The Search For Headphones

My current head-fi is a pair of Sennheiser HD650s I bought in 2014. Before that I had a pair of HD580's. There's a 2019 edition of the HD650's available for £550 on Amazon, I paid less for mine. A LOT of reviewers will say that, as far as they are concerned, the HD650 are the best pair of headphones they have heard, not only at the price point, but at all. Mixing engineers like them, audiophiles like them, ordinary listeners like them. I like them, but they lack a certain... something that might not exist.

The 2019 edition of my HD650's cost as much as my KEF LS50 speakers (on sale). Headphones can cost less than £50 and the pro reviewers are very enthusiastic about the Meze Empyrean, £2,800 at Audio Sanctuary. There are more expensive sets.

Look at a headphone review channel on YT and you will notice those guys have a LOT of headphones. Read some of the comments on the boards and it becomes obvious that some people just like buying headphones. I think there are 'Headphonies' like there are 'Watchies' - people who buy headphones. Instead of, you know, holidays or armfuls of CDs. Oh, and both Watchies and Headphonies are slightly deranged. No doubt.

My theory is that watches just don't deliver, on repeated use and viewing, a big enough belt of feel-good hormones to produce satisfaction. Not like a Monet. Or a Ford Mustang. Or listening to a next-level hi-fi. Hence a continuing need to trade, swap or purchase something different.

I look at those reviewers' racks of headphones, see the same symptom, and suspect a similar cause. Maybe the differences between audiophile headphones might be even more subtle than that between speakers. I wasn't going to rely on reviews.

So I went to Audio Sanctuary in New Malden (five minutes from the station, hidden in a square off the High Street) and explained my conundrum. I wanted the next step up from HD650's. They found me a pair of Denon AH-D7200, Audeze LCD-2, Focal Celstee, and the Sennheiser HD800S (slightly out of my budget, but I did ask). The Focals were an instant NO. Someone else might like them, but I didn't. The Audeze were exactly as 'warm' and with exactly the effect on my neck of the extra weight as everyone said. If they could just shave a couple of hundred grams off, and ease the bass back a little... which brings me to the Denon. If you stole my Sennys and left the Denons, I would not complain. Nice sound. Better build quality that the, let's face it, plastic Sennys. However, with none of these did I think: ah, so this is what modern headphones sound like!.

Until I got to the HD800S. Vanishingly light on the head. Slightly light on bass. But everything else was there. I could tell the second clarinet was sitting too close to the oboe in a recording of Bruckner 3 (slight hyperbole, but not a lot). Better control of the loud and quiet bits. But on Miles Davis' Cellar Door Sessions, the bass did feel light even compared to the HD650s, and everything else sounded pretty much the same. It wasn't WOW!, but it was noticeable.

So many headphones. So little difference.

Some of this is the nature of my search. I was looking for a 'neutral' sound, or anything that made me go WOW! Pretty much by definition, there's really only one way to do 'neutral', and once the engineers have figured that out, they can spend the rest of their days figuring out how to cut the costs. Or figuring out just how much more expensive it is to get that last little improvement, and can they produce anything better at a price people will be willing to pay?

Sennheiser aim for 'neutral': it's what they do. Many of the other companies spend money on the look of the headphone, with polished woods, deep leather ear-pads and so on, and that creates a luxury feel that some people will pay a premium for. Sennheiser prefer the, uh, functional look, it keeps the costs down, which gives them a price-for-quality advantage that's hard to beat.

If I listened to headphones a lot, and if a lot of that was nineteenth-century Romantic symphonies and concertos, or opera (shudder!) from any period, I might take the plunge on the HD800S. But I don't. I listen to EDM, jazz, rock and pop, and most music composed before Beethoven. Any pair of audiophile 'neutral' headphones over about £450 or so will make a good show of that.

(And if I'm going to pay that kind of money for a pair of headphones, I'm bringing the Hegel into the store.)

Things About Getting Older: Learning and Technology

There's a very good Alux post about the changes that happen as we grow older. A fair amount of the time it's spot-on. I'm going to riff on some of the points in a couple of posts.

First up is the technology thing in items 9 and 13. We oldies are less inclined to want to learn new things and to keep up with the new technology. The commentary makes it clear that included in 'new technology' is social media.

Social media is two things. First, it's an online version of old stuff in the analogue realm. Blogs can be personal diaries (like this one), or op-ed journalism, or scrapbooks. Instagram can be a scrapbook, a photo album, a portfolio, or a shop window. Twitter is where some people say things that in the past stayed in the room, the pub, the restaurant or the quiet corner of some club or meeting room. Amazon is mail-order done right (until it was swamped by Chinese junk). Facebook is playground gossip time, or else it's a billboard for bands and businesses. WhatsApp is a group messaging service, and extends the older idea of newsletters sent to small numbers of like-minded people or fans of something obscure. Linked-In is a big CV repository and those didn't used to exist. All the others are variations of the Big Seven.

