really own music or listen to it. I usually have music everywhere i go with me and i could not even imagine being without it.

I'm certainly somebody who cares more about getting every drop of extra that the audio equipment brings to that high music brings to me.

 

I have been into jazz, pop, funk, soul, groove, R&B, etc before really diving into the audio gear, though changing the gear can easily change the genre you can really get into. So like some else have said here the gear can indeed be more than just a "amplifier" to your current music palette. 

 

 

 

Edited by tissot - 11/3/12 at 10:09pm

Artists have an intent to communicate through their work. If they can't put the ideas across to the audience that they intend to, they're a lousy artist.

Music can be appreciated in many different dimensions and on many different levels. Does (at least trying to) play an instrument give one a deeper appreciation for music made with that instrument?  Yes.  Does listening to a symphony or concerto while following along reading the score lead to a deeper appreciation?  Yes. Does knowing about the life of the composer, or the social impact of new harmonic and rhythmic elements, or just feeling the beat in one's body or singing along to a pop song lead to a deeper appreciation?  Yes.

 

People who seek out the best equipment they can afford (which must be the majority of us on this forum) are deepening their appreciation of music in terms of timbre and ambiance and all the rest.  My experience in buying and upgrading equipment over (many) years is that I learned a tremendous amount about listening attentively. I consequently have a deeper appreciation of music than I did as a young person, even though as a teenager, I was already carefully selecting the best equipment I could afford and buying the best performances I could find, listening to them and discussing their merits with my friend.

 

Where we go astray is in making judgments. Some of you may see what I've spent on equipment and consider me an audiophile in the pretentious sense.  Others may sniff at my gear as being barely mid-fi.  When I see someone on the subway listening on their earbuds, the fact is I have no idea how deeply that person appreciates music.  They may be on their way to a conservatory or a recording studio. They may have great gear at home, or perhaps earbuds are the best they can afford, or are sufficient for how they appreciate recorded music.

 

I think it's fair to say that in recent years, the general public has diminished interest in the quality of sound reproduction.  I think it's going too far to say the general public's appreciation of music has diminished.

Hi everybody

 

First post and I figured this is as good a place as any to introduce myself... 

 

Like others have said, my love of music came first and is really what got me into the audiophile world. But at the same time it wasn't until after I acquired something better than iBuds that I really got more into music. I enjoyed all my music SOOO much more when I could actually hear the details, and it just made me like music even more; and this happens again every time I get better equipment. So the audiophile in me strengthens the music-phile in me and vice versa...

In my experience, no.

 

What "audiophiles" are good at is finding (or imagining) minute differences -- in soundstage, midrange, and "mouth shape" -- among different pressings of the same recording.

 

Kinda agree? I wound't say minute differences. 

One thing, for the life of me, I just don't understand.  Read Stereophile or TAS, etc., and they say it's all about getting to as close to the 'live' experience as possible.  But there's nothing "natural" about a live orchestral performance, for example, as that is totally dependent, as others have mentioned, on the amplification equipment, room acoustics and a myriad of other factors too. The closest to the 'real' thing would be a purely acoustic, maybe vocal, performance in the same room you're listening to the music to - and, if I'm right about that, that would eliminate 99 percent of all recorded music.  So the chase to spend a fortune on gear that will replicate the 'real thing' is just a lot of, excuse my french, b.s. -  On the other hand, the desire to hear richer and better recorded sound - that is, to get more fullness from the recording, assuming - and this is a big assumption - the recording engineers have done a good job at mastering - seems to me more of a realistic goal.  But it's the cart before the horse thing here too - it's the music that comes first, and then, once you've decided you love a particular song or genre of music, the desire to get as much as you can out of it, within reason, after you've first been introduced to the recording.  This is why I think it's worth it to upgrade my recordings, say, from basic red book cd to Mobile Fidelity cds (as an example).  I've heard some of bigshot's stuff, and it's great - fantastic, in fact, though definitely not 'hi fi."  But it isn't scritchy-scratchy either - it's cleaned up, but done in a way that doesn't damage the original intent of the recording.  One can love even a beat up old 78 rpm record, but if someone can reproduce the sound before the recording was beat up, I think one can enjoy it that a ton more.   I love music, but listening to some old live recordings, say, from the MET back in the 1930s, can be pretty painful and tiring to my my ears.  I'm simply not musically savvy enough to read through the muck, or the distant recorded sound, to visualize how the original performance would have sounded like.  And I won't even get started with the calliope-like sounding acoustic recordings of orchestral music (other than some vocals) of the early 1920s and earlier (though I'm waiting to have bigshot turn me on to some acoustic recordings that would make me change my mind - in fact, some ancient cylinder recordings sound remarkably good, but are still wearisome to hear on a repeated or extended basis).   

 

So, to my mind, it's the music first, but, that said, I have no illusions about recapturing the original unrecorded "natural" sound - since, it rarely is natural to start with.  But once I like something, I greatly prefer a clean sound, if it was achieved without doing damage to the original recording.  And if the original recording was done right, then I want to hear every bit of what the recording engineers intended, within reason, again, rather than an approximation of it.  And that's where better equipment comes into play.  Heck, if the original recording engineers messed up the mastering to start with, I have nothing against someone even messing with that too, even if it alters the 'original' recorded sound.  Having said that, though, there comes a point of diminishing marginal returns in terms of what you're going to get out of a recording - and I think that point comes at a way cheaper price than what Stereophile/TAS and other interesting to read, but essentially shill periodicals (or manufacturers) would have one believe.   You don't need to spend 10,000 dollars - or 5,000 dollars - or much less, for that matter - to get great sound.

 

One last thing to throw into the pot - not everyone's hearing (including mine) is either so refined or accurate - or even intact - that it would make economic (or arguably musical) sense to try to eke out every last pin drop of detail from a recording. At that point, I think the music no longer comes first and we're in bling (read: look at how rich or how much I spent) land ...The tricky part is to when to tune out all the hype and know when to stop upgrading ....

Edited by 563 - 11/11/12 at 2:12am