[leftside]

Worth having the Sus as well as the TC?

 

[Ciggavelli]

Worth having the Sus as well as the TC?

Def, it’s the standard summit-fi combo for a reason. The two headphones complement each other very well. The trifecta would be the SR1a or Shang. Almost all bases would be covered with those 3

 

[SolarCetacean]

I dunno about audiophiles specifically, but I talk about music with “normal” folks all the time, and most don’t visualize music. I use my hands and verbally paint a picture of a song in a 3D space for them with shapes, colors, etc., and they think I’m crazy and don’t understand…

This is a cool comment. I'm an audiophile who doesn't visualize music that way. I can mentally render space and direction and openness, but I don't visualize a shape or color when I listen to music. So for me, I like headphones with a distinct or pronounced spatial presentation, like sounds are dancing all around me. But it's very interesting to learn how other people perceive sound, or what their mental model of sound and music is. It can be quite different, and often hard to even verbalize in ways that others can grasp. When I was in college, I knew someone who was majoring in Music Cognition, an interdisciplinary major between the music and psychology departments; I probably would have talked more about that topic with them had I been into audio back then.

Going on a tangent, but I recently found out that not everyone thinks in a language. I, for example, think in complete English sentences. When I'm thinking, I'm basically having an internal conversation with myself in English, so my usual way of determining native language is "what language do you think in?" But apparently not everyone's brain works that way! I feel like that abstract concept way of thinking rather than word-based thinking would be easier for learning different languages, because for me, I need to mentally convert everything from a foreign language into English for processing, though as a heritage speaker of Mandarin a few words from that language can bypass that process.

 

[Ciggavelli]

This is a cool comment. I'm an audiophile who doesn't visualize music that way. I can mentally render space and direction and openness, but I don't visualize a shape or color when I listen to music. So for me, I like headphones with a distinct or pronounced spatial presentation, like sounds are dancing all around me. But it's very interesting to learn how other people perceive sound, or what their mental model of sound and music is. It can be quite different, and often hard to even verbalize in ways that others can grasp. When I was in college, I knew someone who was majoring in Music Cognition, an interdisciplinary major between the music and psychology departments; I probably would have talked more about that topic with them had I been into audio back then.

Going on a tangent, but I recently found out that not everyone thinks in a language. I, for example, think in complete English sentences. When I'm thinking, I'm basically having an internal conversation with myself in English, so my usual way of determining native language is "what language do you think in?" But apparently not everyone's brain works that way! I feel like that abstract concept way of thinking rather than word-based thinking would be easier for learning different languages, because for me, I need to mentally convert everything from a foreign language into English for processing, though as a heritage speaker of Mandarin a few words from that language can bypass that process.

That's funny you say that. I had a long conversation about how people think with a really smart women. She thought in language too. I do not at all. I think it images. She believed that if you can't name something, you can't think it. I wholeheartedly disagreed, saying I think about things without a name all the time. It's really interesting to see how people think. I have an MA in psychology, and a PhD in Communication, so I am very interested in the topic. Communication people think you need to use language to think. It's the basis of a lot of their reasoning. I think psychology is a little different. However, @littlej0e visualizes music in a similiar way as I do. We talked about it in the past. I believe it is considered a disorder to feel music in this way, but I feel like it is a blessing. It's what interests me in headphones so much.

Anyway, it's cool to understand how people perceive music and think. Everybody is different.

 

[dynamic headphones]

i think it's interesting that we don't all listen to music in the same way. i often visualise the room around me, the musicians, the instruments and the list goes on. i couldn't really begin to imagine listening to music "deeply" without the ability to do that.

 

[SolarCetacean]

That's funny you say that. I had a long conversation about how people think with a really smart women. She thought in language too. I do not at all. I think it images. She believed that if you can't name something, you can't think it. I wholeheartedly disagreed, saying I think about things without a name all the time. It's really interesting to see how people think. I have an MA in psychology, and a PhD in Communication, so I am very interested in the topic. Communication people think you need to use language to think. It's the basis of a lot of their reasoning. I think psychology is a little different. However, @littlej0e visualizes music in a similiar way as I do. We talked about it in the past. I believe it is considered a disorder to feel music in this way, but I feel like it is a blessing. It's what interests me in headphones so much.

Anyway, it's cool to understand how people perceive music and think. Everybody is different.

