I’ve always thought while we can have a big latitude in preferences that when we get together with others we can still often perceive of similar characteristics coming through when listening and in comparing gear in a room with others. So it surprises me when possibly a very small minority claim these differences don’t/can’t exist.
I visited a good friend yesterday who is also an audiophile who I’ve known for close to 15 years and we visit each other maybe up to a dozen times a year.
We share a lot of preferences in music, gear, coffee making and about life and the hobby in general.
He has a new pair of speakers he’s been settling into his setup… they are really nice!! Kudos Titan 808. A 2.5 way transmission line with predominantly first order crossover but also optional as active.
I did a bit of reading up on them today after hearing them (so had no expectation exactly going in) and in reading post our listening I have to say how on point the review I found on them is.
As it happened my mate was switching out amps and speaker cables on them while I was there and given this thread the experience did bring things to light or helped reinforce and inform things for me.
Pic of the Kudos Titan 808 from the hi-fi plus review… I was too busy listening to music and catching up with my mate to take pics myself… bad Tao.
Kudos Titan 808 HiFiplus review
I’d not heard them before or knew anything about them other than my mate mentioned the other week he had new speakers that he really was enjoying but also getting them optimised was proving a bit of a journey… but they were however to me super nice on first listen and caught me a bit by surprise not because they were good but because they struck me as a return in ways to some other speakers he’s had before but potentially fulfilling things more wholly.
His other speakers in his room are his long term love in the form of Tune Audio Anima horns. The two speakers themselves are sonically different perspectives but both musically very refined and wonderfully engaging. He’s also had a range of full range speakers in that room including Harbeth 40.2 and Spendors. I do know the room and his (great) setup skills well.
In short without going into a full on compare or in depth assessment several thoughts came related back to this thread discussion fairly directly.
Firstly neither of us felt compelled to compare in some audiophile obsessed intensive Double Blind manner… double blind test would have been ridiculously out of context of a casual visit and neither of us are that way much inclined in our approach to enjoying listening to music and sound as well as trying out gear. But the listening formed as small data points in holistic and some analytical data as part of (for him) a larger more in depth long term assessment.
Certainly we spent as much time talking about the music and it was just an informal moment, neither of us were looking for conclusions.. that kind of full on hurried intense shootout is more specific and not the way either of us generally come at appreciating gear. Also it wasn’t the main reason we were catching up, we were catching up as good friends and as far as learning about his new speakers it was just some early observation for me, I’m sure I’ll build more understanding of them over time.
Second a couple of things became quite obvious over the few hours of informal listening. Mainly that I also really liked the potential of the Kudos Titan 808s and got his enthusiasm for them completely. My mate wasn’t needing me to test them for him but our observations on what was working early on and coming through well were clearly shared in general and we both trust each other enough to not need to test anything or to make a proof out of our thoughts. We are also both confident enough in our own listening and observations. We are good mates and we have liked and owned similar speakers over the years so it’s not a surprise that we might also resonate in similar ways over these as well.
Without going into exhaustive detail about what we exactly heard he was trying out on the Titan 808s some Kinki mono blocks (250 watt class AB) into his Bespoke autoformer AVC (lucky he didn’t have a Schitt dac in as well which case he’d be into some Kinki Schitt) and then as a bit of a compare using a much different sounding Moonriver 50 watt integrated amp.
The Kudos are 91db sensitivity and he was trying early on to establish whether they liked a bit of power or whether a smaller (perhaps sweeter or more nuanced) amp with more finesse would play out better. It came out that both of us were coincidentally thinking the latter could be possibly the go but separately we both determined (surprisingly) that the Kinki mono blocks were matching in better for a range of reasons and probably mainly about the speakers liking the larger power and control. The drivers seemed to respond to the bigger rated amps better. He was checking initially with the Kinki monos because possibly getting in some higher power but better quality solid state monos came through as possibly a move to consider. The Titan 808s are recommended needing 25 to 300 watts and the amp setups we listened to were so clearly different in character. It just reminded me how characteristic differences on partnering gear comes through so easily on great speakers and that systems with high quality infrastructure in a very good (large) room make that easier to determine. This was a typical experience that reconfirmed how auditioning and listening is critical and that gear (as always) varies based on whole of system implementation and room context. Both of us coincidentally came out thinking something like a pair of Bricasti monos (which he has had before) might be worth exploring.
With the speaker cables swap he had Signal Project cables initially on the Titans when we started but at the end of the session he swapped in a pair of Shunyata Sigma speaker cables.
It was clear (unsurprisingly) that the two speaker cables sounded clearly divergent in ways even if they had some characteristic overlaps. Both of us thought the Sigmas brought a bit more open quality to the mids and upper end. That was fairly obvious and I had no great expectation in that. But I had an expectation that the Shunyata Sigmas would bring some emphasis to the bass whereas my mate expected them to be better defined in the bass than the Signal Projects (slightly different expectations) but we were both surprised that the differences in the bass between the two speaker cables wasn’t a canyon (so in the ballpark of each other) but still characteristically in ways different but not in giant ways but still the cables shaped the sound in varied ways.
All the way through the session we heard very similar things and you didn’t need to have super sensitive hearing… all very straightforward as far as a typical audiophile experience I’d have thought.
If listeners are hearing and describing similar things that to me helps validate an assessment. Having range and depth of results helps strengthen the validation of the data drawn.
So my question is if (admittedly seemingly a very small but ardent number of listeners) that some don’t hear any of these things what is going on? That’s the more interesting question to me.
