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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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In Reply to: RE: Hearing vs. Perception posted by May Belt on February 11, 2013 at 09:10:16:
While I appreciate the terminology "resolving musical information" this is also a highly ambiguous phrase. My late wife was a musician and to her all she cared about was forming an impression in her mind of what the musicians were thinking while they were performing, plus of course the notes. She could memorize a classical piece from hearing a recording once or twice, but normally obtained this musical information from reading and memorizing Braille music. She was pretty useless at commenting on quality of stereo playback, so after a frustrating afternoon auditioning amplifiers I never asked her to do this again. Other people consider hearing various subtle details of the musical performance, such as two guitars doubling a part, to be "resolving musical information".
The problem with all of these definitions is that information (and indeed all knowledge of this mundane world) is relative. After hearing some piece of information, such as that doubled guitar part, on a good system then it may be obvious on a cheap boom box. This is one of the problems with some blind testing protocols, and helps account for "everything sounding the same" once the testing begins. Other aspects involve much more subtle operation of the mind, e.g. how perception may not reach the level of conscious perception, but is still present and can be observed by certain unconscious behavior or by PET brain scans.
It is also very easy for a system to "resolve" non-musical information and fool people into believing that there has been a positive change for the better. (The classic example is boosting the treble and revealing things going on in the recording, but at the expense of early listening fatigue. This effect is common on systems set up by people who don't listen to acoustic recordings and who don't have any idea of what acoustic instruments sound like in real concert venues.)
I'm not sure there can be good, consistent understanding of definitions of these terms, for these and other reasons.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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Follow Ups
- RE: Hearing vs. Perception - Tony Lauck 10:40:17 02/11/13 (0)
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