Recipe for high-end
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsWords, tastes, sights, sounds are specific recipes that activate neuro transmitters in our brains that bring meaning to each. I know it’s the engineer in me that brings this to your attention, but how things work fascinates me.
When you taste something it is a specific formulation of the 5 primary tastes and smells: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory. And it is the specific combination of those 5 primary tastes, activating a special combination of neuro transmitters, that cause us to identify a flavor. The same is true for words. although there are many more than 5 primary factors. When someone says a word that you get meaning from, that word is actually a recipe firing a specific and unique combination of neuro chemicals. And sound is no different.
If we listen to music through an uninvolving piece of audio gear, and our emotions are not stimulated, it’s because the audio “chef” has the wrong recipe (or no recipe) for emotional involvement. It is the combination of good ingredients blended together just right that gets your taste buds in love with what you’re eating or your ear/brain in love with what you’re hearing. Most audio designers are unaware of the subtle design nuances that connect us to the music – as if they all worked for McDonalds, unaware (or uncaring) of great restaurants and their ability to stimulate our emotions.
The recipe for high-end Audio is no different than any discipline designed to stimulate just the right combination of neuro transmitters – success or failure depends on the skill of the chef.
Paul,
You have struck a chord. Sometimes we always look at empirical measurements to determine ultimate quality. As human beings, there is more going on. When you get a perfect pasta with a few simple ingredients, something transcends the mere combination of pasta, garlic, tomato and oil. It just works in the way that most renditions of the same dish do not. When you hear a band playing all the right notes but it sounds ponderous and dull – as opposed to a band playing all the right notes and seemingly not trying but the result is magic. These are all the imponderables that make our hobby such fun. Just spent a couple of blissful hours listening to the stereo system with the PWD Mk. Ii at its heart. Doing everything just right. Effortless.
Thanks. It’s so easy to think that something strikes you a certain way “just because” without really examining what’s going on inside. We are, after all, chemical contraptions that respond to external stimuli in very specific and measurable ways, it’s always fascinating to me to see how it works.
I think papers like the one in this link and books like Musicophilia demonstrate that we are a lot closer to the beginning of understanding the different flavors, how to describe them, and what their significance is than we are to the end.
http://www.leoberanek.com/pages/eightyeighthalls.pdf
The subject seems to be covered by a conglomeration of different areas of study; acoustics, psychoacoustics, neuroacoustics??? (I coined that term…I think), architecture, electronics, and maybe a few others. There is no comprehensive or coherent explanation yet of how and why different recipes give different results let alone how to duplicate the subjective flavors of a recipe with different ingredients, a recording and electronics in a home versus musical instruments in a concert hall. A lot of what’s being done IMO is just shooting in the dark. I’ve asked more than one amplifier designer none of whom were electrical engineers to define how the ideal amplifier would perform and none of them could give me an answer. In fact none even tried even though that should be a relatively simple task compared to the rest of it. We still don’t know if the Hypex amplifier is better or worse than the FS3 tube amplifier or even what better means. All we know is that under a specific set of circumstances the FS3 was preferred by two people because it produced more treble. Is an amplifier that accurately amplifies a signal electrically revealing inadequacies of other equipment or the signal source better or worse than one that is inaccurate but mitigates those shortcomings?
Indeed, that’s the $64,000 question.
Great presentation of your personal audio systems philosophy, Paul.
Clearly you favor the approach of a black magic style of “hobby” laced with smoke and mirrors, and verbalized using many diffuse adjectives.
Seems that the science of electroacoustics and audio engineering are just for dummies, in spite of 100 years of progress. Ho hum – but I guess this is a great marketing technique for PS Audio to engage with the “high end” audiophiles? Congratulations, I have seen no one so clear and open about this approach before, at the very least your honesty is admirable!
I don’t like smoke, mirrors or black magic – never have, never will.
I also don’t appreciate those smug enough to believe they’ve got it all figured out with science – but they do make me smile.
It takes all kinds my friend.
Let’s try and leave space for those of us that are looking for the truth, regardless of how we get there.
We have and utilize a very good engineering team with all the latest test equipment and scientific approach – without whom we could never build our products – but we also recognize that we don’t know everything and some things are left to skill and craft.
Might do you some good to use both and be ok with not knowing everything. 🙂
What are the ingredients in audio that stimulate the right kind of neurotransmitters? Regards.
The ingredients.
1 WITCH. Round about the caldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.—
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one;
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot!
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
3 WITCH. Scale of dragon; tooth of wolf;
Witches’ mummy; maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark;
Root of hemlock digg’d i the dark;
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,—
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingrediants of our caldron.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Cool it with a baboon’s blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
I thought you might enjoy seeing this famous recipe from MacBeth. I haven’t cooked this one up in a long time. I know a little specialty import store in downtown Manhattan that has everything I’d need. And you thought cooking up high end audio equipment was complicated.
By comparison audio is a little simpler, there is no smoke or mirrors. The ingredients are spectral, temporal, and directional. Of the three the science has a fairly good grasp on spectral although there are no real standards for making recordings so YMMV for different recordings. What that means is if you design a sound reproducing system to be flat playing only one or a few recordings it won’t be flat for many others made differently unless means are engineered into it to compensate for those differences.
IMO where the science breaks down is in understanding the temporal and directional ingredients. The link I provided in my second posting on July 7 is a visualization of what I think it’s about. If you look at it don’t forget to left click on the photo to launch the video. This is the kind of recipe you have to duplicate. The neurotransmitters you have to stimulate correctly, that is to the right degree and in the right sequence are in the synapses connecting nerve cells in the part of your brain that analyzes and understands sound. I don’t think you can compensate for missing ingredients you don’t have by adjusting those you do have. You need to find those missing ingredients one way or another. Since it seems that the “science” of electroacoustics and audio engineering in high accuracy sound recording and reproduction are problems mostly just for dummies those who are interested in the “art” of it have used a less systematic but potentially equally effective method to arrive at what they feel are improved results, trial and error. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of inventions were the result of trial and error. Edison tried 5000 materials for light bulb filaments before he settled on tungsten. The scientists have failed to devise models and measurement methods whose results correlate with what people hear. What Mr. Collins doesn’t seem to understand is that the real failure isn’t by those who are not trained scientists who have tried and gotten somewhere but the scientists who either haven’t tried or who tried and failed. And what’s my interest in this? I have no passion for the equipment, to me they’re just machines. I don’t even get excited and certainly not emotional over music, although I do enjoy some of it. If I have a passion at all it’s for working on solving puzzles. All kinds of puzzles. That’s why I feel I have a perspective where I can see both the forest and the trees. I also find it interesting from time to time to see how others are progressing on their solutions to the same puzzle. Funny how emotionally worked up some people get over this one. That’s the part of the puzzle I don’t understand.