Sound varies in your system???

[vneal]

This is a serious question. Do you find that sometimes your system sounds better or worse than others?

[geebo]

Aug 15, 2017 6:42:01 GMT -5 vneal said:

This is a serious question. Do you find that sometimes your system sounds better or worse than others?

Yup. Sometimes it just doesn't sound right. It might be something like my mood or biorhythm or the humidity, temperature or barometric pressure or something else. But I've learned to just forget it and come back later or another day and it usually sounds good again. I used to try yo figure out what happened or what went wrong but I've learned to just accept it's not a good time to listen.

[405x5]

Aug 15, 2017 6:42:01 GMT -5 vneal said:

This is a serious question. Do you find that sometimes your system sounds better or worse than others?

Sure!
Most of the time, it's US.... not the system, that makes it sound better (or worse)
The gambit runs from ear wax to just plain mood.


Bill

[bluemeanies]

What are we implying now, that we need psychiatric involvement on our feelings about how our equipment is talking back to us on a given day?
LOL...I on one hand laugh at this but I will agree to SOME extent with geebo about ones mood on a given day.
However, it's not the equipment, it is YOU the listener.
Beyond that it may be the recording as some music recordings are better than others.
The given IS that if you are not in the mood to listen everything sounds crappy, but pick any of your music and play it on a Monday I will bet it will sound just as good when you play it on a Friday on a mechanical basis but physically your mood plays an important part on what you are hearing and feeling.
Also and this might sound crazy...LOCATION...is important.
My system is located downstairs in a once one car garage...I would love to move my two channel system to my living room foe some morning interludes.

[jlafrenz]

Sometimes I am in the mood for a certain track and I fire it up and it falls short. It makes me question the system, but then I put on other tracks and it sounds fine. A lot of this is the recording. I think the other part is my expectation and what feeling I intend on getting from listening to it.

[drtrey3]

I always figured it was variations in the house electricity.

Trey

[pedrocols]

Certainly! That's why I have 5 different preamps...I am sure one of them will restore sanity...😀😎

[mountain]

I think the differences are mainly due to atmospheric pressure, weather changes, and the freshness of my ears.

[monkumonku]

Indeed it does and I think it is all in my head.

It depends on the mood I am in. Some days, for whatever reason, are just better days to listen. Also it depends on picking the right songs; some just click and some don't.

I think the system itself is consistent but I'm not!

[DYohn]

My systems sound different every single time I use them. But that's probably because the music is seldom the same back to back...

[KeithL]

Exactly....

What we humans experience can be altered by all sorts of factors..... both physical and psychological. Mood is important; your stereo probably sounds different in the morning when you first get up than it does after work when you get home and you're tired. The effects of stuff like weather can be complex: for example damp air is denser, so may actually carry sound differently than dry air; many of us find grey rainy weather somewhat depressing, which makes everything seem a little more dreary and less exciting; and the untreated paper cones on older speakers may actually get both softer and heavier on days when the humidity is high. All of these contribute to a difference in how those speakers sound on bright sunny days and grey rainy days. And don't forget that some clothes may absorb certain frequencies better than others, and even your haircut can significantly affect the sound that reaches your ears. Then you add in factors about how you feel about the particular song you're playing, and even how carefully you're paying attention to it, and you have an idea how complicated it is.

And, of course, there's that old classic: expectation bias. What we hear is largely determined by what we expect to hear. However, it's important to note that expectation bias works in a variety of ways. Some of us may expect an expensive speaker to sound better than a cheap one ("you get what you pay for"); others may expect the differences to be minimal ("you're past the point of diminishing returns" or "all amplifiers sound the same"). Some of us may expect the speaker we lovingly designed and built ourselves to sound better (pride of creation); others may expect a "real commercial product" to sound better than "a homemade project". And some of us may even have specific expectations about specific technologies (do multi-bit DACs really sound different than Delta-Sigma ones, or is it just that we expect them to?)

