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I am almost always amazed at how easy it is for us humans to modify reality to suit our desires and preferences, while ending with hard lined opinions that are formed at least in part of limited and edited information. Relative to audio, I guess this amazement is because I am always trying to read causes and effects in an unbiased and holistic way toward better musical experiences. And every sonic change I make changes everything else I hear, making absolutes seem foreign in my experience...
The whole idea for me (and I think most others) is to gradually learn more of how to hear the balances of balances, as well as the sonic influences of parts, wires, power qualities, etc, and thus grow more able to efficiently create a more complete sound. And personally, even seeking to understand my most "trusted" audio friends, I might end up close to them, but no matter how close, there is always a twist as to how it applies in my room and system, and usually these twists are informative for both of us toward better understanding.
This is one reason I rarely read articles like Brad posted at the beginning of this thread, the flavor of his post making it appear that the "facts" from these links might be biased against cryo. And when I consider that everything is in part personal listening skills, and in part system/room dependent, why would I want to fill my head with more "authoritative" views that are likely to be way outside my experience.... I knew from personal tests that cryo treatment can clean and smooth things, so why waste energy on yet another blast of ideology that has nothing to do with my experiences from my own listening tests?
Which leads to what I do listen to....
Talk, posts and articles of folks I have come to believe I can gain real pointers from are actually fun for me. They stimulate creative drive. And though many times, I am not necessarily in full agreement, by investigating how I interpret a "trusted source," I almost always learn. On the other hand, those who set out to disprove what others with better systems and perception hear, sometimes based in "science," often appear not to be seeking insight and truth, but seeking more to discredit and to be "right." Whereas, folks seeking to learn new things, almost always reveal a more open mind, a more responsive and flexible mind, minds that cultivate positive change rather than trying to kill it.
So, toward an objective for making the music more real and entrancing, rationalizing ideologies or the opinions of others is often not at all useful to me. And unfortunately, I suspect a lot of "information" on the web is parroting others more than based in personal experience.
Whereas, for me, a whole lot of the attraction is the fun of discovering what I hear, and adjusting my systems accordingly. Then, as things get better and better... seemingly perpetually, with no end in sight.... I also get a little better at hearing and facilitating it all getting better... With more complete balances and nuances, the musical experience is more complete, balanced, and complex... just like the music. With this bottom line, I really can't see any benefit from "psycho-acoustic" "beliefs" that support "acting like I am right" when something isn't right... So it is hard for me to practically imagine this theory... I just don't get the point....
When I am experimenting, often I find breakthrough openings complete enough that they can contribute to new ways of hearing it all. Many modifications and adjustments might be heading in the right direction overall, but by uncovering more than the initial hopes would have implied, beautiful combinations of revelations can easily show me new ways of hearing and perceiving what makes up the whole sonic experience.
Top to bottom resolution increases are primary for me... As it all opens smoothly, with better speed, and less smearing, less spectral imbalances causing masks, and much more harmonic complexity making it all richer and realer... I can get further into the music. And as new musical information is revealed and integrated, I also hear more of what makes natural musical complexity... opening new listening skill "horizons."
After years of this, someone saying they can't hear this or that does not tend to influence what I listen for or hear. Equally, I like pointers to new ways of perception and revelation, but it means little to me unless the pointer is personalized and realized in my own experience, and in my system. And this is likely not so different than naysayers... except that if they don't hear something, they tend to deny what I do hear as delusional "snake oil" or whatever. Where I tend to feel sorry for those who's system/rooms or body/minds can't uncover a lot of what can be conveyed in more complete system/rooms.
So in seeking the real causes and effects as observed in as unbiased a fashion as possible, I am confident that I do not have it all right at any given moment, but I am also confident that my baselines for perceptions and realizations are always improving... And luckily, I am confident enough in musical perception and experiences not to be held back by some absolutist bullshit that says what I hear is not real.
The "proof" can of course be from "blind testing," but does "blind testing" necessarily solve any of these "controversies?" If a system or a body can't reveal and perceive all that is possible, and a blind test "proves" this.... is that a real test of whatever was being tested? And as bad, to me, most absolutist's "proofs" are designed to disprove what others hear, and not to discover new information. And I always wonder.... how can "absolute" fit in a living thing like a great audio system? As far as I can tell, my sound has never been the same... it is always evolving... never static, creating one absolute I can agree with... everything is in a state of transformations, and hopefully good ones!
When I was in the thick of sometimes 5-10 modifications in a day, I did enjoy a version of "blind testing" with my wife. She has really good listening discernment, and it was almost always the case that she liked changes I liked, though she had no idea what I had done, or when, or why specifically. For years I was so careful with my modifications, trying to keep a stable reference with my room and gear setup over time, and trying not to shift the balances Steve designed in except with great care that it did not mess up the whole of the balances. So I was/am very careful to avoid getting "off." Supporting this, another critical reference for me was/is maintaining or improving balances from within the broader balances so that my system sounds really good across most recordings. Throughout, my wife's comments, solicited and unsolicited, have been a corroborating reference to help keep me on track... a sort of comfort.
