Blacked OutI concluded my listening session a full hour early tonight. Sarah is on low volume, running through a Jazz playlist while I come up for air and to attempt jotting down a word or two.
I don’t want to listen to anything else, and just reflect on what I just heard before I hit the sack. I assure you, I will be dreaming about this too, which is just the way I like it.
So, let’s rewind to about 40 min ago, when I start the listening session.
We are at 202 hours.
As I am raising up the volume, I stop at 30 db, a step lower from my current level of 28 (which is already a couple of steps higher from 23 db, that I was using on the Had amp). It sounded just right, so I figured I’d experiment.
I was listening to the tail end of an instrumentals playlist and it was sounding beautiful. I was just lost in the music. And then we got to the final track on the playlist.
The first note of Rodrigo’s guitar hit me like a freight train (actually more like a bullet train). I almost fell out of my chair and multiple expletives followed (hoping my wife didn’t hear that).
God, I’m going to be thinking about that note and that moment for a long time.
It’s actually multiple things about that note. It was tonally amazing and its intensity was electrifying. Sure, you can argue that intensity is part of the couple’s tradecraft, but this note (and the rest of the track was on another level). Ok, so the tonality and intensity should have been enough for me to say that this was the best version of Echoes’ I’ve heard to date, but no, there was something else that got my adrenaline pumping. It’s the fact that the note, came out of nowhere, above and behind my head.
This bears repeating.
Above and way behind my head—without losing, nah actually gaining attack.
Sarah was already friggin holographic to begin with, but this level of holography has been happening since I injected a new PC (but more on that later). It shows, what she is capable of doing if you gift her the right things….
So try to imagine a tonally pure, attacking note with tremendous decay, emerging out of nowhere, diagonally behind your head.
Thank God, I was not sipping a cup of tea as I sometimes do when listening to music.
The rest of the track didn’t disappoint either. The intensity that the artists intended came alive for the first time. It was big and my God, it was beautiful!
And I kept staring at my decibel app in utter disbelief.
I was still within my preferred range of 75-85 db, but didn’t I just set the volume a step lower? How in the nine hells did it sound this bold??
Oh get this—I never really knew who was playing on the right or to the left. Never bothered to check before. But today, I heard a manly breathing on the right side, so it immediately struck me—omg—that was Rodrigo on the right. What the hell…I’ve never heard anyone breathing before on this track and I’ve heard it countless times. So you can guess, if I could pick out Rodrigo breathing on the right, how utterly delish it was to hear the subtleties as they slowed down, gained speed, and for good measure, their signature percussion from the guitar itself. A quick online check seemed to indicate that this is one of Gabriela’s specialties—percussion not only the body of the guitar, but also the strings.
I almost FaceTimed my son in his college dorm, but thought better of it. It was one of those ‘you had to be in the rig’ moments.
The only conclusion I can draw from the new volume setting and what I heard from this track, is that the noise floor has dropped—considerably. I was already suspecting that for the past couple of days, and now I’m convinced of it. I think this is the magic of my new PC, thanks to GroovySauce’s recommendation—the Signature Amp Series by SRA. It has a new thing, that even caught him by surprise. He reached out to the owner Jonny, who explained that he started experimenting with very low-frequency rated ferrite cores last year, that don’t touch the music, but the result is completely dropping out the noise floor. Blacks are seriously, black and bottomless now.
I’m a believer.
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