If You And I Disagree About Audio, Who's Right? Roger Skoff tells you who to believe.

agree with several prior posts

it less about right and wrong

more about our different preferences

one of the few hobbies where the subjective can be as important as the objective

enjoy the journey

Personal taste alone CANNOT be the LAST and only word and the last and only stage in our audio experience...Personal taste must be motivated andinformed by a meaningful process...

In our journey we must correlate our own taste and subjective perception to an INCREMENTAL process of listening experiments in mechanical, electrical amd acoustical dimensions of the working system...

Taste alone is not meaningful but deceptive and the means by which consumerism marketing methods target us and limit our own thinking window...

This is already the case and evident in all audio thread...

For sure we all like our subjective experience when we pick the right components but this does not means that there is no place for the most important process in audio : optimization of the part and of the whole in our room...

This optimization is impossible without listening experiments in the three embeddings dimensions especially acoustic...

Taste without experiments is deceptive ....

Gear upgrade without acoustic experience and basic control is meaningless taste choice and uneducated biases...

Biases must be educated by a learning process...Like a musician in the process of educating his own biases:this is learning...

Subjective perception must have the last word in any audio experience , yes, but subjective perception must be correlated with objective experiments in acoustic to become educated...

Uneducated taste is ignorance... there is bliss in ignorance also for sure.... But the goal of audio and music experience is also educated higher meaningful experience...

A crocodile tasting his rotten victim corpse call it the higher culinary bliss also...

i prefer another kind of bliss.....

Then taste correlated to no acoustic  fact, nor to any other electrical and mechanical experiments  save a brand name in gear plugged in the wall  is only ignorance...

Taste+acoustic= educated experience

Am i right? Am i wrong?

I am in the process of correlating which is right or wrong, and i call it acoustic listenings experiments...

I rarely respond to queries asking for particular brands and models for purchase because I've always felt self conscious about this. What makes me qualified to answer this question for another, my system, room, experience, ear/brain listening complex entirely unique. While there is no doubt I've been at least subconsciously influenced by others in making audio system decisions, I've consciously made vast majority of decisions based on my own past experiences.

I think I was lucky in that my initial forays into audiophile systems was prior to information technology explosion. I made equipment purchases and built systems with virtually no outside influences, it was only my personal experiences listening to  other audio systems that guided me in determining preferred sound qualities. I had no experts to lead me, I considered myself to be most expert in making my choices.

I'm not sure I'd like to be novice audiophile today, far too many 'experts' likely leads many to doubt themselves. My recollections of the few audiophile publications and letters to the editor, and my own interactions with fellow audiophiles recall a time when it felt more like a mass or common exploration to discover the  determinants of audiophile sound qualities. Now it seems everyone believes or desires to be an 'expert' or the objective voice of one with the highest knowledge.  I often read audio threads with a sociological and/or psychological perspective rather than audio perspective.

 I'm completely in with advice given within the context of personal experience, this is knowledge imparted without other hidden agendas. These are the true experts, maintaining the subjective posture illustrates one wants to be helpful rather than expert. Desire a funny thing, helpful or expert, all becomes known in time!  I'm all in with Skoff, you are the expert only for yourself!