Audiophile Priorities and Recent Topics

@danager

I read somewhere that the act of pulling a record off the shelf, removing it from its sleeve, cleaning it, placing it on the turntable, clamping it down, dropping the needle on the groove and settling into the armchair is akin to making the bed before making love.

I’m not inclined to disagree.

As to the format with the most value, us vinyl types figured that would be the case all along. It just sounds better. And since few artists record in analog anymore, the LPs that are AAA (as opposed to ADA, or DDA), are becoming rarer and rarer. I can tell, without checking the liner notes, when an LP has been mastered or remastered digitally.

@tvad Thanks for lucid thoughts on this as always. If nothing else, the input on this thread over the past 4 pages validates your premise that far and away forum members are applying tweaks as tweaks - not expecting them to be the cornerstone of one’s system.

One of the more negative, and long-running aspects of the tweak threads is how they always tend to devolve into a "who is right?" argument. (Sometimes they don't devolve - they start right out of the gate guns-a-blazin’). It would be so refreshing just to simply share our experiences and allow all to absorb and consider - as opposed to taking a position to "argue". It seems years ago that Audiogon had more of a spirit of comradery. Now some posters just resort to name-calling, Youtube-linking, and use of a 12 yr-old’s codes for shaming as a method of showing dominance in a discussion. Hopefully we will see this behavior dissipate and we all take individual ownership of making this a better place by acting more friendly. This is certainly my intention.

The controversy around priorities and putting topics like cables and floating the cables on little feet etc in their proper context with corollary importance (or lack thereof) and to what degree complexity lends itself to obfuscation rather than understanding reminds me of a scandal from the 1990s that occurred in the upper echelons of cultural theory.

Alan Sokal, a professor at NYU and London’s University College, submitted an article to “Social Text”, an academic journal of postmodern cultural theory (that I also happened to read myself from time to time). His submission was meant to test the journal’s intellectual rigor, and to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies - whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Frederick Jameson and Andrew Ross - would publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it sounded good and if it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions."

The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the journal’s spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars” issue. It proposed that “quantum gravity” is a social and linguistic construct. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine “Lingua Franca” that the article was a hoax.

The “Sokal Affair” - as it came to be known - caused controversy about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of “Social Text”; and whether “Social Text” had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor.

At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.

Needless to say, peer review and the analytical discipline that accompanies it is nowhere near to being A Thing in audio. Is it any wonder that audiophiles rarely agree on much?

My peer reviewed post re quantum entanglement was deleted by the mod. Now, Most people don’t think of Jack Daniels as an accomplished Quantum physicist, but in our household he is chair of the Dept.

Who would sit on this audio peer review board, and what form would this analytical analysis take? I don't think audiophiles will ever accept any appointed or elected audio peer review board in the near future. There is so little commonality between individual systems, highly likely each system is totally unique on this earth. And then there is my individuality to account for, I may interpret what I hear differently than some expert.  I highly doubt mass audiophile agreement to some audio board's determination of some instrument measured and/or double blind or some other iteration of so called objective listening tests that rates audio equipment in hierachy of sound quality.
There may be a day when acceptance of some instrument measured audio sound performance hierarchy will be accepted by the masses. I'm sure some  outliers will continue to decide for themselves, at least until the audio police confiscate their equipment or place the outliers in audio reformatories where accepted norms of sound quality are inculcated.
I think most of us are quite content to freely build our own audio systems and interpret it's sonic performance based on our individual perceptions. And so, argument in the audio realm really not need take place if the above subjectivity kept in mind. Self appointed judges who'd be more than happy to sit on these peer boards would love to send me to audio re-education camps.