[lejaz]

Quote:

 
LMAO I had to quote this for epic ownage.  Couldn't agree more.  
 
While I enjoy my sound, at some point I just enjoy what I got and just quit sweating the little details.  
 
These little examples of my typical listening would get the other guy having a coronary.
 
Most of my listening is through my work PC with (OMG...shudder now) MP3 playback (I do have a ton of FLAC though too) plugged into my DAC/AMP and my two main cans (listed in sig).
 
Oh and when on the go I actually plug them directly into a simple laptop and mobile phone and still enjoy the music.
 
While this is a hobby for most of us...some miss the point it's to "ENJOY THE MUSIC" and not worry about little details.  I appreciate good sound but could care less if I hear one extra little minute detail during my casual listening.
 
Oh yea, on the go...my "radio shack lamp cord" adapter that I paid $3 for works just fine.  Plus, I was at a head-fi meet a few years back and was demo'ing how easy it is to drive the Denon AH-D7000 from a "portable source" that a few commented on the "build quality and sound quality" from my radio shack adapter that when I told them how much it cost and where I bought it from (Amazon) they laughed and were amazed at the budget buy.
 
Gotta love placebo sometimes.  

LOL, I was ashamed to admit it. I thought I was the only one who actually plugs one of my phones directly into my laptop when I don't have time to bother connecting a DAC and amp. I have to wonder if there's any time left to actually listen to the music when one is obsessively analyzing the audio quality.....listening to the gear rather than the music. The music itself must be awful boring if a little bit of imperfection in the gear can distract one from enjoying it. Didn't opera fans enjoy their Caruso records played on antique 78rpm victrolas, or whatever they were called?

 

[palmfish]

There is a class of audiophile who is so obsessed with getting the maximum out of their source, that they fixate on real and imagined deficiencies with their current audio equipment and are in a never-ending quest for that next microscopic, incremental bit of improved performance. These audiophiles seek the blacker background, lightness, nuance, pace, palpable presence, attack, body, decay, quickness, agility, drive, rythmic acuity, openness airy sparkle, blah, blah, blah...
 
In other words, things that you can't identify in a blind test. Things you cannot measure with test equipment. Things that numerous high-end boutique companies are willing to sell you a solution for. This is the realm of green magic markers, power conditioners, audiophile cables (digital and analog), audiophile power cords, etc.
 
A fool and his money are soon parted.

 

[mikebauer]

music is real when you're there and hearing it in person. the machine in your home should represent something like an accurate picture of what the instruments and room sound like in the recording. the kind of listening you do, the kind of music and how it's engineered as music and sound to make you feel is the issue, i guess. using music as medication is fine, but you're wasting your money on the sennheiser 600's. you want a mellow and bassy sound, with the treble numbed down so that it's not so shrieky. probably, the radio shack over the ear headphones were sound-shaped just for that kind of easy listening.
 
if you want to talk to the composer, face to face and hear what the composer thought about sound and form, then you have to hear live performances of non-amplified acoustic instruments. if all you want is warm wah-wah, why not just listen drunk? probably, anything that mood-played you would sound wunnerful. even on a clock radio.
 
the truth of a music system is how transparent it is. if you're listening to over-engineered commercial buzzer music, then the system's function is to mellow down and blur and homogenize. you're not needing to know what i'm writing about the sennheisers. what do you think the sennheiser's are doing for you? making you upper-class?

 

[mikebauer]

like, probably you guys do know something about something. you know that a mellow muffler doesn't mean a car that will hold its line in a curve. you know that a yellow wrapper on a spam sandwich isn't going to make the spam taste like ham. how about beer? you know that a picture of an urban cowboy drinking a bud isn't going to make the bud into a beer. you have objective standards and your own areas of elitisms. so, just for the discussion, are we supposed to be bragging here or talking objectively about whether we need to spend so much money on hi-fi gear? because, i think that what the thread must do is allow us to say why we like the 600's and what we expect and know about headphones in the first place. i know them as a monitor for the music i compose. i know what a piano sounds like and i know which headphones i've used make a sound that is closest to a piano. with headphones, i know i'm not listening to a real piano, just a headphone -- i'm not wacko. but, i know that the only thing i want is the music itself as it was recorded. i don't want to make it sound better than real.
 
