When reflecting on some of the customers who have bought loudspeakers from us, I have noticed that they have one thing in common. They are predominantly male. Of course we have female customers. Notably, the second pair of loudspeakers we have ever sold on Amazon and weeks before CNET put us on the map went to Michelle from Portland who went on to write the most amazing review on her purchase, spanning five pages and describing her experience so enthusiastically and eloquently that on some discussion forums it was alleged that she might be a shill. I actually had to look up the word:
No, Michelle was not a shill, which is of course exactly what a hawker, gambler or swindler would say about his hired accomplice. Let´s move on, shall we?
Michelle is, however, an audiophile and she also happens to be a woman. Many other female customers came along, some lovingly buying Loudspeakers for their husbands like Donna from San Antonio, who later complained laughingly to have ‘lost him to his music for the evening, he’s that happy with them. :)’ I do hope Donna eventually did get him back. I would have hated to have done that to her. Charles, Donna´s husband commented on the same review that we should be nominated for a nobel prize. Peace or physics, I wonder.
Similarly customers like Lili from Iowa bought the speakers for her audiophile boyfriend as did Donna but confessed to loving the design. WAF still matters it seems.
Christina from Chicago loves urban art and when she heard that a building she grew up in was to be torn down, she decided to immortalize some of the building's graffiti by turning that work of art into a loudspeaker.
With Michelle and a woman named Margery being the notable exception I can think of right now, by far most of the audiophiles, and hence the people visiting our site, are in fact men. Last week we counted 1256 men to 64 women and that with a product that is frequently praised for its WAF that does stand out as a clear verdict. So if you are reading this, let me tell you, that it is very likely that you may be a male.
I firmly believe stereotypes don´t work. By that I mean, besides being often demeaning, they are usually entirely useless. When basing predictions on the next random person who enters or lives, based on any group they may or may not belong, to the quality of the prediction is dismal at best. For most human attributes the differences between people within a certain demographic are going to be far larger than the differences of the averages between two different demographics. In simpler terms: The most audiophile woman is definitely going to be more passionate about great sound than the least audiophile man.
But I did wonder, why it is, that it is mainly men who seem to go on our joint conquest for the perfect reproduction of great music. I went to do a quick scan of my iTunes play count and found that more than half of the musicians I enjoy listening to are female, so musicality is definitely not the great divide. But what is it.
With that question in mind I decided to go on another of my quests. What is the difference between the feminine and the masculine nature that may explain what I am very much experiencing in day-to-day life as a loudspeaker manufacturer.
Luckily the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Imaging provided an answer. Yes apparently our male and female brains seem to work differently when it comes to processing sound.
Researches around Liesbet Ruytjens studied brain activation in men and women as a response to both music and noise. She found that the prefrontal auditory cortex was activated by music in men but not by noise, while the female brains showed higher activity with music and noise alike. Both brains reacted similarly to music it was just the difference between music and noise.
Now the pre-auditory cortex is known to be in charge of tasks like sustained and selective auditory attention and I cannot think of a better description for my experience as an audiophile than that description of my pre-auditory cortex´s task.
As a tendency it seems, male brain tends to be better at honing in at minute auditory cues and define their precise origin and nature, perhaps evolved from our ancient quest to eat, not be eaten. At the same time the female brain has evolved to a great degree to scan noise for useful information and does that extremely well. Is this an ancient reminiscence of our hunter and gatherer ways, perhaps? Off to the man cave to dwell about that… to the sound of some great music, I may add.