Audiophilia is the mirror of modern times

[Petrushka]

It's worse since it is a presedential election year in the US producing a steady diet of partisan news.

You have touched an interesting point. Well-being actually causes people to claim rights that in times of lesser well-being would not even have dreamed of. This can be seen as a good because it is a sign greater civilization, but also as a bad thing because everyone claims anything, even unreasonable for most. But people will always polarize about it.
But let's not go further for the peace of the thread.
Fortunately, this still does not seem to happen in the audio world ... but I would not be surprised to see one day, when multichannel is the standard, a movement that claims the right to have audio tracks to an even number of channels because odd is too... uneven?

I demand the right of my speakers to identify as microphones.

Do I get banned for that?

 

[pablolie]

As I got older and my hearing got worse, I started listening more to the music and less to the system.

I should note I always listened to the music, the system was kind of a "pride of ownership" thing, but not something I listened to. My hearing is still pretty good, and my "downgrade" is not hearable, and I spent a long time trying to hear a difference.

In my case, "as I got older" meant I find myself enjoying minimalism, and owning fewer things. Still quality things, mind you, but fewer... and I certainly lost the desire to impress anyone.

 

[KellenVancouver]

Indeed it is more gray, and it gets more gray as time goes on. Whether it is chemistry, football tactics, or pasta, as time passes things get more grey and less polarised.

Discourse in real life is far far more courteous than it was in the past. If you offended a man in a bar 50 years or so ago, you'd be far more likely to get punched. That's if you weren't black or Irish, then you maybe not get in the bar to start with.

It'd be great to have an example of something more polarised today than it was 50 years ago.

It is good to read your perspectives because you help expand my thinking. Not sure I can provide much insight from 50 years ago, but at least within my lifetime I'd say one area that has changed dramatically, and not for the better, is discourse on college campuses. When I was in college early 90s there was only one time I heard about anything akin to cancel culture, and that was when student activists stole all the Berkeley student newspapers because they were offended by an article. Otherwise, it was actually kind of a thing to invite more radical speakers to campus because they were the ones who best pried our minds open to new thinking and expanded perspectives.

That open college culture seems to have been lost. Not all, of course, but a trend today at college campuses is to cultivate a dominant closed culture, whether from the top-down or bottom-up I'm not sure, that effectively squelches non-conformist voices, which is about as "polarizing" as social discourse can get (i.e., never allowing discourse to occur in the first place). I find that rather abhorrant, and in fact antithetical to the very word "university." There are countless YouTube videos showing it in real time, perhaps most infamously from Evergreen State University in Olympia, Washington. My hope is that this is just a pendulum swing which will rectify over time. I really hope that is the case...

 

[Robin L]

As I got older and my hearing got worse, I started listening more to the music and less to the system.

I guess I was listening more to the music and less to whatever was playing back the music right from the start. To begin with, my first music playback devices were terrible. As I got older the playback gear got more sophisticated but that simply increased frustration. Eventually I became a recording engineer and, in the process, came to realize that much of what caused frustration was baked into the nature of recordings. Now I have the best playback gear of my life, while I can detect encroaching limits to my hearing. A lot of what I listen to are historical recordings with obvious built-in limits. Those force one to focus on the music rather than the audio gear.

 

[Chrispy]

Glad to receive so much feedback. Thanks to all.


No, and I apologize if the translation hinted at that.
I was talking generally.
I meant that people who do not have a certain culture regarding an issue tend to treat information regarding it in a binary way, without the propensity to delve deeper, doubt, scratch the surface, desire to truly understand the reality of things, contemplate different points of view.

Our forum is a source of information, like many others, and among its participants there are people who are truly educated on the subject, as well as people who do not know how to treat (without fault or demerit) what is being discussed with scientific criteria, regardless of the background of the question.
As happens with any other topic in the world.



Audiophilia in my speech is not to be understood with the usual negative meaning relating to the grouping of scientifically unfounded concepts, but with the more generic one of the search for optimal sound.

This research process and all its consequent ramifications, scientific and not, which obviously began decades ago before the internet era, is one of the many representations of how human thought is not inclined to always use a scientific approach, but rather a subjective one.

