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Playback Listening
Topic: The great and sad Japanese

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Posted by Romy the Cat on 12-22-2009
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The Targeted Audio Listening has nothing to do with general music listening and it is just an ingredient of a very narrow audio evolutions.  It might be as stupid as just brainless acknowledgment of individual sound or as complex as assessment of specific intricate dynamics and chromic accents – it all depended from the objectives and the reference points of a person who do listening. Important is, that many audio people, in accordance to own understanding of complexity , use discretization-quantization  (Dis-Qu) assessment techniques to as a complementary to other assessment techniques.  The subject of interpretation of the discretization-quantization assessment techniques is very complex and I would leave it out of scope. What however I discovered recently that the Dis-Qu techniques very much use by very experienced cooks.

I was once observing a local friend of mine do cooking.  He is not just a good professional cook but one of those who get the cooking talent from God – the guy really what he is doing.  He is retired but sometimes he cooks part-time “just for fun” in a one of the Boston restaurants. What I find that I felt a lot of fun to observe HOW he is cooking. Mind you that I have absolutely no interest in cooking itself. What however I was fascinated that his cooking techniques are very similar to my Targeted Audio Listening techniques.  We have a lot of conversation about the some methodological shortcuts and he (let call him the Cook) and I absolutely independently created and those shortcuts showed to be remarkable similar.

The Cook does not taste his food. I never saw him to eating the meals he cooked. He claims that he know how they taste. What he however does taste are some obscured elements of the semi-cooked ingredients that are not necessary have a direct relation to the final taste.  He might for instance to taste the pepperchini liquid and based upon the result he completely change the way how he prepares one of his very complex sauces. Interesting is that the final sauce was not tested. Then we reversed the process. He teases the final source and based upon the result he make a collision that the same pepperchini were dehydrated before they were used.  He insists that the dry pepperchini shall be handled differently to yield the best result with the given type of pork and in a given idea of sauces. It is not an absolutely insistence of course BUT he is able to DEMONSTRATE and to PREDICTABLY PROVE what he is stating.

We do the very same in audio.  We define for ourselves some Dis-Qu check-points and we based upon them we define some absolute judgment about playback capacity. Let to take for instance a very simplistic example. Let look into the much-disputed cymbal clash in the adagio of the Bruckner 7. The enormous, massive Bruckner-style, monochromic orchestral climax, play is loud-enough and most of playbacks are in double digits of distortions (tube amps dive in grid currents, drivers are near Xmax, SS amps are fur in B class, rooms choke with pressure and so on). Then, while the playback is stressed the cymbals are lighting the scene up. The intermodulations of playback electronics and drivers under normal circumstances would flatten the cymbals, spreading them across orchestral sound. Now, try to play the same no with a single full-range drives but multi-driver playback with multi-amping. The cymbals get completely different new license to live and completely different expressive meaning…

The Targeted Audio Listening is like cooking and I do like very much to hear HOW my friend-cook is thinking about cooking. Unfortunately I do not cook but for somebody why do practice high-end cooking and high-end audio it might be an interesting mix…

The Cat

Posted by Axel on 12-23-2009
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if you like it at all, then it may be a change from this dour fellow Herr Bruckner...
"Der Zigeunerbaron" Overture, with the Berlin Philharmoniker and H. Karajan (EMI Electrola C 065-02 642 from 1976).
It all happens on side two first band. When you mentioned crashing cymbals it immediately came to my mind.
Greetings,
Axel
PS: If well played & recorded it ought to do with any other recording surely

Posted by Romy the Cat on 12-23-2009
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Axel, there are millions of those examples. It is important not to catalog those examples but behave minimum amount of the examples-shortcuts that would serve wider margin of the interpretable results. You see, the better or worse rendition of a specific examples-shortcut itself is not necessary illustrative or significant. In addition we have the “Foreign Sound Syndrome” – what we hear something that we not use to. It is not sensory wrong but it might be just a bit different but we feel that it is wrong. The interpretation of the result and the projection of the results in context of other things is the key. The same as …cooking – it might be a wrong apple to eta it as it but it might be wonderful apple to stick it into a duck’s ass and to broil it on a slow flame....

