#sonic event rendering

[richardvarey]

Why I've Stopped Talking About the 'Music Listening Experience'

For years, “music listening experience” has been the central phrase in my writing about home audio. It felt like the right focus: subjective, personal, resistant to the objectivist fantasy that systems can be evaluated independently of listeners. The experience is what matters, not measurements or orthodoxies about “accuracy”. But the phrase has problems I can no longer ignore. “Experience” is…

[richardvarey]

Why I Stopped Using "Audition"

I used to use the term “audition” when writing about listening. Not in the audiophile sense—auditioning components, running A/B tests, cataloguing sonic attributes—but in an older, more formal sense: audition as the faculty of hearing itself, the structured perceptual capacity to attend to and make sense of sonic events. Something closer to how “vision” names both the faculty and its exercise,…

[richardvarey]

There Is No Recording

For musical listening, a home audio system exists to render recordings into sonic events that facilitate attunement: the state in which you become part of the music rather than remaining outside it, analysing. That’s the working definition, and it’s held up reasonably well as a way of thinking about what playback systems are actually for. But it contains an unexamined assumption: that…

[richardvarey]

Why Audio Evaluation Isn't About Superior Hearing

The “golden ears” mythology collapses rather dramatically under a rendering framework, because it fundamentally mistakes the object of evaluation. The standard golden ears claim is that certain individuals possess superior auditory discrimination—they can hear finer distinctions in frequency response, lower levels of distortion, subtler timing cues, and so on. This frames audio evaluation as a…

[richardvarey]

When the Producer Matters

Hugh Padgham and the Conditions for Attunement Hugh Padgham’s birthday passed yesterday, one of those minor calendar notifications that social media surfaces. But it caught my attention because Padgham’s name appears with unusual frequency in my listening: Phil Collins, Genesis, Kate, Bush, The Police, XTC, The Human League, Robbie Robertson, Paul Young, Black, Clannad, Suzanne Vega, Tears for…

[richardvarey]

Power to the people ... eventfully

Here’s another product review that looks odd to me: “Following his rave review of the PowerQuest 505 power conditioner, Litemagazin’s Volker Frech spends quality time with its bigger, more accomplished brother, the PowerQuest 707, comparing it against the wall and a tangle of typical power strips. The results were unambiguous. With the PQ-707 in his system, Frech noted deeper silences, more…

[richardvarey]

The end and rebirth of audio?

On returning to the Frieve Audio Review website, I discovered that there’s an associated book (online via a link at the site, see below). Core Thesis Frieve-A (Yoshiyuki Kobayashi) argues that audio reproduction has reached its physical “end” — the engineering problems have been solved — but the industry and audiophile community refuse to acknowledge this, instead sustaining themselves through…

[richardvarey]

Attunement and Market Value

A record shop worker, pricing up stock, picks up Lyle Lovett’s Joshua Judges Ruth. Unfamiliar artist, slightly austere cover—instinct says bin it or stick a quid on it. Then comes the Discogs check, and surprise: this is a “desirable” record commanding significant money. The worker’s assessment shifts immediately, not because anything about the object has changed, but because its social status…