In some ways, language does affect or shape how people think. I was reading an article on how people's attitudes towards time are shaped by their language; in English, the future is represented as being in front of us and we're walking towards it, while in other languages, the future is behind us (we can see the past but not the future, so the future must be behind us where we can't see). Some languages envision time as an amorphous quantity, like a liquid, so in those languages the question "how long will it take?" would be odd because native speakers don't think of time as a length. I read that in a study of some people from isolated Amazonian tribes, whose languages often don't have explicit numbers beyond 3, that when they're asked to do arithmetic, they need to mentally switch to thinking in Portuguese instead of their native languages since those don't have the vocabulary to describe those mathematical operations.

On the other hand, it makes sense that we can think more than we can verbalize with language. Humanity is much older than language, spoken or written, and humans almost certainly had thoughts before they had syntactically defined languages. So I would also disagree that we are limited to thinking solely in words, even as someone whose conscious thoughts are encoded in language. And most people, and languages, have terms for those undefined feelings or thoughts that we get but can't put into words, like "gut feeling".

And it makes sense that music and sound trigger neural pathways in us that we cannot easily describe in language. Humans have always been enjoying music-like sounds in nature like bird songs long before they came up with languages. I think that's part of why music can cross language and cultural barriers in the way that it does. Even without the gift of synesthesia, music can make us feel things that are difficult to explain in words. We've all seen posts like "I don't know all the words to say it, but these headphones sound very good to me". It makes sense to me that the headphones rendered music in a way that reached deeper beyond the layers of language and socialization such that we want to express how good it felt to enjoy music that way, but we aren't used to expressing those thoughts since most of our aural inputs are in the realm of language. It took a long time for me to learn how to properly describe what I was hearing in headphones, and I took the time to do so because I was tired of thinking or feeling something about a headphone's sound, but not being able to put my finger on what that was exactly. I like to use analogies to connect the sound I hear with a sound that people would have heard in real life, something like "it makes the impact sound a bit like [real life sound]".

Thinking about the headphones I like, I think my affinity for spatial presentation, imaging, and positional layering of sound in headphones goes with my general spatial intuition. I love how the SR-X9000 layers sounds where there's a progression between sounds that are close and sounds that are far away. And I've always had a visual or spatial way of thinking about things, especially math. When I do mental arithmetic, I'm jumping around a number line that I visualize in my head at the same time I'm reasoning about it in my mental conversation. For me, calculus was relatively easy, since many calc concepts can map to physical things, like the area under a curve, which I could visualize. But I struggled more with linear algebra, since things like vector spaces were hard to visualize, and so my spatial-centric reasoning didn't do well in that area. It's funny how audio connects to so many different topics.

 

[Malcyg]

Very interesting line of conversation. I am a very visual person and use visual expressions to describe things, even music, much as @Ciggavelli describes. It helped me enormously when I learnt that people think, see, hear and learn in different ways and this is partly why we find it easier to communicate with some people than others. As a visual based person, I often struggled to communicate effectively with those who were auditory based. I still do, but I do at least understand why and try to use language that will ease matters - when I’m sober at least!

Visual: a visually-dominant learner absorbs and retains information better when it is presented in, for example, pictures, diagrams and charts. Auditory: an auditory-dominant learner prefers listening to what is being presented. He or she responds best to voices, for example, in a lecture or group discussion.

I won’t go on, but it is a very interesting topic and very relevant to conversing about music.

 

[gammi]

I dunno about audiophiles specifically, but I talk about music with “normal” folks all the time, and most don’t visualize music. I use my hands and verbally paint a picture of a song in a 3D space for them with shapes, colors, etc., and they think I’m crazy and don’t understand…

Some people literally can't visualize 3d objects in their mind. Google "shape rotator" if you want to go down a rabbit hole...
Another thing that blew my mind was learning that some people don't have an internal voice. Crazy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation

 

[Ciggavelli]

Some people literally can't visualize 3d objects in their mind. Google "shape rotator" if you want to go down a rabbit hole...
Another thing that blew my mind was learning that some people don't have an internal voice. Crazy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation

Wow, both of those things are crazy! I never knew people couldn't visualize 3D objects in their mind, but not having an internal voice is even more surprising. Wow

 

[Ciggavelli]

In some ways, language does affect or shape how people think. I was reading an article on how people's attitudes towards time are shaped by their language; in English, the future is represented as being in front of us and we're walking towards it, while in other languages, the future is behind us (we can see the past but not the future, so the future must be behind us where we can't see). Some languages envision time as an amorphous quantity, like a liquid, so in those languages the question "how long will it take?" would be odd because native speakers don't think of time as a length. I read that in a study of some people from isolated Amazonian tribes, whose languages often don't have explicit numbers beyond 3, that when they're asked to do arithmetic, they need to mentally switch to thinking in Portuguese instead of their native languages since those don't have the vocabulary to describe those mathematical operations.