Posted by Axel on 12-24-2009
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speaking for myself of course I am not in agreement with that.
I have hundreds of records and the one mentioned seemed the outstanding example.
May that be as it is, and getting back to your cooking and apples, the one example mentioned is one VERY sour apple and I unfortunately have no duck's arse to stick it into either.
It therefore gets back to assessing: is it really such a sour apple (the software / vinyl), or is something amiss with the duck (the system and room).
I'm a trained chef myself (not high-end though, five star was good enough) and it is without question what we called "scoring the good stuff" i.e. the ingredients --- mediocre ingredients are hard to improve only by "abschmecken" (tasting), yet THAT exactly is all what the French haut cuisine was/is all about. Using crappy meat cuts and make something marvellous from it --- food for thought (pun intended).
In terms of engineering this "French cooking" method is still on the books, in my understanding, i.e. using so-so, components and then try get it all to work by use of your dispised "synergy".
It is a question of price and profits, and it was/is no different with French cuisine either. Your high-end cook chef friend will of course argue that it's "balls to the walls" for his friends and to show of his 'knowing" and that is fine too, yet there is a "real" world out there and not every one is either willing or able to change e.g. his listening environment (you have to use the duck or chicken you can get for yourself).
After all is said: we are back to synergy, aren't we?! The sour apple in the duck's arse, and the sweet one for your desert to go fine with the cheese :-)
Go figure...
Axel

Posted by Romy the Cat on 12-24-2009
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 Axel wrote:
I have hundreds of records and the one mentioned seemed the outstanding example.

I do not find the example outstanding in any way. In the same adagio there are dozens of moments that I would like to be played in a certain way. In any symphony there are hundreds and hundreds of moments like this. It is all depends what you’re looking and what you expectations from audio. If you objectives are just to play sound as is (that would be similar for a cook just to heat up food above FDA regulation and provide a meal) then it is fine. However, if you use audio as an expressive tool for your performing objectives then this would be totally different story. 

The same Komkomer Sambal might be just a pile of cucumbers and it might make a person to go by up to the next meal. However, what if the objective is not juts feed a person but to make a person just by eating this food to experience a patriotic rush for own country, sort of Chopin’s Heroic Polonaise? How we are entering a very different domain of cooking!

Sure it might be different by indifference. My annoyingly beloved Gabriel Marquez in his “Love in the Time of Cholera” gave a stunning example of it composing something like this: “her food tasted like an open window”…

The very same is with audio. Only in audio we bounded to many restrictions and in away are very limited. The complexity is to associate the squashing of those Bruckner cymbals with the fact of intermodulations.  The intermodulations are normal thing during live sound but in audio intermodulations looks like behave differently and much more destructive. The multi-channeling helps with intermodulations tremendously and makes the multi-layering of sound much “fluffier”. I am sure that cooks have the same techniques with preparing ingredients and cooking their food. I think there is nothing outstanding in there. The shaping of higher objective and recognition the methods that would serve them is what distincts high-end audio from just boring Morons who just buy mindless expensive gear and play slaved sounds.

The caT

Posted by Romy the Cat on 12-24-2009
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http://www.romythecat.com/pDF/TasteOfTubes.pdf

:-)
The Cat

Posted by Romy the Cat on 02-05-2010
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One of many wonderful features of my hopefully coming listening room is it’s perfect integration with kitchen. I am not so good cook but I like cooking. Mostly what I cook is turn out to be crap but I do know how to eat and I very much like to celebrate obesity. Since the kitchen in new place will be accessible for sound I envision a lot of fun and a lot of opportunities in both audio and feasting department.  I still am not sure if I develop any interest in cooking. My liking of cooking is mostly deriving from my masochistic inclinations.  I always amused that whatever I cook does not taste in the way how I would like it to taste and whatever difference I am trying to make it worse and worse.  Anyhow, I hope I will have a full-blown kitchen to exercise my cooking foolishness.  I wonder if Bruckner will be able to affect the way how the beef is roasting…

The Cat

Posted by twogoodears on 02-06-2010
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... sure Satie's piano-music will affect it... try Reinbert de Leeuw on Philips... special on rare steaks... so-so on well-done...


