Doya think any women are put off by the "what do you think about besides audio" post that I enjoyed so much a couple of months ago? Let's face it, although we're a pretty polite and positive bunch (compared to audioasylum: I can't even go there unless I'm looking for something pretty specific), we do sometimes exude that caveman aura.
biz
Women are used to caveman and already know how to ignore them.
Somewhere and when - and I've lost track of both - I found a discussion of gender in audiophilia. Dealers and people who attended gear shows and conventions universally agreed that 98% of those attending were male, and the rest were hardy souls looking for things for their husbands, with *very* few exceptions. Later in the thread, an actual female audiophile turned up and made some observations, based on conversations with her female friends. They were fascinating, but unfortunately this is from memory and I'm sure I'm misrepresenting some things.
Still, she and others concluded that females and males listen to music quite differently. Females make music part of their experience - she descrbed it as integrating music into a larger experience. Males make music their experience - when they are listening, there is no other experience. They are *listening*.
When music is part of a larger experience, you don't micro-optimise the music. You don't sit and fret about whether that high A was half a db down. You might not notice if the high A was completely absent, as long as the music is still contributing to whatever else you are doing. So you don't care about gear very much.
But when music is the whole experience - well, you know how it is. Your eyes are closed, you are hearing everything and experiencing nothing else, you want a comfy chair so nothing distracts you; if someone interrupts you you have to kill them and then start the whole song or album over. And if you even suspect you are missing part of the experience because the gear is imperfect, well, that's just not acceptable.
My wife and I bear this out. She likes music. Her family is musical (early music fans with connections to Eastman school), she sings, she has perfect pitch, she can dabble at a few different instruments. And while she likes my no-holds-barred music system, she's generally happy with a boom box and indifferent musical production values. The only thing she kicks up any fuss about is missing bass, and I suspect that's because bass is so viscereal that it always becomes part of a larger experience, so it's a problem if it's missing. And she'd happily talk while listening to a recording for the first time, something I literally cannot do.
Me, I'll listen to music even if I hate the style, if the recording is good enough. Boom boxes make me want to find an axe - half the music is missing. I delight in finding subtle touches buried deep in sound tracks, and I instantly can tell if someone re-mixes a song I've previously heard, no matter how many years ago, no matter how minor the changes. My wife sometimes fails to notice if a song is rerecorded by a different artist and has different instrumentation and words. I can compose some; I don't think she can. But if I listen to new music I generally have to ask her what instruments were used and what key it was in. And if she pays close attention, she can go to a piano and bang out a melody she's just heard, sometimes with accidental improvements. I just see a sea of useless black and white keys, while I have this exact copy of the song ringing in my head.
We are clearly processing very differently. But we both adore music.
If you ever get a chance to see Rob Becker's _Defending the Caveman_, mortgage the kids and go. It's a one man play about gender differences, and you'll laugh so hard you'll cry. But in the humor, he uses an analogy about spears and baskets which I have found utterly true: men point the spear of their interest and attention at something and it becomes their whole world; females have a basket and constantly gather some of this and some of that and create something from the mix.
Great play - and you have to love a performance that ends with the wild, life-affirming cry: "I... am not... an asshole!"
