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Reviewer: Mark Wheeler - TNT UK
Published: November, 2024

Can an audio philosophy save us time and money?

In Part 1 we noticed that we each experience things differently from each other, and differently at different times of our lives. Psychoacoustics is the study of our auditory perceptual mechanisms. This is how we hear and process sound (including music) in any context. Our ear-brain mechanisms affect how we initially process the data. This includes our primary survival mechanism that must be able to override our thinking brain regions so that we can react fast enough to find food while escaping becoming food for something else. The drive to reproduce our genes, and to keep those progeny safe, runs concurrently and is often the trigger for our emotional responses. We are all the product of a selective breeding programme to ensure that these are our mind-brain's top priority.

When we are overwhelmed by emotion at a wonderful musical performance, it is partly that some of this unconscious survival/reproduction system has become activated unconsciously. This is a secondary process apart from basic psychoacoustics. There is an argument (Ehrenzweig, 1971; Maclagan, 2002) that the greatest of art communicates, in its implicit inarticulate form (not the explicit basic notes or depictions), the state of mind of the creator or performer at the time.

Hiroyasu Kondo, designer of the original Audio Note (Japan) explains how he left Sony to pursue a different approach to domestic audio. Hiroyasu Kondo had been brought up in a Buddhist monastery listening to the chanting and wished to reproduce the depth of the experience of hearing chanting that affected his whole being. For this he coined the idea of "Obedient" sound which means a particular quality of transparency. He suggested that his approach means that even when driven by a very small signal level his amplifiers should keep their clarity and transparency. How this differs from a more general idea of accuracy might be the concentration on the very small signal.

Could we follow this path if what affects us most is wide bandwidth and dynamic range?

In a Stereophile interview (Scull, 1997,2007) Hiroyasu Kondo makes a key point about his audio philosophy, amid a discussion on his ideas about the limitations of 1990s digital technology, “That when you listen to a string instrument that's hit by a hammer wrapped with a felt cushion, for example, that it can obediently be replayed by analog, but not by digital. The sound of felt-wrapped hammers...you can almost feel the string sound, and touch it. The sound is very, very delicate. When the same instrument is played through digital components, it may be felt by listeners to sound as though the string was struck by an iron hammer. And that's the reason single-ended is better, because it can express these very delicate differences in sound.”

Hiroyasu Kondo is describing the subtle nuances of sound that carry the delights of a performance, distinguishing it from any other performance of similar material. Can our capacity to interpolate, to fill in those subtle details, overcome system limitations? Is this why some pursue explicit reproduction of the subtlest information (so called “inner detail” and “air” in the mangled nomenclature of audiophilia) at the expense of macro-dynamics and bandwidth? A music therapist friend who is also an orchestral player happily accepts mid-fi because their brain fills in the rest from remembered live performances. Interpolation of the incoming auditory data makes a fair guess at the missing data based on regular past experiences. Memory (both conscious and unconscious) works by repetition (that thickening of neural pathways described in Part 1) so a musician will inevitably have a higher probability of this.

Having started by building a legendary push-pull amplifier based around 211 triodes Hiroyasu Kondo took these ideas further to develop single-ended triode amplifiers. Kondo felt that single-ended comes closer to the music. Kondo claimed that he could feel the touch or breath of a performance, or of the players or conductor. He said that he could actually feel the movement of sound, that his single-ended designs allow him to “feel the musician's state of mind”. The musician's state of mind is embedded in the performance. Kondo argued that we “can guess that a violinist might have had a fight with his wife the night before!” This fits those ideas from Anton Ehrenzweig that creativity demands a holistic vision made by connecting disparate pieces of information that enter the mind, which can trigger syncretistic (child like) understanding and creative insight. “All artistic structure is essentially 'polyphonic'; it evolves not in a single line of thought, but in several superimposed strands at once. Hence creativity requires a diffuse, scattered kind of attention that contradicts our normal logical habits of thinking.”

Hiroyasu Kondo noted that his ideas found first acceptance in France. Perhaps France does has a reputation for wider public interest in philosophy, even among audiophiles. Your Old Scribe remembers as a schoolkid reading Jean Hiraga articles translated from la Nouvelle Revue du Son and Revue de l'Audiophile that turned established audio practice on its head. Jean Hiraga might have single-handedly introduced the single-endedness revival to the West. During the same period your Old Scribe was also reading pro audio magazines that argued nothing less than a fully active, full range, high power, low distortion, flat response, accurate reference quality playback system will do. During the febrile audio atmosphere of the 1970s another group were just beginning to emerge who subscribed to the GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) front end first philosophy, who eschewed either of the foregoing approaches.

That all these arguments have some internal logic is perhaps one reason why so many audiophiles spend so much time and money trying to achieve something that works for them. This is while trying to minimise any FOMO sense that something else might be better in either their own philosophy's oeuvre or worse, from another faith entirely. Given our visual and auditory perception changes over a lifetime, our hi-fi priorities may also change. In Part 1 it was noted that enjoyment of audio systems is subjective, so concepts like accuracy or obedience take on different meanings to different listeners. What works for whom is just an opinion. Your mileage may vary.

So an adolescent love of bombastic bass evolves. I noticed at one audio show the AudioNote UK room was playing some banging techno through one of their subtle single-ended triode amplifiers and Snell derived loudspeakers, which are rarely bought for their chest thumping bass. It sounded much better than any system should sound in a hotel room. So we could argue that there is not even a correlation between audio philosophy and favourite musical genre.

Saving Money on the Audio Journey

For any trip we have a choice between budget travel, mainstream travel or luxury travel. Budget travel involving different timetables to achieve the lowest prices might also achieve a missed connection. Does the extra cost of rescuing the trip (an overnight hostel room before the next connection) exceed the cash saved on the ticket?

Evolving a clear philosophy early in our journey to audio Nirvana (not a set of 70s Linn Sondek springs) might save a few expensive diversions into irrelevant audio culs-de-sac. Practicing active listening will increase our pleasure and also increase our perceptual skills. Regular physical exercise (for neurogenesis) and exposure to novel activities and experiences engenders more neural networks to process these experiences. Repeated audio exposure to different systems will thicken those neural networks that help us develop expertise. Trusting our own perception rather than being prey to confirmation bias will save expensive purchases of white elephants. Sticking to used classic products early in our audio learning curve will develop this expertise. They also sell on easily at minimum loss, or even at a profit if were canny.

Conclusion

Learn what you enjoy in audio from repeated and extended listening to as many systems as possible. Early in the audio journey buy audio classics which will be widely written about so you can calibrate your critical reading skills to match your experience.

References

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Copyright © 2024 Mark Wheeler - mark@tnt-audio.com- www.tnt-audio.com

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