Scientifically cutting through Audiophile claims (phase 1)
Reply #41 – 2007-05-25 20:37:24
An audiophile claims that cables or cd players etc can make a difference because he hears it . And as any sensible people, he believes what he hears. That's where psychology kicks in ... the human ear/brain system is the most powerful and versatile sound processing system known to mankind (although Creative's marketing guru's will surely disagree and tell you how much transistors are attached to the X-Fi series). In short terms ... audiophiles who spend lots of serious cash on scientifically unnecessary equipment actually want to hear the difference of their precious investment. Their brain will - as a consequence to these wishes - then adjust their hearing experience accordingly to make them believe through hearing. Additionally, we all know that any given person's specific listening experience depends upon these person's state of concentration during listening. Getting used to environmental circumstances plays a great role in listening experience, too. I repeatedly made the following experience: If I concentrate/focus on the music content using e.g. cheap computer speakers with a limited frequency range, my brain will - after some time - adjust and add e.g. missing low frequency content (that I'm sure the speakers physically can't transmit) to my listening experience to make the music sound good to me. If I switch to my fullrange speakers afterwards and play the same kind of music, these speakers will sound terrible to my ears at first ... I experience overemphasized low frequency content that physically isn't there. After some time, this experience will vanish and I'm happy with my stereo setup again. This leads me to the conclusion that - talking sound quality - the influence of human perception is totally underrated. It's all in our heads and not in our playback hardware. Your hearing system can and will adjust extremely fast to what you wish to experience. For me, this could be tricky when choosing a stereo system through comparison and listen too long to single components. As a side note: if I - instead of concentrating on the music - try to concentrate on the sound or recording quality of the playing music, I sometimes have to rewind because I simply missed my favourite guitar or sax solo ... very strange in my opinion.