Second, it's a bunch of opportunities to a) screw up our lives, careers and reputations, b) to create a career- or ego-enhancing but ultimately fake public image of ourselves, c) make money by sponsoring goods and services, d) publicise our work, e) err... that's it.

Now, we oldies are a) too darn cautious to screw up in public, b) our careers are pretty much topped out, and our egos take a beating every time we look in the mirror (unless we have severe delusions about what attractive looks like), c) only young or famous people can sell stuff and we're neither, and d) most of us have jobs or are retired or have an established customer base. We just don't need social media. There are exceptions, and you will be surprised at how well we use it when we know what we're using it for.

Now let's talk about technology. I can remember the first computer technology I decided I would let pass. It was Flash (ask your grandfather). Flash was for graphics, and I am a writer. Writers, remember, would be quite happy with a 286 running WordPerfect 4.2 (ask your grandfather). Writing is a pretty darn low-tech occupation.

And I'm really an engineer who turned to the philosophy of science and mathematics, and then had to get a day job so I didn't have to sleep in homeless shelters. To engineers, technology is a tool. Not an end in itself. It's nerds who treat it as an end in itself.

I don't dig ditches, because I don't have a farm I need to dig ditches on. So I don't need to know about back-hoes and diggers.

A lot of retail computer technology is for graphics and video production. There is a LOT to learn in those programs. I don't do that stuff, so it's no fault that I don't know shortcuts for plug-ins in Lightroom. I am not spending time and money on photography-related stuff while my eye is AWOL.

I get that by remaining a text-typer, I am not taking advantage of the new things I could do. Sticking to one's last when a music editing programme cost thousands of pounds and needed a specialist to edit tape is sensible. But when it's so cheap, don't I want to dabble? Maybe it's not about the technology but the new channels of communication. Should I be exploring those possibilities?

That's a fair question. My first thought is, that a few years ago, I might have given it a whirl. But now, a lot of YT channels are basically small TV production companies. The production standards are going up by the year. And the people posting recordings from their iPhones look like... people posting recordings from their iPhones.

However, I could be excusifying to support a bad case of denial.

I did keep up with PC technology, but the last Windows version I could handle to the roots was Windows 2000. After that it just got too complicated. I used to cut code, but code-cutting now is mostly about finding the appropriate library for what you want to do (optionally cussing because it hasn't be ported to your Python version) and making sense of the parameters of the functions in the library. This applies to Microsoft C++ / C# / VBA, and even to a hefty chunk of Python these days. To think there was a time when people sniffed at VBA as a 'glue' language. They're all glue languages now. As for writing Power Shell scripts? No. I just... No.

It's not because I can't. Of course I can. It's that it's not my day job, I won't re-use the knowledge, and it's quicker to hack it manually. If it was my day job, I would put in the effort of learning Power Shell. I've had the pleasure of learning computer languages. Several times over.

That's the real issue. Other than writing, I don't do anything else frequently or well enough to justify the investment of time to learn whatever the technologies are.

I have been learning a lot about hi-fi and acoustics over the last year. I think that counts. It's new to me.

After years at the keyboard and commuting, I do need to be learning / polishing up some things. Cooking. Home DIY. Painting and decorating. New to me.

So yes, to the Millennials at Alux, we oldies do learn new stuff, just not the new stuff you're learning.

Things and Experiences and Happiness

I watched two YT videos recently which hit a number of spots. I'll be riffing on them over the next few weeks. This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p_sqQHdvcE was one, in which the speaker referred to some research that suggested that if you want to spend money to make you feel happy, then buy experiences not things.

After I finished nodding along, my inner philosopher wanted some nuance.

Because buy experiences not things is one of those rules-of-thumb that requires us to fill in all sorts of blanks.

Any experience? Like travelling on a Japanese subway in the rush hour? Dealing with the Italian bureaucracy? Getting your teeth drilled?

As for things... don't buy a painting, or a sculpture? Don't buy novels, or textbooks? As for that car because you live in the country, nah. That's a thing. Things bad.

Obviously not.

Listening to music is an experience, and the live music industry would like it if you would immediately equate 'experience' with 'live'. A concert is an experience for sure. The musicians play in a different way than they do in the studio, and there's the whole-event items: travel there, the concert hall itself, the seats (okay, we'll pass that over, because seating is not always wonderful), the audience, the intervals, leaving at the end into the night, the comments you exchange with whoever you are with, the journey home (might want to pass over that one as well if it's by public transport).

Listening to music at home is an experience, speaker-fi or head-fi, though not as multi-faceted as a concert. Home listening needs gear: amplifiers, speakers, CD players, streamers, turntables, headphones... these are all tools to provide the home listening experience.