Looking at tubes and cryo, in a fully resolving system and room, obviously everything matters, especially if that complete sound we seek is in fact extra resolving and complex. Not masking, but embracing very fine detail and space musically, I find more fine detail in clear space (right down to rich harmonics and decays) can be way more musical than less. But in a tradition of fears of "detail" being harsh, etc, seeking and finding the fine stuff musically is probably one the the most difficult tuning tasks for me.
I resent how so many makers over decades tried to bridge transparency with "forgiveness," often defaulting to "musical warming/masking" that kills/smears critical aspects of subtle beauty that can make music feel real. And now, really in a new age of home music, refined resolution within open space is more of a realistic goal, so we are learning that resolution with excellent space can be "transparent" without being painful...
But still I fear many developers have yet to integrate smooth revelation and really good timing fully as a measure to create a realistic and more complete musical experience. With fuller resolution comes better timing and space, also revealing naturally fast micro-micro to macro speeds across the spectrum, and if spectrally balanced in all ways, while being unrestricted in musical complexity (resolution and space)... it can be crazy good. Yet in my sheltered world, most sources I have heard kill a bunch of this important information right off... and though these sources can appear to sound pretty right in many ways based on traditional development, they can be missing too much subtle beauty due to designer's tendencies to run from hardness by dulling it rather than making it more musically complex.
So we all hear things based on our wildly variable systems and rooms, but also, we all have different hearing abilities and listening skills.... Under these conditions, even if we can't hear this or that in our system, does that make it an absolute, proving that others can't hear the same things we can't???
Maybe a decade or so ago, my buddy who developed the Tranquility DAC had four primary reference systems to do blind testing with, as well as a bunch of pop DACs (mainly under 5K at the time) to try to do better than... And this guy, and the developers he worked closely with, did blind testing for design and parts parameters when creating this DAC. Here were some guys trying to make a NOS $1K DAC sound better than many "hi-res" DACs costing 2-5 times as much... so guessing it is not glamour or pretense they were after, but real sound that is as affordable as possible... My question becomes, why should blind testing in this case matter unless it helps to give us sound we are after. The safeguard here to me is that this was a creative blind testing process, designed to discover what we don't yet know, to discover beauty. Whereas blind testing designed to disprove something could potentially be another matter... more about discrediting than expanding knowledge.
So "blind testing" can be used a lot of ways....to prove "snake oil" being one. And people prone to mistrust of others, and perhaps not very confident in their own discernment abilities, seem more vulnerable to shouts of "snake oil." I also guess some folks attracted to discrediting this or that are often speaking more about what they have read than what they personally discovered. Or it could be a combination, especially true if whatever it was they tested did not have obviously good effects in their systems and rooms. But again... what of all the countless variables that would allow hearing something or not? If a system and room are held back by design, and/or by room issues... there can be a whole lot on the recording that we can't hear! And obviously we are all different in our musical path, some of us more or less discerning. But with luck, improving discernment can help us solve subtle masks, veils, and imbalances... and in turn make our systems more revealing, so potentially hearing more yet.
I can also imagine, that even if a system has quite good balances and resolution, some tubes may be so well designed and made that cryo may not effect them obviously. I wonder if this might be a possibility with the famous metal based Mullard GZ34s Brad so loved. Seems plausible that they are so good that the particular cryo treatment that was done on one of them may not have done much to improve it? Or maybe the samples were a little different vintage (or whatever), and the cryo'd one would have sounded a little worse without cryo because of subtle variations in parts and construction? No telling really, but to me not hearing a difference between the cryo'd and non-cryo'd tube was not a conclusive argument for throwing out cryo as bunk!
The Cryotone cryo systems, by appearances, are developed specially for each tube they work on... would they be able to do something more for the metal base... we don't know. But Brad's going from a hard core NOS tube guy with some of the more high tone/rare tubes... and having one test that seemed to show cryo did not work for him, isn't it possible that some time later, when he finally tried Cryotone tubes that he changed his mind? And from my experience with JJ tubes being OK, but not brilliant, it seems pretty likely that Cryotone is really onto a good cryo method. But whatever the final reasons, some pretty serious tube heads claim Cryotones are some of the best sounding tubes many on that thread had heard.
I am just suggesting that Brad's turn from looking at cryo as another thing to be pissed off at, and later coming to love Cryotone tubes, may be just plain old learning through research and listening, resulting in more realizations of what he likes.
I am surprised he has not responded to all this speculation, maybe he lost a bunch of thread notifications with his name changes on the forum.
Anyway, it is all a lot of fun to me!
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