watson2@AppleLink.Apple.COM (Allen Watson) (05/25/90)
Thoughts on high-end listening, by Allen Watson III: The recent spate of comments about green-lining and sound rings and such got me to thinking about the Clean Car Syndrome, or Why It Sounds Better. It seems to me that the high-end folks are remiss in not attempting to analyze that effect so they can allow for it when they are trying to evaluate some new device or technique by listening. No matter how valid the claims in favor of any particular device may be, if those claims are not backed up by truly double-blind testing of the utmost trustworthiness, there will always be room for doubt - the small, insinuating voice that says Maybe they're hearing only what they expect to hear. I think we need to investigate and explain the working of the Clean Car Syndrome as it applies to serious listening to reproduced music. (I call it the Clean Car Syndrome because, as everyone knows, your car always runs better right after you wash it.) I have a few preliminary thoughts on this. It's going to be hard for a bunch of nerds and techies to design experiments that reveal what a listener is perceiving. Maybe we need to do some background research on the design of psychoacoustic experiments. One approach might be to try to get a handle on how much we remember of a complex perception. When you listen to reproduced music, you are aware of both the music and the quality of the reproduction. The question is, how much of that information do you retain? Your initial answer might be `All of it', but I don't see how that's possible. If we can show that you don't remember all of it, and better yet get some measure of how much, we can start trying to convert the following conjecture into something more like a theorem. >WATSON'S CONJECTURE: Because we don't remember everything about a >reproduced piece of music, there is an element of surprise every time >we listen to it. The conjecture helps to explain how it is that we can listen with interest and pleasure to recorded music we have heard many times. Even though we know the music, we do not know every detail of its performance and reproduction; if we listen attentively, we are certain to hear a least a few things that we do not remember. I think this could be developed into a useful argument. Of cuss, I don't know where to try to publish it. The high end people are certainly not going to want to hear about this, because it calls into question some of their most closely-held shibboleths. Maybe I can start an underground publication... - Allen