Is it that the expectation of not hearing differences can be every bit as (or more influential and persistent) as any other kind of expectation in shaping the phenomenon of the listening experience? Hmmm curious.
I visited a good friend yesterday who is also an audiophile who I’ve known for close to 15 years and we visit each other maybe up to a dozen times a year.
We share a lot of preferences in music, gear, coffee making and about life and the hobby in general.
He has a new pair of speakers he’s been settling into his setup… they are really nice!! Kudos Titan 808. A 2.5 way transmission line with predominantly first order crossover but also optional as active.
I did a bit of reading up on them today after hearing them (so had no expectation exactly going in) and in reading post our listening I have to say how on point the review I found on them is.
As it happened my mate was switching out amps and speaker cables on them while I was there and given this thread the experience did bring things to light or helped reinforce and inform things for me.
Pic of the Kudos Titan 808 from the hi-fi plus review… I was too busy listening to music and catching up with my mate to take pics myself… bad Tao.
Kudos Titan 808 HiFiplus review
I’d not heard them before or knew anything about them other than my mate mentioned the other week he had new speakers that he really was enjoying but also getting them optimised was proving a bit of a journey… but they were however to me super nice on first listen and caught me a bit by surprise not because they were good but because they struck me as a return in ways to some other speakers he’s had before but potentially fulfilling things more wholly.
His other speakers in his room are his long term love in the form of Tune Audio Anima horns. The two speakers themselves are sonically different perspectives but both musically very refined and wonderfully engaging. He’s also had a range of full range speakers in that room including Harbeth 40.2 and Spendors. I do know the room and his (great) setup skills well.
In short without going into a full on compare or in depth assessment several thoughts came related back to this thread discussion fairly directly.
Firstly neither of us felt compelled to compare in some audiophile obsessed intensive Double Blind manner… double blind test would have been ridiculously out of context of a casual visit and neither of us are that way much inclined in our approach to enjoying listening to music and sound as well as trying out gear. But the listening formed as small data points in holistic and some analytical data as part of (for him) a larger more in depth long term assessment.
Certainly we spent as much time talking about the music and it was just an informal moment, neither of us were looking for conclusions.. that kind of full on hurried intense shootout is more specific and not the way either of us generally come at appreciating gear. Also it wasn’t the main reason we were catching up, we were catching up as good friends and as far as learning about his new speakers it was just some early observation for me, I’m sure I’ll build more understanding of them over time.
Second a couple of things became quite obvious over the few hours of informal listening. Mainly that I also really liked the potential of the Kudos Titan 808s and got his enthusiasm for them completely. My mate wasn’t needing me to test them for him but our observations on what was working early on and coming through well were clearly shared in general and we both trust each other enough to not need to test anything or to make a proof out of our thoughts. We are also both confident enough in our own listening and observations. We are good mates and we have liked and owned similar speakers over the years so it’s not a surprise that we might also resonate in similar ways over these as well.
Without going into exhaustive detail about what we exactly heard he was trying out on the Titan 808s some Kinki mono blocks (250 watt class AB) into his Bespoke autoformer AVC (lucky he didn’t have a Schitt dac in as well which case he’d be into some Kinki Schitt) and then as a bit of a compare using a much different sounding Moonriver 50 watt integrated amp.
The Kudos are 91db sensitivity and he was trying early on to establish whether they liked a bit of power or whether a smaller (perhaps sweeter or more nuanced) amp with more finesse would play out better. It came out that both of us were coincidentally thinking the latter could be possibly the go but separately we both determined (surprisingly) that the Kinki mono blocks were matching in better for a range of reasons and probably mainly about the speakers liking the larger power and control. The drivers seemed to respond to the bigger rated amps better. He was checking initially with the Kinki monos because possibly getting in some higher power but better quality solid state monos came through as possibly a move to consider. The Titan 808s are recommended needing 25 to 300 watts and the amp setups we listened to were so clearly different in character. It just reminded me how characteristic differences on partnering gear comes through so easily on great speakers and that systems with high quality infrastructure in a very good (large) room make that easier to determine. This was a typical experience that reconfirmed how auditioning and listening is critical and that gear (as always) varies based on whole of system implementation and room context. Both of us coincidentally came out thinking something like a pair of Bricasti monos (which he has had before) might be worth exploring.
With the speaker cables swap he had Signal Project cables initially on the Titans when we started but at the end of the session he swapped in a pair of Shunyata Sigma speaker cables.
It was clear (unsurprisingly) that the two speaker cables sounded clearly divergent in ways even if they had some characteristic overlaps. Both of us thought the Sigmas brought a bit more open quality to the mids and upper end. That was fairly obvious and I had no great expectation in that. But I had an expectation that the Shunyata Sigmas would bring some emphasis to the bass whereas my mate expected them to be better defined in the bass than the Signal Projects (slightly different expectations) but we were both surprised that the differences in the bass between the two speaker cables wasn’t a canyon (so in the ballpark of each other) but still characteristically in ways different but not in giant ways but still the cables shaped the sound in varied ways.
All the way through the session we heard very similar things and you didn’t need to have super sensitive hearing… all very straightforward as far as a typical audiophile experience I’d have thought.
If listeners are hearing and describing similar things that to me helps validate an assessment. Having range and depth of results helps strengthen the validation of the data drawn.
So my question is if (admittedly seemingly a very small but ardent number of listeners) that some don’t hear any of these things what is going on? That’s the more interesting question to me.
Is it that the expectation of not hearing differences can be every bit as (or more influential and persistent) as any other kind of expectation in shaping the phenomenon of the listening experience? Hmmm curious.
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