When I recently said to my wife and son, “I am done buying audio gear,” they called BS. It was a promise I’d made numerous times, they told me. But I know I mean it this time. I know it’s time for me to end this 20-plus year pursuit of better sound quality.
It’s easy to explain why: I’m 100 percent happy with the sound I have. That’s usually not a good enough reason to stop for many of us. We always seek improvements, even when we’re satisfied with what we have. But I’m adamant this time. After having gone through 30-plus pairs of speakers, 50-plus amps, and countless tweaks, I finally made up my mind to stop making changes. And it’s not just because I’m happy with the sound. There’s another reason, one that’s longer to explain, hence the impetus to write this article.
I didn’t always see it, but now I recognize that there are three main aspects to this hobby. The first aspect starts with the music signal in a music file or a record, and ends when it comes out of your speakers. The goal here is to improve the sound coming out of those speakers. This part centers primarily around choosing and buying stuff, and includes things like component upgrades, trying new cables, and improving connections. It’s called the “gear game.”
Courtesy of Pixabay.com/Mohamed Hassan.
This is mostly what holds our attention, what we spend money on, and what we argue about. Most of my audiophile life was spent playing this game. But after owning and using so many components, I still feel like I don’t know enough. 30 pairs of speakers? 50 amps? That’s still a tiny fraction of what’s available out there. When it comes to the gear game, I still have a lot of uncertainty about a lot of things, even those things I have considerable experience with. But there is one thing I am absolutely certain about. If you want to achieve a jaw-dropping sound quality, playing the gear game isn’t enough. You need to go through the second aspect as well, which brings us to…
The “room game.” It starts when the sound leaves the speakers and ends when it reaches your ears. This aspect is as important as the first because about half of what you hear is coming from the room rather than the speakers. How reflective are the room surfaces – the ceiling, the floor, and the walls? How far are the speakers from these surfaces? How far is the listener sitting from all these, and at what angles? These factors can completely change the sound that travels to your ears following the gear game. And it’s in this second aspect, one steeped in physics, where I’ve invested most of my time in recent years in audio.
Playing with absorption panels and diffusers, as well as speaker placement and toe-in, often resulted in clear improvements. Sometimes these improvements were more dramatic than component changes. As I said, I’m 100 percent happy with my current sound, and I don’t think I would have reached this level of satisfaction without having judiciously played the room game.
But I also noticed a bizarre phenomenon. It’s that the quality of the sound that I’ve worked so hard for doesn’t guarantee the quality of the listening experience. And this is where the third aspect to our hobby comes into play. It starts when the music reaches the ears and ends with its personal transformation into a subjective experience. It's biological and psychological in nature. Some might call it spiritual. This part is the subjective experience. It’s biological and psychological in nature. This part is the“mind game.”
Without a doubt, the quality of the sound is determined by the gear and the room acoustics. But after it reaches the ears, a new story unfolds. In this story, the quality of the experience isn’t always proportional to the quality of the sound.
For example, let’s say you hear a recording when you’re hungry. And then you hear it again on the same system in the same room after you’ve had a satisfying meal. There’s a pretty good chance that due to your satiated physical state you’ll have an easier time appreciating the second scenario over the first one. This illustrates that factors other than sound quality can influence the quality of our listening experience.
How important is the third aspect? Biologically speaking, hearing doesn’t occur in the ears. It occurs in the brain. What happens in your mind, rather than what enters your ears, is the final product. That’s the ultimate truth. Keeping this in mind, you can judge for yourself how important it is.
Courtesy of Pixabay.com/BarBus.
Crucial for me, and for this article, is that I find that playing game #3 difficult to do while I play #1 and #2. The first two aspects, based on gear and room acoustics, are like the ground the listener’s mind is standing on. If I’m constantly worrying about #3, it’s like trying to do a very delicate task while standing on shaky ground. This is why I decided to stop making changes in gear and room acoustics, games I’ve been playing constantly and rather relentlessly. I want to take this hobby to the next level, by focusing only on the mind game.
I am still a novice at it, which is why I find it a more fascinating aspect now than the other two. Of the three games, it is the one that’s the least understood because it happens at such a personal level. You can’t take a photo of it. You can’t have a logical discussion about it. And you certainly can’t buy upgrades for it.
But its subjectivity doesn’t diminish its importance. Do you believe that gear and the room acoustics are the only things that matter? It would be like claiming that the success of a marriage depends only on your spouse and the things she does for you, but not on you. Every experience is a meeting between the externals and the internals, its quality determined by the chemistry between the two. The whole experience of how we perceive and are affected by sound waves is no exception.
Header image courtesy of PMA Magazine.
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