and, that's controversial. toscanini still listened to 78 after LP was marketed. when asked, he replied: you have to leave something to the imagination. mea culpa for my mistake, arturo, but i think that listening to a piece reproduced in another medium is always an exercise in imagination. i have a lot of imagination, and i can imagine the composer as the important reality in music. next comes the performer and the performance, and that's as good as it gets. third... but, there is no third: when i listen to music i only listen to it to hear music -- i don't want background music because i always have some music in my head and i have a good music imaging in my head... i can turn a mozart symphony into a piano reduction in my head, or imagine it being played by the thelonius monk quartet. i could even imagine hank williams singing a mozart symphony in his own style and place... complete with lyric. i'm not, that is, looking for the magic tweak, because i know that some small changes will bring out more middle or whatever tone or texture in the music that is effected by electronics and wave. i know that maybe some swap of cable will emphasize woodwinds, say, and i'd use them, say, if that's what i wanted. on my sacd 777 there's some filters available for playback as mood -- mellowers for vocals or whatever. music as mood shape, not as a way to expand your musical creative consciousness. the mood shape for me comes in the manic high and low of creativity. i know that's not where you guys maybe are at, but you've got this opportunity in an open dialog like this to encounter aliens like me and hear our take on something which is supposed to be important to you. you're not asking me the right questions... i don't really care if i seem alien to you: i am alien to you, and you to me.

 

[lejaz]

Quote:

music is real when you're there and hearing it in person. the machine in your home should represent something like an accurate picture of what the instruments and room sound like in the recording. the kind of listening you do, the kind of music and how it's engineered as music and sound to make you feel is the issue, i guess. using music as medication is fine, but you're wasting your money on the sennheiser 600's. you want a mellow and bassy sound, with the treble numbed down so that it's not so shrieky. probably, the radio shack over the ear headphones were sound-shaped just for that kind of easy listening.
 
if you want to talk to the composer, face to face and hear what the composer thought about sound and form, then you have to hear live performances of non-amplified acoustic instruments. if all you want is warm wah-wah, why not just listen drunk? probably, anything that mood-played you would sound wunnerful. even on a clock radio.
 
the truth of a music system is how transparent it is. if you're listening to over-engineered commercial buzzer music, then the system's function is to mellow down and blur and homogenize. you're not needing to know what i'm writing about the sennheisers. what do you think the sennheiser's are doing for you? making you upper-class?

 Melody and harmony are what the composer is conveying.  Great music easily transcends imperfections in the gear if you listen instead of analyzing. My vision is not close to perfect, but I don't obsess about what I'm missing when I visit an art gallery and look as great art. The performers are doing their best to portray what the composer intended, but who knows how close they actually are coming to what Mozart intended. Likely not as close as you'd like to think. Who knows how transparent the recording gear is, or whether moving a mic to a different position or using a different  brand mic would alter the sound more than your cables and interconnects do..The microphone cables are less than perfect no?.... less perfect than your $450 cables anyway. If you can't enjoy Mozart or Bach on a less than totally transparent system then you're listening to the gear not the music. You're obsessing about small imperfections(that are always going to be there) and missing the glorious melody, harmony, vocal and instrument performances that are right in front of you. I used to get lost in great melodies/harmonies on a cheap Sony tape deck and as a 10 year old school kid playing  the 'Largo' movement from "the New World Symphony " on a clarinet....very poorly. Not saying you should listen to a recording of 5th graders playing Dvorak, however, haha. But you might try to listen with the ears of an innocent child, perhaps.

 

[N0sferatu]

Quote:

 Melody and harmony are what the composer is conveying.  Great music easily transcends imperfections in the gear if you listen instead of analyzing. My vision is not close to perfect, but I don't obsess about what I'm missing when I visit an art gallery and look as great art. The performers are doing their best to portray what the composer intended, but who knows how close they actually are coming to what Mozart intended. Likely not as close as you'd like to think. Who knows how transparent the recording gear is, or whether moving a mic to a different position or using a different  brand mic would alter the sound more than your cables and interconnects do..The microphone cables are less than perfect no?.... less perfect than your $450 cables anyway. If you can't enjoy Mozart or Bach on a less than totally transparent system then you're listening to the gear not the music. You're obsessing about small imperfections(that are always going to be there) and missing the glorious melody, harmony, vocal and instrument performances that are right in front of you. I used to get lost in great melodies/harmonies on a cheap Sony tape deck and as a 10 year old school kid playing  the 'Largo' movement from "the New World Symphony " on a clarinet....very poorly. Not saying you should listen to a recording of 5th graders playing Dvorak, however, haha. But you might try to listen with the ears of an innocent child, perhaps.

