Interview by Marco Kolks with Thomas Krüger in the listening experience

Krüger from "The Other Hifi Studio" in Karben near Frankfurt puts it in a nutshell: Music is a language that you understand intuitively. Which you don't have to learn, whose grammar you don't need to know. No matter where you are in the world, you always interpret music correctly for yourself. Thomas Krüger is not only a hi-fi dealer, but also a trained brass instrument maker and qualified musician. He knows the power of music and the fulfillment it can give a listener. As such, his approach to demonstrations and assembling equipment is quite different from the standard.

He is an advocate of Vortex products, specifically the Ground Optimizer and the Iraser 4, but also the OACard 3. What he and many of his customers perceive is the greater intensity, plasticity, more tonal color and air in the picture. According to Thomas Krüger, the individual steps with Vortex are always additive in total. He is always pleasantly surprised at the gains in sound that can be achieved.

Like the author of these lines, he cannot understand how Norbert Maurer from Vortex Hifi does it. That, on the other hand, doesn't matter, you can still hear it and so it's the reality - even if it can't be explained technically. Thomas Krüger is eloquent, entertaining and humorous. He speaks of the categories "Märklin railroaders" who only wanted to play with devices and "Captains from Köpenick" who only believed what was in trade magazines. He considers these approaches to be wrong when it comes to properly listening to music. In general, there are a lot of perceptually disturbed people in the scene.

He likes to use the image of a meditating Buddhist. It is essentially about the inner attitude that a listener should adopt: Wide awake, you should set the perception radar to 360 degrees without focusing on anything in particular. With such an attitude, there is a great chance to perceive what is real instead of doing bean counting and discovering what the essence of music is, namely a language of emotions with an infinite range of expressive possibilities that our verbal language does not have at all is available. Then the music hits the soul and listening becomes a new intense experience.

Women generally manage this emotional approach to music better than cerebral men. When asked why so few women visit hi-fi studios, Thomas Krüger has the right answer: women don't want to be bombarded with technical explanations. That unsettles them, so they prefer to avoid hi-fi shops. Men, on the other hand, love exactly what the qualified musician has often acknowledged with a shake of his head: “The purchase decision was made on the basis of technical criteria and can be justified intellectually. Great: but unfortunately the goal is missed, because technical data say nothing about whether a device is able to give the playback the necessary expression and that's what music is all about.

Thomas Krüger also made the wrong decisions in his early hifi days, which led to him selling all the components again and having to start over. The training as a wind instrument maker and later his music studies have had a significant influence on his listening habits and his understanding of listening to music.

An acoustic instrument produces sound, not pure tones. Sound, in turn, is made up of its basic frequency and its even multiples. If 100 Hz were "C", then the following (200, 400, 800...) would also be "C". From the 9th partial, however, the pitches become so small that we are only dealing with seconds, i.e. the smallest intervals in music. From the 9th partial there are only dissonances which are no longer perceived as such because the amplitudes are zero or very small. However, they are the decisive tonal color dabs in the development of a tone from soft to loud.

Since tones sung or generated on instruments are not static, but always vary - quasi living, also in volume, changes occur in relation to the timbre. And that's exactly what good hi-fi equipment has to be able to reproduce, especially the boom that occurs in the lower partials.

Thomas Krüger remembers his studies. He could walk down a hallway and, despite the closed doors, clearly identify which fellow student was playing an instrument behind it. “Every musician has their own unmistakable sound on their instrument, which is as individual as a fingerprint. The coordination of the individual muscle groups required when playing is slightly different for each player and ensures this very personal sound.

He later had his students audition for a short time and immediately recognized where the problems lay. As soon as the physical motor skills are on point, you can hear it. From this he learned that his students have to experience this certain physical feeling in order to be able to play well. You need to understand what it means to hit the center of the tone. After that, they have to experience it again and again until they know exactly how it feels. Then the mental energy of the musician manifests itself in the quality of the sound. In such cases, explaining in words does not lead to an acceptable result, because it is the wrong input channel. You have to experience what a well-played note feels like, only then do you really understand it.