Where the amount of information, in this case relating to audio, becomes larger and more complex, the process of polarization frequently occurs, whereby the fallacious subjective experience is trivially contrasted with the scientific one. And even where there is no personal experience, people frequently and even unconsciously decide whether or not to support a concept, a piece of equipment, a speaker, or a study, just because they have received information about it.

And so the same occurs for any other matter. But by increasing the information, the polarizations also increase, to the detriment of the scientific method.
In addition to being potentially dangerous all of this, it is often also a loss of opportunity.



Sorry I don't understand the meaning of your comment, but it intrigues me...

Sorry, deleted, wrong thread got distracted with a few tabs opened...

 

[dfiler]

Interesting thoughts in this thread, and I appreciate the OP who started it. I'd suggest you look up the "privileged window effect" which is a fairly recent theory regarding information accumulation in our brains, both consciously and subconsciously. It specifically addresses information overload and, paradoxically, how that is leading to heightened integration of intuition into decisions (often at the expense of objective data).

I'm interested and googled that but this thread is literally the only hit on the entire internet. Do you have a link?

 

[pderousse]

You describe the false dilemma fallacy. Experts in particular areas of knowledge almost always see their field as complex. In other areas of life, however, where that same person is less expert, they will rely on dogma.

 

[pablolie]

Interesting thoughts in this thread, and I appreciate the OP who started it. I'd suggest you look up the "privileged window effect" which is a fairly recent theory regarding information accumulation in our brains, both consciously and subconsciously. It specifically addresses information overload and, paradoxically, how that is leading to heightened integration of intuition into decisions (often at the expense of objective data).

I think we have a noise overload, rather than an information overload. Noise is not information. The same -and hopefully non-manipulated- data is given different "interpretations" that we are bombarded with. And "noise-driven" discussions are empty rituals with zero intention to learn or compromise - they just exist as a ritual to perpetuate dissent.

So I don't think we're "overwhelmed by information" as much as we're utterly exhausted by constant noise.

 

[KellenVancouver]

I'm interested and googled that but this thread is literally the only hit on the entire internet. Do you have a link?

One of the better publicly available sources for succinctly describing the privileged window effect is an article written by Michel Tuam Pham, Leonard Lee, and Andrew T. Stephen called "Feeling the Future: The Emotional Oracle Effect" from October 2012. It was published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 39 (DOI: 10.1086/663823), pages 461 to 477. It also provides a good deal of insight into social attunement which you may likewise find interesting.
Anyway, the PDF file is available at this link and happy reading: https://business.columbia.edu/sites/default/files-efs/pubfiles/4162/feeling_the_future.pdf

 

[KellenVancouver]

I think we have a noise overload, rather than an information overload. Noise is not information. The same -and hopefully non-manipulated- data is given different "interpretations" that we are bombarded with. And "noise-driven" discussions are empty rituals with zero intention to learn or compromise - they just exist as a ritual to perpetuate dissent.

So I don't think we're "overwhelmed by information" as much as we're utterly exhausted by constant noise.

Excellent point. One of the key problems is, when faced with so much noise/data (call it what you will), how to glean the fraction which is pertinent.

 

[Timcognito]

Information today is replaced propaganda or reality shows which are in fact game shows. Watch so called food networks the shows barely show food preparation or skills content but instead completions. Internet and cable so called News Shows have commentators and few if any reporters on the ground or at the scene, very little objective observation and reporting. The viewer is never left uncertain about where to place their belief or how they should view any situation. Even broadcast and local news goes out of the way to share popular content and fluff pieces, while much of the world is in some political or environmental turmoil. One really has to look hard for broad based factual on the scene reporting outside of their own country.

 

[KellenVancouver]

Information today is replaced propaganda or reality shows which are in fact game shows. Watch so called food networks the shows barely show food preparation or skills content but instead completions. Internet and cable so called News Shows have commentators and few if any reporters on the ground or at the scene, very little objective observation and reporting. The viewer is never left uncertain about where to place their belief or how they should view any situation. Even broadcast and local news goes out of the way to share popular content and fluff pieces, while much of the world is in some political or environmental turmoil. One really has to look hard for broad based factual on the scene reporting outside of their own country.

Ain't it the truth. I hardly ever watch news anymore, certainly not American (and not much better from Canada or Europe). Generally prefer to watch congressional hearings on CSPAN and get the skinny directly. Otherwise the one news source which seems to do a pretty even job is Al Jazeera, despite that it is partly sponsored by Qatar.