 
Couldn't have said it better...sure the composer/artist/director/etc. may have had a way they want it heard/seen/etc. but ultimately it's up to how the audience wants to interpret it.  
 
There's so many other things in the pathway out of your control (recording end, CD mastering, etc.).  Plus, if it's a classical piece of someone that's been long dead who knows if the person who put it together did it right by the original artist (Mozart, Dvorak, etc.).  So who's right...the modern day composer or the original long dead one???  

 

[mikebauer]

i think, really, that sound is what the composer is creating: shaping and contrasting. that it sounds like 'melody' and 'harmony' is secondary and an artifact. that we like beethoven really doesn't effect beethoven's music: it exists as potential and real, but more as an ideal. i think that's what you're suggesting when you say melody and harmony: that beethoven gives something sonically so important to us that we call it music.
 
the new mic cables are linear crystal. things have gotten better. but, one of my favorite recordings is of furtwangler doing the ninth, in stockholm in 1943. what i want from my machine is as much off that CD transcription of an aluminum 78 as i can hear. i want to hear what the horns are doing underneath the strings. that's what it's about. and, for a modern recording, i want to hear something like the presence that the conductor heard. now, in the day, the conductor worked with the recording engineer to make a viable recording of a piece -- emphasizing what wouldn't be emphasized in a live performance because the tweaks would sound crude or awkward -- loud horns, say.
 
what i get from my expensive cables is more detail, and that is the composer's detail i'm getting, not the detail of some smile on someone sitting next to me on the sofa because it's 'such a great system, it never sounded this good before'. this to 'madonna'...?
 
basically, i just don't trust that y'all are listening for the same thing i'm listening for.

 

[lejaz]

Mikebauer: " i don't really care if i seem alien to you: i am alien to you, and you to me."
 
No, you don't seem at all alien. We all get lost at times listening obsessively to audio quality, and lose touch with the music itself. It's that being 'in touch' that easily gets lost along the way because of the search for a perfection which doesn't exist.

 

[mikebauer]

dude, i am so not obsessed anymore, since i learned that i could hard-wire into the system and not have to use plugs and connectors -- objects which catch and amplify, muddy, certain frequencies. i no longer use a head-phone amp, one where i have to go for changes of this and that because i think i might hear more sound than before. we used to have to do that in the 70's with turntables and cartridges and stax and all. it was a hobby, but you're very right, it still wasn't the sound of the music. the point i wanted to make with talking about the 78 rpm of furtwangler, is that there is a lot more musical information on the CD than what we're getting with active preamps and good-enough cables. if you don't want to know that, then that's fine. but, i don't, then, know what you really want to know about getting music out of music reproducers.
 
you know that when you're listening to a piano on headphones or speakers that you're not really listening to a piano, don't you?
 

 

[mikebauer]

maybe it's being musical. if you look at a score of a piece, you maybe see things that you're not hearing on the disc. dilemma! did the conductor leave out the bassoon?? or, did your system muddy the total so much that copland sounds like mancini? 'muddy' -- not 'harshy': i don't want el salon mexico to sound like pink panther music -- it's not supposed to... i listen in polyphonic, for one thing: i hear several musical voices at the same time, doing their different things to make the whole a music. maybe that's part of our differences in what we hear and want in a system. i had one friend who only wanted heavy bass speakers and full on bass amp because he liked ( schlock ) romantic organ music. i listen to organ music, but mine is messiaen's work from the 1930's, recorded in the 50's by the composer. i want to hear it as he heard it as he played it. if i wanted thumpa-thumpa in my gut i'd go to the baths.
 
for a recording of the musical offering, what would you want from it? wouldn't you want each voice distinct so that you could hear how bach heard it? or, would you want it mellowed up so that it didn't distract you from blogging?

