In my early years of writing about audio (footnote 1), I was known—to the extent that I was known at all—as something of an objectivist. I was, after all, working as an editor at a leading science journal at the time, just a few years out from a brief career as an actual scientist, still in recovery from the physics PhD I’d earned a decade or so before.
In those days, I was more inclined to rail against obvious snake oil (footnote 2) than to defend subjective listening. I even participated in a number of spirited online debates with major industry figures, such as the late, great Charley Hansen of Ayre and the great John Curl, who these days consults for Parasound, iFi, and AMR. Those industry insiders insisted that you shouldn’t dismiss anything without listening to it first. I argued that it’s okay sometimes to dismiss, without listening first, tweaks for which no plausible mechanism of action exists (colored foils, photos in freezers, electret creams, little plasticky chunks of stuff under CD players, supposed high-temperature superconductors operating way above their critical temperatures, and so on).
What changed? Has Jim gone soft?
My impulse is to take sides, as it were, against whichever extreme I find to be most destructive. Lately, that has been the narrow-minded objectivist extreme. But my beliefs don’t align with those of the subjectivist fringe.
I believe it’s foolish to claim hegemony for measurements when the goal of music is the conveyance of human emotion, which can be experienced subjectively but not measured. Hook up listeners to an FMRI machine as they listen, and we’ll talk, but until then, beyond some basics (footnote 3), attempting to measure or predict emotion-conveyance via THD+N, frequency response, or other measurable parameters is a fool’s errand.
There is, however, a—um—sound argument in favor of a measurements-based approach to hi-fi, even if it’s not one I often hear made by advocates of an objective approach.
Hearing is a complex phenomenon. Our ears connect (via nerves) to our brains, and neurons in our brains connect to a wild array of other neurons, some close, others far away, physically and in function. What we hear—and we do hear it; we don’t just think we do, even if it doesn’t correspond to any change in the physical world—is affected by what we see, think, smell, and have experienced, recently and in the distant past. Through long experience, we can learn to set those influences aside, partially but sufficiently. It’s scarcely different from gaining expertise in any other field, like hitting a baseball or performing microsurgery: No, we reviewers (and other audio pros) don’t have golden ears, but thoughtful, self-aware repetition builds sensitivity, competence, and some ability to seal out distractions and sources of bias.
The more compelling argument in favor of a quasi-objective, measurements-based approach to audio can be summed up by an exchange I had a while back with a loudspeaker designer of note, who is also CEO of a major speaker company:
Me: Is there any reason to believe that accurate reproduction is the best way to convey music’s emotional message?
The Designer: Why wouldn’t it be?
Why, indeed?
Music moves us. The gold standard for affecting music reproduction is live acoustic music—so surely music is most moving when it is presented as closely as possible to live, or to the musicians’ intentions. What could be gained from deviations from the characteristics of live performance: changes in frequency response, added distortion, or whatever?
Many of the most subjective subjectivists prefer old-school tube amplifiers, which we know alter the frequency response, due to the interaction between their high output impedance and the complicated complex impedance of loudspeakers. Call this the “tubist” school of audio philosophy. Tubists insist that their tube amps make music sound more real, more live, even though we know that in measurable respects, their reproduction of music is less real, less accurate. Surely the tubists are falling victim to some kind of illusion—perhaps euphony resulting from a heavy measure of second- and third-harmonic distortion.
What is music? A dose of reality or an intoxicating drug? Maybe it’s both at different times. Or at the same time.
This is a good place to remind people that all reproduced music is an illusion.
Measurements provide reliable, repeatable access to key aspects of the world as we know and experience it—to aspects of reality. If we love live music, shouldn’t reproduced music move us more if it’s demonstrably more like the real thing—that is, when it’s conveyed with the highest fidelity? If not, then surely the universe is skewed.
I’ve heard people from the tubist school of audio philosophy argue that in the process of recording and reproducing music, something is lost that consequently has to be added back. The more advanced the technology behind the music reproduction, the more they claim there is to repair. Tube amps, they say, go at least partway to restoring what is lost. But tubists cannot say precisely what is lost, or what is added back. How does that tube amp know what’s missing, anyway? This is the point at which the tubists start to get mystical.
Music is about conveying emotional truth—so isn’t it better to listen on a system that tells the demonstrable, measurable truth, at least according to what factors psychoacoustics research tells us are most important? In audio, we talk a lot about emotion. The truth part should get equal time.—Jim Austin
Footnote 1: My first Stereophile contribution was published in the March 2003 issue.
Footnote 2: See, for example, “Chips for Chumps,” from 2005.
Footnote 3: … although substantial deviations in some easily measured characteristics can be linked to emotional resonance, such as high-order distortion and the quantity and quality of bass.
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