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What can I say? Of course it sounds the same!
Have you ever had a pal over to listen to your system, only to find under the scrutiny of the audition that you hear your system differently than when you were alone?
Where pals/gals are at home or not when I listen to my system doesn't change it's sonic behavior. It's true that I'm more excited to share my passion, but usually it's them who gave me their feeling about what they hear. However, it's true that my system doesn't sound always the same, as explained in a previous Vote! forum. Thanks to my P300 power plant, I can however minimize this. The main factor is how I feel when I listen. Herv
My friend is deep into tubes and I am a solid state, Levinson kind of guy and my system is always dry, overetched, cold and cerebral, in his humble opinion. But I digress. To each his own, I guess. Tubes or solid state ? That is the eternal question.
It's just the same to me. What's more amazing to me is the number of friends I have that have absolutely no ear for very high fidelity music. Basic audiophile observations are lost on them. When I tell them the value of my system , they almost hit the floor! Of course, I do have a FEW friends that are absolutely blown away. Regardless, what's important is that the music moves me.
I used to think that it did -- in the sense that a positive or negative comment would lead me to believe that there were aspects of my system that I previously did not hear (or was aware of). It finally occured to me that the visitor was simply voicing his or her opinion. What really mattered, visitor or not, was how engaging my system was to me and what sort of emotional reactions to the music it could elicit. This is related to the "reviewer effect," where someone elects to buy, not buy, or replace a component based on a reviewer's opinion.
You know, it's funny, but even though my stereo sounds much better when I have critical listeners in the room, my driving gets much worse when I have carefree passengers in the back seat. What do you suppose is wrong with the people I hang around with?
I never tell outside listeners what I think are the shortcomings of my system. Neither audiophiles nor non-audiophiles ever seem to hear its shortcomings, only its strengths. I think that people generally hear the strengths of systems/equipment at first; it takes a while to hear the problems in a fairly good system or with a decent piece of gear. Audiophiliacs needn't have performance angst once their systems reach a certain level.
I have two distinct groups of friends: audiophiles and normal people. When my audiophile buds come over we're all crammed in to a fairly small sweet spot. Any discussion tends to focus on sonics rather than music. They think the price of my cartridge is a steal! My normal friends really get off on the music, beer in hand, possibly dancing. They have the ability to enjoy a song or two from an adjacent room. They think I'm nuts for spending so much on a cartridge! BTW, my system sounds best when these guys(normal folk) are over.