Buying tools to provide an experience, especially one that can be repeated at nearly zero marginal cost, is okay.

Tools are things we use to produce or to do something.

A watch is a tool if you wear it to tell the time.

But if it's the sixth one in your collection and you bought it because of the brand and image - then it's a 'bad thing'

A car is a tool to travel in.

But if all you do is drive round the suburbs, and you bought a Mercedes 500, you bought a 'bad thing'.

If you bought your Naim Uniti Atom because it's a well-reviewed super-integrated amp and you wanted a compact piece of kit rather than a bunch of separates, then it's a tool. If you bought it because it looks cool and trendy and makes you feel like an audiophile, then it's a 'bad thing'.

A piece of jewellery on certain women is a tool: it helps show them off, and that's part of their job. A fancy Rolex on your wrist just marks you out to the local muggers.

This doesn't mean that anything but the cheapest is a show-off, over-compensating piece of glitter.

Up to a certain point, there's a good relationship between price and quality. Quality tools are always acceptable.

When they have rubies embedded in them? That's way over the line.

If a thing gives you an experience - such as a signed first edition - then it's a 'good thing'. But if it doesn't, and you just bought it because that's what you think you're supposed to do, then it's a 'bad thing'.

How I Treat Music

The majority of music was and still is written to accompany social activities: dancing, eating and conversation. Telemann has four volumes of Tafel Musik for dinner parties, and more Mozart was written as social accompaniment than his worshippers would want to admit. Handel's Water Music was one of a number of pieces (Telemann wrote a Wassermusik as well) written to accompany a royal trip on the river. It was a soundtrack, in today's terms. So was Handel's Music For The Royal Fireworks.

The music in an opera rarely stands on its own (so rarely that the bits that do are extracted for compilation albums) but is there to accompany, highlight and embellish the words and action. It plays the same role as music in a movie: reinforcing what can be seen, or hinting at something we can't see yet. Sometimes it is used ironically or to jar.

Some music was written for the composer's sponsors to play, to show off their skills, or for their own entertainment in playing it privately. (These days, contemporary jazz fulfils the role of music played mostly for the enjoyment of the musicians, because there is no audience.)

Some music was written for church services. Bach turned out over a hundred cantatas for just this purpose, and many composers wrote at least one Mass (until the twentieth century). Poulenc's best music is his religious works for voice choir.

Romantic music (Beethoven to the end of the nineteenth-century) was written for large audiences (by the standards of the time) to provide a roller-coaster emotional experience, at least for those who could keep up. One real cracker of a symphony could make an international reputation for a composer, maybe even set him up for life - if he kept his spending modest - and certainly put him in the running for a conducting or an academic post.

During WW2 the ever-meddling British Government found that workers flagged at around 10:30 in the morning and 3:00 in the afternoon. So they broadcast half-an-hour of brisk light music (a genre you can thank your lucky stars you have never heard) to pep everyone up. This blatant paternalistic manipulation went on until the end of September 1967. I mention this to separate it from the other use of music while working.

Modern music while you work relies on the home hi-fi and head-fi manufactured since the 1970-ish, and was driven by the spread of the personal computer. There's a reason for this: the more active your brain is used to being, the more content it is used to handling in a given moment, the easier it is to distract when there isn't enough content or activity to absorb it. Smart people doing routine things don't do well, because their brain is looking for something absorbing to do. At the other end, creative work needs the brain to be able to ruminate inside itself and not to be distracted by e.g. colleagues yammering away on conference calls. In both cases, the right kind of music (which varies from person to person) can act either to occupy the brain so the rest of you can do that boring thing, or can blank out the outside distractions and random thoughts so the brain can ruminate on subject. (I'm currently listening to The Avalanches Since I Left You and jolly good it is for that purpose too.)

Music is supposed to enhance our lives. Sometimes that happens because we listen to the music, and sometimes because we get lost in the music, and other times because it makes it easier to work, covers up awkward silences, is a pretty tune that adds to the scene, or lets us get into some serious emotional self-indulgence (Love Will Tear Us Apart on repeat after the partner walks away?). More than once, after leaving a job I should have left a few months earlier, I have felt a lightness of spirit and an urge to hum the march from Grand Prix.

Some music doesn't really accompany, it wants to be all you're thinking about: that's why it's called `Romantic' music. Use a Schumann symphony as background music and it won't do the job, but some Hottenterre flute pieces will do just fine. I wouldn't use John Coltrane as background either, though Eighties Miles does quite well. Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Debussy and most twentieth-century composers keep poking and prodding for attention: listen to this chord, listen to this tune, bang! wasn't that loud. I wouldn't commend Schoenberg's Verklate Nacht as brain-ruminating music. Go back before around 1820 or so and a lot of the music is as much an accompaniment for life as any amount of EDM, Ambient, Jazz, Eighties Rock, Tamla Motown folk or anything else made after about 1960.