On the other hand, it makes sense that we can think more than we can verbalize with language. Humanity is much older than language, spoken or written, and humans almost certainly had thoughts before they had syntactically defined languages. So I would also disagree that we are limited to thinking solely in words, even as someone whose conscious thoughts are encoded in language. And most people, and languages, have terms for those undefined feelings or thoughts that we get but can't put into words, like "gut feeling".

And it makes sense that music and sound trigger neural pathways in us that we cannot easily describe in language. Humans have always been enjoying music-like sounds in nature like bird songs long before they came up with languages. I think that's part of why music can cross language and cultural barriers in the way that it does. Even without the gift of synesthesia, music can make us feel things that are difficult to explain in words. We've all seen posts like "I don't know all the words to say it, but these headphones sound very good to me". It makes sense to me that the headphones rendered music in a way that reached deeper beyond the layers of language and socialization such that we want to express how good it felt to enjoy music that way, but we aren't used to expressing those thoughts since most of our aural inputs are in the realm of language. It took a long time for me to learn how to properly describe what I was hearing in headphones, and I took the time to do so because I was tired of thinking or feeling something about a headphone's sound, but not being able to put my finger on what that was exactly. I like to use analogies to connect the sound I hear with a sound that people would have heard in real life, something like "it makes the impact sound a bit like [real life sound]".

Thinking about the headphones I like, I think my affinity for spatial presentation, imaging, and positional layering of sound in headphones goes with my general spatial intuition. I love how the SR-X9000 layers sounds where there's a progression between sounds that are close and sounds that are far away. And I've always had a visual or spatial way of thinking about things, especially math. When I do mental arithmetic, I'm jumping around a number line that I visualize in my head at the same time I'm reasoning about it in my mental conversation. For me, calculus was relatively easy, since many calc concepts can map to physical things, like the area under a curve, which I could visualize. But I struggled more with linear algebra, since things like vector spaces were hard to visualize, and so my spatial-centric reasoning didn't do well in that area. It's funny how audio connects to so many different topics.

This is a very interesting and amazing post. Thinking about the future by looking back got me thinking a lot. I don't really believe in time, at a meta level, but I can see why some think of it in the front and some think of it in the back. I guess culture and language really do influence thoughts. I like to think of thoughts as coming internally, and I hate to think external forces are dictating my thoughts, but the reality of it is that they probably are (at least to some extent).

I think that headphone impressions are influenced by external forces as well, which is an interesting idea. When I listen passively, I'm more interested in the vibe. When I listen actively, I focus in on the soundstage; the 3D representation of the sounds. I think most "normal" people listen passively. We in the audiophile community like to listen actively. That's why I typically do not like veiled headphones when actively listening. They muddy the vision. I'm thinking like ZMF and Meze headphones. They veil the resolution (to be fair, not the Calderas). I want to "see" the sounds in the highest resolution possible. That's why the Shang Sr and SR1a are so impressive. But that is just a particular mindset or state of mind. Tone is also important, but it's a different way of listening to headphones. In that case, ZMF and Meze actually really excel. The tone is amazing. Tone is an interesting concept. I think it's less visual, and more felt. Depending on my mood, I might prefer tone over resolution. Tone is more colored. I see tone in colors, and different headphones bring about different colors in my mind. ZMF does this really well. The LCD-4 does too. I think this different ways of listening is why many of us have multiple headphones. You can't get everything in one pair of headphones (but of course we wish you could).

Visualizing music in colors is an interesting experiment, if one hasn't tried it yet. Different headphones have different color. I've recently tried to verbalize this. Most of the music I have has darker colors (negative metal and negative rap), but with jazz and classical, the colors are more light. Then you mix the headphones in. The LCD-4 and AC paint a more brown-ish color, with many different shades. The Susvara is more off-white. The TCs and Shang Sr are black-ish. Grados are more yellow-ish (maybe, I haven't heard them in a while).

I'm really into the shapes that headphones bring about in my mind. The higher the resolution and the better the soundstage the better. I really want to get into speakers, because the modest LS50s I have present a sound stage where you can isolate individual rain-drops in a very good 3D soundstage. Speakers simply give a better soundstage. You can't really do that with headphones, but you can get relatively close.

I have the Realiser A16 and it presents a pretty good 3D soundstage. It's not perfect, but you can hear sounds in front and back of you better than without it. It helps with visualizing a 3D space. I wish that 5.1 audio never went away, but it did. Listening to an album that is 5.1 with the Realiser is an amazing experience. I can only image what that would be like with speakers.

 

[572217]

(I deleted this post, because I no longer publish thinking pieces on head-fi.)