Remember that expectation bias works BOTH WAYS. It may exaggerate differences, or make you hear things that aren't there; but it may also cause you to ignore or not notice real differences that you weren't expecting. We humans also have something called our "acoustic memory" - which is a fancy way of saying "we remember what we imagine something sounded like before". I say imagined because, as it turns out, our actual ability to remember how something sounds doesn't last very long at all - on the order of a very few minutes. Beyond that, we remember our impressions of what we heard, but not what it actually sounded like. (If you compare two speakers in an A/B test, switching back and forth, then you can compare how they actually sound. But, if you try to compare the speakers you're listening to today with the ones you had yesterday, you're comparing what you hear today to your impression of what those speakers sounded like yesterday. You may remember that they sounded "harsh", or "a bit dull and blurry", but the actual memory of what they sounded like is long gone. The value of experience is that it enables you to make more accurate and relevant impressions and remember them more accurately... which allows you to make more accurate comparisons. It's difficult to make a fair comparison between two speakers that "both sound a bit dull"; much easier to compare a speaker with "a broad 2 dB dip centered around 14k" to one with "a gradual 10 dB roll off between 5kHz and 20 kHz". Remember that, in both situations, your memory of the sound is pretty much gone, and you're really comparing "mental descriptions" of each.)

Aug 15, 2017 7:14:09 GMT -5 405x5 said:

Aug 15, 2017 6:42:01 GMT -5 vneal said:

This is a serious question. Do you find that sometimes your system sounds better or worse than others?

Sure!
Most of the time, it's US.... not the system, that makes it sound better (or worse)
The gambit runs from ear wax to just plain mood.


Bill

[DYohn]

Yep. Like I always say, the most critical part of any sound system lies between the user's ears.

[foggy1956]

I agree with all of what has been said.  For those who agree my question is, how do we objectively review or recommend anything without qualitative, measurable data?

[garbulky]

One interesting thing is that my system sounds different (better) when there is video of the music being played. The audio visual connection in my brain takes things to another level.

Aug 15, 2017 10:04:24 GMT -5 foggy1956 said:

I agree with all of what has been said.  For those who agree my question is, how do we objectively review or recommend anything without qualitative, measurable data?

It's because you don't listen to a system one time - usually. How I reccomend systems with or without measurable data is by listening to it and then recommending it depending on what I hear.
If I had measurable data that disagreed with what I was hearing and it didn't sound good, I wouldn't recommend it.

Though sometimes, I'll just jump on the hype train to hype town like my love for the Schiit Ygdrassil, and Audio GD electronics without ever having listened to it.

[DYohn]

Aug 15, 2017 10:04:24 GMT -5 foggy1956 said:

I agree with all of what has been said.  For those who agree my question is, how do we objectively review or recommend anything without qualitative, measurable data?

If you like it then it's good.

[foggy1956]

Aug 15, 2017 10:18:26 GMT -5 DYohn said:

Aug 15, 2017 10:04:24 GMT -5 foggy1956 said:

I agree with all of what has been said.  For those who agree my question is, how do we objectively review or recommend anything without qualitative, measurable data?

If you like it then it's good.

On which day, at what time, in what type of weather?😎

[monkumonku]

Aug 15, 2017 10:04:24 GMT -5 foggy1956 said:

I agree with all of what has been said.  For those who agree my question is, how do we objectively review or recommend anything without qualitative, measurable data?

I think to "objectively" review something then like you say, qualitative, measurable data is needed otherwise there's no basis for comparison against other products or standards.

But even so, reviews are going to be subjective because the reviewer has to state their opinion although hopefully it is based on extended listening to counteract the influence of mood on any particular session. Without the measurements, there can't be any objectivity.

[pedrocols]

Biases are extremely influential! As much as I want to like one of my preamps more than the other one I always keep going back to the one I shouldn't like most...It just seems this particular one matches better with my system.

[mshump]

IIMO mood is one of the biggest factors in the sound.

Mark

[garbulky]

Aug 15, 2017 10:48:06 GMT -5 mshump said:

IIMO mood is one of the biggest factors in the sound.

Mark

Yes! If mood influence the sound in regular listening, it would be better reviewed with those factors included. Not with them excluded. Nobody cares what it sounds like on the test bench. What they care about is what does it sound like when they listen to it in regular day to day use.