Music is there to do what we need it to do. I play what I need or want to listen to. Some mornings I will let a Jazzed playlist roll on for a couple of hours, other times I'll stand over my CD's unable to make a choice because I don't actually know what I want. Sometimes I want to hear it over the speakers, other times over the Sennheisers, and other times over the bluetooth WM1000's. Horses for courses, music for moments.

Bad Photographs

I have utterly and completely lost the knack of taking photographs. I'm pretty sure Aristotle thought that was a sign that a man had fallen into a rut and needed to get out more. It may be in the Nichomachean  Ethics somewhere. Or maybe the Metaphysics. I'm not sure. I just can't see the pictures anymore. I could blame the damn iPhone, or the lockdown, or the fact that I don't get out much. The truth is that I just can't see the pictures anymore. That requires serious therapy. Aristotle is pretty clear on that.

The Skittles Argument

Here is a bowl of Skittles. If you don't like Skittles, substitute chocolate M&M's.

Hundreds of them.

Help yourself.

Oh. Yes.

Ten are poisoned. Fatal poison.

But dig in. Please. What are the odds?

You won't, of course.

The downside is too great and the upside is fleeting.

It's the reverse of that awful mess that is Pascal's Wager. This is the one where we should believe in God because the upside is infinitely wonderful and the downsides are minor inconveniences. (One flaw in the argument is that the upsides only happen when we are dead, so you have to believe in the after-life as well. Another is that Pascal is assuming that the way the Catholic Church says you should live is the way to heaven, especially the donations-to-the-Church bit. But you're not supposed to point that sort of thing out, as it is considered bad manners.)

There's a whole class of arguments like this. Where one of the choices has penalties or payoffs way over anything we are prepared to risk. Like death or permanent injury or disability.

Some people argue against nuclear power on this basis. Sure the odds of the reactor blowing up are minuscule, but then again, Chernobyl.

The Skittles Argument was recently used by women explaining why they refused to have anything to do with men. Because one might be an abusive ***hole and you can never tell. Until it's too late.

Now it's used by men to explain why they are steering clear of dating and marriage. They don't know if the Skittle is poisoned, but what you do know is that forty per cent of men who pick a Skittle end up paying alimony and child support.

One flaw with using the Skittles Argument is its assumption that we cannot identify the poisoned Skittle. However, people aren't Skittles: very often, we can spot the Poisoned Skittle, and even if we get it wrong, we don't lose much by getting it wrong.

I'll modify that a bit. Very often, a psychologically healthy person can spot a Poisoned Skittle.

Which leaves a lot of people who can't. Because they have faulty calibration and don't know what a Poisoned Skittle looks like (ask me how I know about that). Or because they have faulty goals, which the Bad Boys / Bad Girls meet so well.

A variation of this flaw is assuming that everyone will react to the Poison the same way. Maybe it only affects people with existing conditions, and most regular people will be asymptomatic. Most people with existing conditions know they have them because the Doctor has already told them. There is no test for being asymptomatic, so everyone else has to assume they run a risk of feeling rough for a few days. Which is probably enough to say that even the fabulous taste of Skittles isn't worth the risk of finding out you're symptomatic.

So when what's at stake is everyday contact with everyday Skittles? That's as if we had a bowl of things that looked like Skittles, but most were just gum, and only a few were real Skittles, and who would grab a handful then?

How I'm Going To Use Favourites in Qobuz

My inner teenager interpreted "Favourites" as songs and albums I want to hear again soon, like maybe in an hour and then this afternoon. Which is at least as often as the favourite song of the moment would be played on the radio.

Not being a teenager, I don't listen to music like that anymore. Not even Spinning Around



which I would put on the headphones at work if I needed a pick-me-up before heading off for the gym. Or Money Guns and Lawyers



but I wouldn't call those "Favourites". I'd call those "motivation".

Which meant I was not doing well with finding a use for the functionality.

While thinking that I should be able to use it for something else useful.

One afternoon of now distant memory I was lazing in the shade in the garden, because it was way too hot to be sunbathing, and I was streaming Goldie's The Journey Man Remixes as an experiment. Timeless is one of the great albums of all time, and when I tried his next one back in the day, it was way too dark and Jungle-y. So I never followed up. Three tracks into the The Journey Man Remixes and I knew I would want to hear it again...

...and that's what my Favourites list will be. Songs and albums I want to hear again reasonably soon and would probably have bought on CD if it was back in the days before streaming. It's also going to be albums-I-used-to-have-and-got-rid-of-but-now-want-to-hear-again. Like Duke Ellington's New Orleans Suite. (If you have never really heard the Duke, I suggest giving him a listen. Qobuz has a bunch of his stuff.)

I could go on some sort of Favourites-building binge, but I'd prefer to build it up album by album, which is what I've been doing.