@ProtegeManiac : Thank you so much for having taken the time to give me such a detailed answer. What Evshrug said is so on true. I have a few passions in life and therefore I am part of several communities. I do not know why but the Hi-fi enthusiasts community is by far the kindest and the most respectful I have seen. It is quite remarkable.
I never noticed LOL maybe I'm generally around the more pleasant ones.
Then again I'm not into wines beyond "if I wont drink it I wont cook with it...except when the recipe says 'mirin'" so I might not have met annoying, snooty dickheads. Apart from a couple of dudes in a cutlery group perpetually on rage mode (although I understand why - lots of rip offs from China with Japanese names and low prices for the claimed steel, pretty plastic handles, but they break more easily than idiots that don't know how to use Shun properly).
To come back to your comment and my topic, what helped me alot is when you gave me examples of songs and what it illustrates. This really reminded me of my oenology courses. Without this guidance, improvement is of course possible but much difficult and much slower. This is exactly what vibrates with me. I need my nose to be put in it and told what smell is there, in order for me to understand and then, after some training I can sniff it from miles. Like finding fruity notes in white wine for example (I am really good at this... at least until I try a glass or two too much... I always found that spitting the wine out was an unacceptable waste... anyway...).
I got asked why I keep saying that any fruit dessert should go with Gevalia Peruvian blend. Nobody gets it until they smell and taste it. It actually has fruity notes, which is funny - people think that's weird for coffee when coffee "beans" are berries ie fruit.
And yeah I don't spit either. I'd rather be intoxicated for the tenth glass than waste twenty.
Btw, I do love ramen
. I loved it from the very first time I had it. Then a friend that lived a few years in Japan told me that the ramen in the restaurant where I was going regularly was not "real" ramen. He took me to a much more expensive restaurant. I had a ramen there... and hated it. All tastes were SOOO STROOONG. It was salty and brutal. But I started to go there at least once a week for some time and developed a taste for this violence. But without the guidance of my friend, I would just have gone back to what I knew. Sometimes the best things need a bit of work to be appreciated. And I want to thank you both in helping me on the path.
Well there's a jumping off point for audio.
If the ramen you've been eating isn't a dedicated ramen restaurant, and I've eaten from such places, one sip and I can immediately tell if's from a bouillon cube, regardless of whether they add tare and make it saltier or if it's bland. This is like buying a headphone that isn't all that good, and just like how a Japanese restaurant is not a guarantee that it's proper ramen, a company that makes speakers - home or pro - isn't guaranteed to do well with headphones (and vice versa).
The problem though is that from here there are many ways to go.
You could try
traditional chukasoba, ie, OG shoyu ramen. This uses real broth, but if it's not watery it's just because there's a heck of a lot of fat in the broth that they can't control anymore because they're just boiling a few pork parts plus the pork shoulder or belly that comes with your bowl. Speaking of that, that's not that tender either - if they make it tender enough it's gonna be labour intensive to have somebody watch it and get it out in time otherwise they end up with pulled pork, something easier to do when just braising it by itself at a low temp. The flavor doesn't get past the crust as they marinade the cooked pork after rendering its fat into the broth. Flavor isn't as deep since they didn't boil or simmer bones etc for hours. The tare is usually just plain soy sauce. This is kind of like getting a kind of OK headphone, like the plasticky AKGs that get sold bundled with an audio interface. This isn't much of an improvement, if not what you were originally eating.
You could try certain ramen styles like Kitakata or Edo style. Real broth made from bones (or shells) simmered at low temp so it doesn't roil around pulveriing anything and making the broth cloudy, but doing so for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time to get the flavor out. When I do this at home I soak the niboshi and mushrooms in the fridge over 24hrs, bring that up to temp over low heat, then filter any sediment; only then do I take the bones out of the freezer to soak in ice water, toss the water out, repeat, then start simmering the bones and add the filtered dashi; then make shoyu tare that is 25% broth, 25% mirin, and 50% soy sauce blend; make chicken oil infused with garlic, etc etc, with the end goal being that I get a lot of flavor in each component and yet the final product should have either one dominant flavour supported by the others or everything This is kind of like getting into a K701 at the low end and if you have to queue up for several hours in Chiba prefecture, like an HD800.
Or as I assume you did, tried Jiro-style ramen, which is basically something you can do to modify any other existing kind of ramen. It uses a thicker paitan and has a more in-your face tare, a very rich broth if not really thick as well, lots of other flavour components that blend into the soup in addition to the tare like a ball of toasted garlic, etc. This is like getting an RS1.
And then the taxonomy isn't always this clear. Not all ramen have flavors relatively less up in your face and balanced flavour use an assari or chintan soup, since you can always make a rich broth without pumping it full of shoyu tare, or not pour it into a wok with miso getting fried in a heck of a lot of lard, or not slap on a lot of toppings. On the flipside you can use a a shoyu tare with none of the soup or dashi added to to make it, and/or pour more of that more concentrated tare into an assari soup.
I am working on two things:
- training my ear to be able to appreciate quality
- being aware of my tastes
Like for ramen, I know my taste can change in time. So far, I have noticed that I love a certain degree of bass (more than flat for sure) and details (or micro details as it is sometimes referred as) like the sound of the keys of a sax or the "lips" sound of a singer. Yes, bass and details.
You'll really just have to dip your toes into it.
Just avoid a couple of things:
1. A product that isn't what it says it is, ie claimed to be 'audiophile' or 'hi-fi' but it's just on the box. That's like a general Japanese restaurant serving ramen (same way I don't order noodle soup from a general Chinese restaurant, at worst their specialty is dimsum if not primarily noodles; same thing with pho; and the ramen in Central Philippines similar to Tossakko style but ups the ante on the fat with fried fat and fried toppings) made from bouillion cubes.
2.Handicapping some of the other headphones (or speakers) with the wrong amp, which, even if you use reasonably good amps, can have problems like using an OTL amp on a lower sensitivity, lower impedance headphone. Which is kind of like trying to make a Jiro-style ramen just by upping the flavor concentration without any thought to whether each component works with each other (for example a too strong chicken or too strong pork flavor will overwhelm niboshi, so you have to decide whether you want a strong niboshi that most people hate, or just use it to compliment either).
I am working on two things:
- training my ear to be able to appreciate quality
- being aware of my tastes
Like for ramen, I know my taste can change in time. So far, I have noticed that I love a certain degree of bass (more than flat for sure) and details (or micro details as it is sometimes referred as) like the sound of the keys of a sax or the "lips" sound of a singer. Yes, bass and details.
Just by curiosity, I often read about flat frequency response vs Audiophile frequency response. How would you define the difference?
