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Are you an audiophile? What's that mean to you? How does that impact your life?

I've flirted with audiophilia a lot; I've many times almost bought expensive equipment, but ended up just taking the compromise. These cheap Andrew Jones Pioneer speakers are rather good for like a hundred bucks, for example.

When I have gotten Hi-Fi stuff on the cheap, it's had compromises too. The Focal Elears have a weird hole around 3-6Khz that many people mix with some crazy EQ to get around in somewhat different ways; but then they also provide practically undistortable bass frequencies if you turn it up, all smooth and pumpy, so it ends up feeling really 'fun and active'. So then I get too distracted if I use them ... I end up using these nearly 30 year old Sennheiser HD570s instead, since it's pleasant but not distracting. Of course I have the standard Sony MDR-7506 and ... okay, I'm not making my "I'm not quite an audiophile" argument well.

My point is that I've chosen compromise each time. I have a turntable; it's a Sony consumer one over Bluetooth for proper lossy vinyl listening (that's a joke). I tend to listen to CDs, but nothing with a superb DAC or whatever. Even everything off my Navidrome -- I have a hard time telling if anything is FLAC or not anymore since I only keep FLAC or 320.

I was thinking today about the concept of 'critical listening'? Have you ever just sat ... and listened to music ... and done nothing else? No walk in the park. No coding. No playing a video game. No reading a book. Just sit. Go sit on the tatami mat and put on your headphones or put on the speakers and just sit with the music. I am not sure I know how to do it. It feels like an exercise in meditation, a pathetic one, because if I can't even just Focus On The Music, how could I calm my mind?

Anyway -- I wanted to open the floor overall. What's your life experience with music and ... audiophilia?

I was sorta innoculated against becoming a self-identified audiophile when I saw weird scammy audiophile-targetted digital equipment with vacuum tubes wired in for no reason. However, the way you describe listening to music is how I ordinarily do it. I do not like to work with background music, I usually turn on podcasts or long trashy videos or simply work in silence. I treat my music listening pretty seriously.

However, the closest I get to being an audiophile is when I have to replace a broken pair of headphones and I try to optimize absolute most bang for my buck in terms of performance for both listening and doing production. My 'producer' headphones are a pair of sennheiser hd599se open back cans. I also use them for gaming.

I would say I got 'into' close listening most when I taught myself a little abt jazz theory and listened to some of my faves and tried to 'get' it.

i feel like i have the opposite problem where i can really easily get tricked into putting on a whole album and not doing anything else for 40 minutes

sinku wrote:

However, the way you describe listening to music is how I ordinarily do it. I do not like to work with background music, I usually turn on podcasts or long trashy videos or simply work in silence. I treat my music listening pretty seriously.

Wait, I said I don't know how to do that. You never listen to anything? Half my music is ambiance for helping focus...

i'm definitely not an audiophile in the sense of having good equipment, most of my music making and listening had been done on the same pair of headphones for the last 13 years (sennheiser hd280s) until i recently became the owner of meri's old dt 770 pros which are much nicer. however the input jack on both of these is subtly broken so i only get left channel audio unless i wiggle a bit. if i knew how to solder i would replace the cable but the mod seems hard and im very sure i would mess it up.

however meri did get good speakers a year or so ago and that has definitely juiced my life up a lot. in college my friends and i cobbled together two 5.1 setups into a mega wall and blasted that thing really loud. i had been missing the experience of playing music loud a lot and im glad i can do it again and i'm even more glad that my neighbors don't seem to mind.

as far as how you describe "just listening", that was/is my predominant way of listening to music. i'm very bad at multitasking, so i can't really do much else when i listen to music. from middle school on i used to also be very particular about only listening to full releases, never using playlists or shuffle, and never pausing or switching albums for any reason until they were done even if they suck and i hate them 2 minutes in. i think it was a good rule for a long time but these days i am more lax with this sort of thing since i don't listen to nearly as much music these days. i think dj-ing has made me more interested in taking songs i like and putting them together in contexts outside of their native one. however i am like sinku a bit in that i never use background music or anything like that.

