A few comments about the above:
@whart -- love your answer. Especially the part about becoming a passionate student of music. The gear transported you to a new world of discovery. Job done!
Compare with @oregon papa
Comment: Why is it important for an oboe to sound exactly like an oboe? It’s a test for a system, but why is it important for musical experience? After all, I don’t care if the tree in a Monet painting looks a tree, do you? And when I eat a steak, do I know what real cow tastes like? No, I judge it based on other steaks I've eaten and not whether it traces back to the cow. We seek realism, but this term can be misleading; as @whart points out, there’s no secure way "back" to some singularly real original. But we can want it to sound "somewhat" like the instruments we've heard before -- I'd grant that. But then there are all those world instruments I've never heard in person, or electronica, etc. Like a good fantasy or science fiction story, I want to be enveloped in an experience -- but that's a wish for a kind of experience, not "a path back to the real."
@three easy and @reubent @has2be
All three of these comments seem to be saying that a pleasure *should* be simple and that’s all it *needs* to be. This does not jibe with my experience.
I may enjoy something initially -- say, wine. Then someone says, "Notice how it tastes of feels at the end, as you swallow. That’s the ’finish.’" Then, I start attending to that. I notice it. It becomes part of my next tasting. I taste *for* it. I may even want it. What's happening? Experience thickens, pleasure thickens -- thanks to knowledge applied to perception.
Oh, and that’s not "worry" -- that *makes* me happy. Learning things which make experience richer makes me happy. Then again, I don’t associate thinking about something with being unhappy, and I don’t worry that creating complexity is necessarily a path to paralysis-by-analysis.
@whart -- love your answer. Especially the part about becoming a passionate student of music. The gear transported you to a new world of discovery. Job done!
There are so many ways to solve this, based on room, different equipment, type of source format and budget, that one wonders whether they are simply describing their preferred sound.
Compare with @oregon papa
I believe that the primary thing to listen for is the proper tonality of instruments. That, of course, requires knowledge of what live instruments sound like.
Comment: Why is it important for an oboe to sound exactly like an oboe? It’s a test for a system, but why is it important for musical experience? After all, I don’t care if the tree in a Monet painting looks a tree, do you? And when I eat a steak, do I know what real cow tastes like? No, I judge it based on other steaks I've eaten and not whether it traces back to the cow. We seek realism, but this term can be misleading; as @whart points out, there’s no secure way "back" to some singularly real original. But we can want it to sound "somewhat" like the instruments we've heard before -- I'd grant that. But then there are all those world instruments I've never heard in person, or electronica, etc. Like a good fantasy or science fiction story, I want to be enveloped in an experience -- but that's a wish for a kind of experience, not "a path back to the real."
@three easy and @reubent @has2be
Listening to music should simply be a joy...not something you have to train for. The ability for someone to hear something or not has no correlation whatsoever to the level of enjoyment they can derive from music.
"don’t worry, be happy"
By simply listening to music for years and decades . Through those times from beginnings as gear evolved and it comes naturally. Its not forced or strained or fretted over. It’s not some rare gift . Its memory like a reflex.
All three of these comments seem to be saying that a pleasure *should* be simple and that’s all it *needs* to be. This does not jibe with my experience.
I may enjoy something initially -- say, wine. Then someone says, "Notice how it tastes of feels at the end, as you swallow. That’s the ’finish.’" Then, I start attending to that. I notice it. It becomes part of my next tasting. I taste *for* it. I may even want it. What's happening? Experience thickens, pleasure thickens -- thanks to knowledge applied to perception.
Oh, and that’s not "worry" -- that *makes* me happy. Learning things which make experience richer makes me happy. Then again, I don’t associate thinking about something with being unhappy, and I don’t worry that creating complexity is necessarily a path to paralysis-by-analysis.