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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Why audio itself is wasted efforts
Post Subject: There is a language and there is the languagePosted by Romy the Cat on: 2/27/2026
The questions that preoccupied me throughout 2025 emerged from a convergence of psychology and critical listening. Once I became consciously aware of the pervasive role of projection in everyday psychological life, it became impossible not to recognize the same mechanism operating within the discourse of audio evaluation. The language we habitually use to describe sound reproduction is, to a striking degree, projective. What masquerades as technical assessment often reveals itself as unexamined psychological attribution. One finds almost no evidence of second-order metacognition — no sustained inquiry into how the listener’s own psychic structures participate in what is being “heard.”
Language is retroactively fastened onto experience, yet the bond between linguistic description and sonic event is neither natural nor self-evident. It is constructed. The high-end audio industry, in particular, frequently capitalizes on a subtle logical fallacy — post hoc ergo propter hoc — encouraging the belief that because a technical modification precedes a perceived improvement, it must have caused it. Last summer, I systematically reviewed numerous publications through the lens of projection theory. The pattern was unmistakable: narrative, not evidence, was doing the explanatory work. In this respect, audio rhetoric resembles ideological polarization in politics — persuasive, emotionally charged, and often detached from phenomenological reality.
The central problem, then, is not one of technology but of consciousness. If we are to speak meaningfully about sound, the task is not to accumulate descriptive adjectives for audible phenomena. It is to cultivate second-order awareness — the capacity to observe not only the experience of listening but the structure of experiencing itself. The essence of musical perception does not reside in circuitry or topology; it resides in the encounter between sonic event and psyche.
Objectivity in audio performance becomes conceivable only when the listener can accurately differentiate between the intrinsic properties of a sonic stimulus and the qualities psychologically attributed to it. This demands disciplined introspection. We must learn to attribute specific experiential qualities — tension, expansiveness, intimacy, coherence — to identifiable acoustic events rather than to the symbolic aura surrounding equipment or effort.
Yet mapping experience onto sound is not a mechanical operation. It occurs exclusively within the consciousness of the listener. Such mapping requires an unusual integration: psychological depth, cultural literacy, and musical understanding. Cultural competence here does not merely mean familiarity with repertoire; it refers to the cultivated ability to interpret symbolic form, to translate auditory metaphors into conscious meaning, and to situate musical perception within the broader architecture of human experience.
Without this integration, there can be no stable reference between audible event and subjective consequence. One is left with preference masquerading as principle, projection masquerading as analysis. Only when psychological awareness and musical literacy develop in tandem can discourse about audio transcend rhetoric and approach genuine phenomenological clarity.
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