pauline oliveros influenced my thinking about this subject a lot. i met her about a month before she died when she did a workshop/perfomance thing over a weekend at my university. the first day we all showed up and she instructed us in deep listening meditation, which was about a 30 minute sequence of some basic stretching and near-yoga type things before laying down and listening. she instructed us to start by only listening to a few inches around our head, trying to accept every sound in that field without judging it in any way (as "too loud" or "nice sounding" or "annoying", etc) and gradually expanding our field of perception to encompass the whole room. we were in my school's gym, in one of those large wooden floored rooms they probably use for dance or yoga usually, and you could hear the creaking of everyone else breathing and shifting their weight, and people lifting weights outside, but also the jackhammers of the construction outside, and the cars, and the light rail going by the stop a block away. we laid like that for about another 30 minutes. then we got up and she taught us the two pieces that we were going to perform, which were a capella and improvisational in nature. the first one we were instructed to think of waterfalls, and to think of our voice as being one drop or stream in the waterfall of the choir. the second one was based on a longer tone, like the decay of a bell. we practiced each for about 15 minutes and then could ask her questions. i asked her about her early tape and electronic music since that was what i was most familiar with at the time. i forget the nature of my question and of her response. some other dude asked a question about stockhausen and we ended up becoming friends and i went to some punk shows at his basement. his name was joey b.

the next day was the perfomance. her wife was videotaping the whole thing. i've been looking for the footage forever but i've never found it. she performed alongside an electroacoustic ensemble made up of our music school's faculty, and then we performed our improv voice things. afterwards there was dinner. i introduced myself to her and thanked her for leading the whole event since i had been wanting to immerse myself in in-person experimental music more. she was very kind and remarked that all that was required was to show up.

apologies for the long story, but it was relevant to me since it very strongly impacted my views on listening. i had already listened to lots of types of things, even those that made me feel terrible and bad and that i thought were ugly (peter sotos, martin bladh that sort of thing), but my perspective was always like that of a "digger", or someone that was trying to assemble a library. meeting pauline made me realise that music, and indeed any form of listening, could be a form of communication, not only with other people at events, in performance, etc, but also with the recording itself, or with the world at large. when i put on a recording, the creators and i are talking with one another. they're telling me about what was important to them, or about what was trivial to them, or maybe about something else entirely, and im receiving and transforming that information, ideally sans judgement. from that perspective, i ask myself often what the difference is between music and sound. increasingly i don't think there really is any. its for that reason i play a lot less music now, because i think just listening to my house and the birds and meri playing coaltar of the deepers in her room next door through the wall is plenty stimulating. and because my tinnitus is starting to get really bad.

I don't see myself as an audiophile as I don't "need" the best or audiophile-grade gear when listening to music. Though, having better quality audio equipment does improve the audio experience, so I naturally favour it. By better quality, I am talking about devices that have a good DSP chain (like Apple's stuff or high-end phones), regular head/earphones, et cetera, instead of using cheap earphones that you found in a drawer (because I ended up losing all of them over the years).

When listening to music when working, I mostly listen to ambiance, classical music or jazz as it's doesn't distract me. Otherwise, if it's an album I value sentimentally, I find myself listening to it religiously instead of working. If it's not, I still focus on the lyrics and don't get anything done. That's why I prefer to listen to ambiance music when working, but recently I've been finding it too boring and I am not sure how to change it up. I sometimes try putting videos in the background or podcasts, but end up not doing any work. Too much calmness after a while gets me longing for some music or pushes me to play the piano.

I sometimes do critical listening and see it as meditation and a way to get closer to the music and the feelings and emotions it evokes. Some of Vylet Pony's albums do an especially good job at resonating with me.

maru wrote:

sinku wrote:

However, the way you describe listening to music is how I ordinarily do it. I do not like to work with background music, I usually turn on podcasts or long trashy videos or simply work in silence. I treat my music listening pretty seriously.