 

[lejaz]

Quote:

dude, i am so not obsessed anymore, since i learned that i could hard-wire into the system and not have to use plugs and connectors -- objects which catch and amplify, muddy, certain frequencies. i no longer use a head-phone amp, one where i have to go for changes of this and that because i think i might hear more sound than before. we used to have to do that in the 70's with turntables and cartridges and stax and all. it was a hobby, but you're very right, it still wasn't the sound of the music. the point i wanted to make with talking about the 78 rpm of furtwangler, is that there is a lot more musical information on the CD than what we're getting with active preamps and good-enough cables. if you don't want to know that, then that's fine. but, i don't, then, know what you really want to know about getting music out of music reproducers.
 
you know that when you're listening to a piano on headphones or speakers that you're not really listening to a piano, don't you?
 

"there is a lot more musical information on the CD than what we're getting with active preamps and good-enough cables" You think it's really 'a lot' that you're missing with OK cables? I guess that 'a lot' is where some of us are in disagreement. Is your hearing perfectly flat. You'll never hear what the conductor or engineer was hearing. I miss out on a lot more visual detail in an art gallery because of my less than perfect vision, than the amount of audio detail you're losing with a less than perfect cable. Not sure what the implication of your last sentence is.

 

[mikebauer]

the kind of music i listen to has distinct parts, distinct voices adding up to a musical whole. the musical satisfaction is like suddenly being in a forest glade with high mountains in the distance and trees and many many kinds of flowers and plants all around. for going over the falls kind of music, i like punk rock, and that i can hear on most anything because the lyric and voicing isn't important -- it's the shape of the attitude expressed as music energy first and not music thought.
 
when you're listening with headphones, the instrument you're hearing is the 'headphone'.
 

 

[lejaz]

" the musical satisfaction is like suddenly being in a forest glade with high mountains in the distance and trees and many many kinds of flowers and plants all around. " I understand. Are you saying that a stock, "OK", cable or plug prevents you from enjoying those musical flowers and trees? If you're vision is a bit less than perfect can't you visually enjoy the 'real' flowers and the trees and the mountains? It would seem very odd to me if you replied 'no' to that. 

 

[mikebauer]

in any case, i've changed my mind about modding my 600's with jena cable, because i had a good listen to the HD800's yesterday. a headphone is like a microscope focused on a performance. the performance, is, unfortunately, the CD player making soundz. but, the way we hear the performance, in our way of hearing music, is to get at those soundz with transducers... basically things which translate information into other information, no? so, if you want the world through rosy glasses, that's a real need. but, i don't want to leave sense reality, i want to leave common language reality -- i want to get into a space where i'm inspired to be musical, to think and act musically. that's what i want. some of musically means getting into a scene, sure -- like, maybe the way some people think franky or madonna are singing just to them -- but, my scene is maybe like the reality of the performers being there -- thelonius monk and sonny rollins in some club, recorded on some funky quarter-inch tape machine. and, if i can get as much clean and not fuzzed up sound into my head, from a good system, i can hear them playing against and with each other. and, the HD800's are one of the fastest machines i've heard music on -- and, fast means that all the sound seems to arrive at the ear at the same time -- just like with a good camera lens, where all the spectrum arrives at the same time and gives more than crisp -- gives a three dimensional feeling of imaging. same with a good sound system: i on a clock radio i can hear the melodic shape of the music, the emotion on top of the sound, like whipped cream. or, i can hear from a good system the space the piece was recorded in, and how that was part of the reality of the time and place... music is human, and the more i know about something the more real it is to me.

 

[mikebauer]

i don't like kodak moments, and what i was trying to suggest is that with muddy systems it's just limited experience. for sure, i'm saying that a live concert gives the most forest, but that a good system gives a great deal of that forest -- much more than a lazy man's affection-system gives off.
 
try them side by side: play a note on a piano in your listening room and then play a recorded segment of 'piano' and hear what's what. now, imagine that you were tired and weary and the piano was 'too much', too 'loud and harsh' in your room... then, maybe you'd want to just mellow out and listen to some john lennon. i'd rather puke.