Posted by Romy the Cat on 01-10-2011
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Writing a yesterday about Korean Silbatone Acoustics:

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?postID=15405

…I was thinking about a relationship between a nation cuisine and nation high-end sound.  I do not know if it possible to build this relation as Sound is not nationalistic properly but mostly a subordinate to a given individual.  Still, if conditionally accept this premise then I wonder where are the Koreans with this own Sound?

Among the all national cuisines I would remove Japanese from the list of comparatives - in term of food they are out of this Earth. Among the remaining cuisine at the very top of my list is Korean food. The Korean understanding of spice much wider and so much more divert meaning then western food has. In stupid US there is no cuisine – in US we have meals, where spice regulated by amount of Ketchup or 93 octane gasoline converted into a generic hot souse.  The Koreans have very different balance between hot and spice and their spice is a whole universe, at least to me, and I adore it tremendously. Being a hugely compulsive person for instance if I find a properly cooked Kimchi Pork Soup then I can eat it up to the point where I can’t move. But I wonder if Korean aversion tendency to high spice discrimination in food are able to translated in any way into high tonal discrimination in Audio?

We have a few Korean companies that are exposed in US: Emillé Labs, Alnic Audio, Song Audio and I am sure many others. Silbatone Acoustics also have a tendency to become a manufacturer, it look like. I wonder of somebody can detect and to recognize anything specific-Korean in the sound that Korean hi-fi produce. If you taste Chinese or Vietnamese food next to Korean then by the sophistication of spice you instantly get feeling where Korean food is. Is it projected somehow in Audio?

Rgs, Romy the Cat

Posted by tokyo john on 01-10-2011
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I agree Japanese food is sublime, and if you like spices, then very good Indian food can be fantastic (but I doubt you can eat that type of Indian food in the US). Even in India, it can only be had at select places (like the fish Tikka in Delhi Oberoi, the kebabs in the Kebab Factory of the Gurgaon Radisson).
I have also been impressed by Lebanese and Turkish food.

The Japanese claim to cuisine glory is the fact that taste-buds are trained to detect very delicate flavors from mushroom and seaweed etc. Chinese soup (again, forget about most Chinese restaurants in US) and French sauce are the other two of the holy trinity.

Celebrity chef Adrian Ferran of El Bulli has said that Chinese food would have been the most magnificent in the world, not French, if Mao had not sent all the chefs into the farms during the purge of the cultural revolution (ending 4000 years of culinary invention).

I find that general American food is for children; as if no one grew up in the US. Burgers, meatball sphagetti and pizza - all rather bad and Coke is indispensible to wash it all down (that is why coke sells so well). And after drinking coke, everything tastes the same.

To be fair, a good steak in the US is pretty sublime, and a well done grilled cheese sandwich makes me wonder whether human civilization peaked with its invention.





Posted by Romy the Cat on 08-18-2011
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Due to some non-audio events in my life I do a lot of cooking nowadays. What I find lately is that cooking is in way very similar to designing playback system. I did say it before it before but nowadays it hit me with new level of truthfulness.

You see, in audio very few people design playback. I do not mean the engineering aspects of design, there are many people who operate formals and rules and fancy themselves that they design Sound. The majority of folks learn a few tricks in schools or on-line, pile up audio components and get audio operational. However from just functional audio to Sound that has worth there is LOT of room. The real sound starts when a playback has no obvious audio problem and the playback owner begin to navigate the “as is” sounds that he got from stupid audio machinery to the expressive sound of his intentions. There are very very few people in audio that does it and most of audio people would not even understand what it it would mean.