Wait, I said I don't know how to do that. You never listen to anything? Half my music is ambiance for helping focus...

lol sorry I meant how you described not being able to do it ..

i'm only half-joking when i say that being an audiophile is the second-worst kind of -phile to be. i'd say it's just as life-ruining as the worst oneⁱ if taken too far, but then i made friends with warhammer fans and learned that there are plenty of things in this world to dump obscene amounts of money into with diminishing return. and i mean, it could be worse; i could have a timeshare or a boat.

and yet… i still am attracted to the idea of having a really high-quality audio setup, even if i'm personally not very far along on the journey toward financial ruin. right now i just have a set of sennheiser hd 650 headphones running via xlr into a mid-grade schiit stack (modius + midgard). those last two were an incremental upgrade to the modi+vali 2 stack i was using for years, with part of the justification for upgrading being to not have to deal with tube quirks anymore. i've since repurposed that old stack for my work setup, where they drive a $20 set of mdr-v150s, and i'm surprised at just how much more the amp is able to pull out of them.

but would i want to go further? do i want to pay up in the hope of sinking deeper into aural ecstasy?
god i don't really know.
i've seen glimpses of the endgame and it honestly seems absurd to me: with $3,700 mp3 players (no, i don't know if you can put rockbox on it) or $10,000 boxes of dirt to route your audio hardware through (which admittedly is now only half that price). or i could get into vinyl, where it's possible to drop five figures on just the needle!

so what does it mean to compromise, when there will always be another mountain to climb, another metric to chase, another part of the stack to optimize? when do you know that you've made it? like it makes me think of that 2004 achewood gag about audiophile flooring as the most outlandish expression of this pursuit, but i'm assuming there's something like that on the market already.

ⁱ a cinephile

---

i usually only listen to an album while doing nothing else if i happen to love it enough for it to earn that kind of spot in my life. it's perhaps a bit of courtship that way: first as something to listen to in the background (the speed dating phase), then to giving it a place within my car's rotation, then to becoming something to listen to with undivided attention.

although it's pretty rare for me to have that inclination; i think the last time i did was when i got high a few months ago and listened to super miracle circuit, cartooom, and the xenopittan section of the mojipittan daijiten soundtrack all in a row. the first and third were transcendent experiences, cartooom less so (though it's still quite impressive).

for many years i used to listen through all of A I A by grouper each year on the anniversary of its release – april 11th – with no distractions except for a notebook where i'd journal the thoughts that flowed through me. i treated it as an opportunity to take inventory of the past year and get a sense of my current mental state. i didn't this year though… my current living arrangement didn't seem to offer me this luxury.
it's scary to look through those notes now: there's still some core essence that persists from year to year, yet the way it's expressed slowly morphs…
i can tell that i don't think the way that i used to, yet i still think about the same things that i always have… a cognitive equivalent to timelapses of a face aging.

mara wrote:

i had already listened to lots of types of things, even those that made me feel terrible and bad and that i thought were ugly (peter sotos, martin bladh that sort of thing), but my perspective was always like that of a "digger", or someone that was trying to assemble a library. meeting pauline made me realise that music, and indeed any form of listening, could be a form of communication, not only with other people at events, in performance, etc, but also with the recording itself, or with the world at large. when i put on a recording, the creators and i are talking with one another. they're telling me about what was important to them, or about what was trivial to them, or maybe about something else entirely, and im receiving and transforming that information, ideally sans judgement.

I think you touch on something important that can get lost in the ontological idea of 'audiophilia' vs 'plebian music liker' -- the idea of cataloguing, curating, collecting, vs a more experiential relationship to music. Audiophiles I think are often in two camps here; therefore when they talk about critical listening it's either to perfect a particular sliver of the collection — the purest expression of the entry, think different mixes of Aja or quadraphonic releases of Graceland — or it's because this particular equipment is a utility in the ritual of connecting with a specific set of frequencies.

I have found my own tastes getting more into field and textural stuff as I get older, and people often would make fun of me for just playing spa tunes or ambiance. You can easily find examples of people just living life on YouTube — walks through different towns, or someone sitting at a cafe with a recorder on -- and experience that with the same audiophilic equipment. You can scrobble it. It's all just sound, yes. But different organisations of sound are little rituals to personal purposes, presumably... I think the emotional access is important to a lot of people, and it is to me, though it often follows the pop formula (and therefore shares a lot with the hymnal).