 

[pablolie]

Excellent point. One of the key problems is, when faced with so much noise/data (call it what you will), how to glean the fraction which is pertinent.

That's what AI is good at...

I mean that seriously, we have had big data for a while, but the tools to interpret were cumbersome (has anyone really used R?), but with the parallelism that AI algorithms provide it's easier to turn big data into curated insights. Mind you, we have to be very careful to not introduce human bias into the training process (which is easy to do and unfortunately is done all the time).

 

[Cbdb2]

We have gone from the information age to the misinformation age. When I look at youtube (where a high percentage of people get there "news") over half the videos are full of false info. So I agree with the title of this thread. People, including the subset of audiophiles, believe what they want to believe and the internet will reinforce there beliefs no matter how wrong. A flat earther 30 years ago learnt to keep his mouth shut or get ridiculed, now he gets on line and finds a community of thousands that reinforce his delusion.

 

[Cbdb2]

That's what AI is good at...

I mean that seriously, we have had big data for a while, but the tools to interpret were cumbersome (has anyone really used R?), but with the parallelism that AI algorithms provide it's easier to turn big data into curated insights. Mind you, we have to be very careful to not introduce human bias into the training process (which is easy to do and unfortunately is done all the time).

The AI that big business owns? There highest priority will be to empty your wallet.

 

[pablolie]

The AI that big business owns? There highest priority will be to empty your wallet.

Indeed so when it's AI hype. The vast majority of what is now hyped as AI has zero Ai algorithms behind. little or zero recurrent or convolutional neural networking in there. Our smartphones had advanced photo processing before someone decided to slap an AI label on that.

And I firmly expect a lot of AI stuff making it into the audio world... "AI-powered room optimization"... "AI audio track fixing"... "AI HD upsampling" etc etc. Hurl...

 

[OldHvyMec]

If only audio diagnostics were that simple.

“Philias” are associated with individuals exhibiting an unusually high fondness, arousal or outright love of something to an extreme. Conversely, “phobias” are when individuals have an irrationally strong hate, fear or dislike for something. Either can be associated with mundane or bizarre behavior. Of course, if an individual exhibits considerably milder levels of interest towards something, it’s then more aptly described as a “passion,” a “devotion” or a “hobby.”

A hobby is a hobby when “an activity is done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure,” as defined by Oxford Languages, though any behavior has the potential of becoming an obsession or an addiction. According to the American Association of Addiction Medicine, “Addiction is a disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry.” One theory is that people become physically addicted to the beta-endorphins their brains produce when experiencing pleasure. They either use that “high” to maintain a constant sense of euphoria or to counteract negative feelings, including depression or anxiety.

Most hobbies are fairly benign, though certainly far from all. Some folks just don’t know when to stop when it comes to satiating their internal (or eternal) curiosity.

There we have it!

Regards

 

[rank]

The rediscovery of vinyl seems to disprove the hypothesis. But I also suspect that at some point certain unfounded paradigms of audiophilia will cease. The problem is probably others will arise. If you look at the debates on the various new technologies ...

I'm not sure if sources are part of the equation; sales of vinyl remain low (we buy less and less physical media). The industry revived the cassette and the r2r tapes too.

Audiophilia assumes that there is no end to sound improvement if you spend as much money as possible of course.
So the compulsive buyer who plays his disc on a rotten turntable or worse who frames Nevermind still sealed on his wall are not part of the game.
Here we are rather in contact with other pathologies such as completism.

 

[mocenigo]

Wait, did you just say the people here are non-informed?

I would say that most people are non informed in any case, even when by chance they support the correct thesis. I have been attacked here by a bloke when I claimed that listening tests (if properly controlled) have an objective scientific value, because "only measurements count" and was the object of "are you for real?" "LOL" and similar comments. I would say most visitors just come here to read a single value, the SINAD.

 

[mocenigo]

The audiophile war will soon end for lack of fighters because time takes its toll.

Yep. In the meantime the DAC chips and class D amplifiers (will) have reached virtual perfection so good audio will be an option for everybody, while the last audiophile DAC companies will manufacture 45M$ (yes, "M" not "K") DACs for sheiks.