So, back the cooking. The cooking in the way is very similar. We have taste of ingredients and their compilations. Then he have objectives and understanding what taste we are willing to accomplish and what kind impact we would like to inflict to the eater. Then we begin to use the different produce and different cooking methods to accomplish what we would like to accomplish, very similar to what we do in audio.

I find it is very useful to run test cooking. I might go to some kind of upscale restaurant and try some kind of meal that I like. Then I try to recreate the same taste in my own kitchen. There is a key in this ceremony: It is not about looking and testing the food in the restaurant and to dissect the meal, trying to get the ingredients. In fact I less care about the meal’s content but rather to get the whole taste of the meal and to re-recreate it with your own ingredients, not the same meal but the same taste. If you thinfully read what I said then you will understand how in my mind cooking and audio making have the same underlining mechanism.

BTW, it might be interesting to cook a dish and get a particular taste specifically for a given piece of music….

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

Posted by tokyo john on 08-18-2011
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When I was a teenager in the 80's and The Absolute Sound was my favorite hifi magazine, I always thought the Japanese were crazy because they did not believe in an "absolute" sound but were trying to create their "own sound".
They also seemed crazy to be listening to old record players like Garrard and EMTs , using tube amplifiers instead of sexy modern Krells, to drive super ugly, large and complicated, horn speakers.

In the last decade, I guess I was one of the many people who realized that in those respects, the Japanese were more right than wrong.

But these Japanese are also old and very soon all we will have are financially-challenged Japanese who only know iPod sound. (and thats all they can afford after 20 years of economic stagnation)

At this rate, Japanese food will also be much less interesting in 5 years.




Posted by N-set on 08-20-2011
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...Alexander Shulgin. What immediately stroke me while reading his PiHKAL
book was his methodology of cooking and assessing psychoactive drugs.
An association with Romy and his methods was immediate: experimental
establishing of corelations, and on a later stage shortcuts, between some
structure of a chemical compound (e.g. position of some atom or a group of atoms)
 and a psychological effect. All this self-made, with own
concepts, methods and vocabulary and practised in a circle
of volunteers ready to explore and learn.
After a little reflection,advanced listeting and psychodelic drugs do share
a common objective/effect of altering the state of consciousness, so similar
methodology should not be so surprising. Listeting however acts more
subtly, by affecting listeting nerves (and perhaps the torsion field)
rather than directly the neurochemisry of the brain.



Posted by Romy the Cat on 11-28-2011
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I was cocking pelmeni this weekend.  Pelmeni is Russian meal, slightly reminding Chinese steam dumplings but boiled with different dough, and much smaller. So it was perhabs 20-30 of those miniature Pelmeni dumplings….

While I was making them (of cause hand-made with my own “signature” meat staffing recipe) it suddenly come to me that we have some kind of inertia of thinking about this type of food. Sure we boil those mini-dumplings and serve let 15-20 in plate. We garnish it vinegar, butter and black paper and we eat them. There is nothing wrong with it. The plate full of those pelmenis is a complete meal and we enjoy the juiceness of the meat in the fine thin dough. However why those 15 mini-dumplings in the pace shall be all the same?

This idea came to me when I begin to visualize each individual mini-dumpling as an individual note. The individual notes have different character. Even if they are the same notes but made by different instruments then they have own harmonics and own characters. Why food that consists from multiple individual identical items could not be organized in expression of taste?

So, I come up with an idea to make symphonic mini-dumplings. Pretend a long and narrow plate that has 15-20 mini-dumplings but they all different and they are arranged the person eat them from let say left to right and taste of those individual mini-dumplings is changing in some kind of predetermined pattern. I need to try something like this another day….

The Cat

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