The Absurdity of it All

@mijostyn,

"My mission has always been to reproduce that thrill at home but still maintain timbral accuracy. Imaging and accuracy are good things to shoot for but if the system does not feel right it is all to naught."


I still want that at home but I'm more or less resigned to never being able to hear my favourite music in an uncompressed form.

The loudness wars may or may not be over but recorded dynamic range remains a poor facsimile of a live performance. At least for the music I normally listen to.

Just take look at the first 10 pages of the dynamic range database and you will notice that Pop/Rock music hardly makes an appearance. Even after some 60 or 70 years, in terms of recording quality it still remains a second class citizen compared to the likes of Classical and Jazz.

Therefore I'd suggest a sense of humour as well as a feeling of eternal optimism is essential in this pastime since absurdity and audiophilia seem to clearly go hand in hand. 


https://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list/dr/desc

@cd318"

 "...absurdity and audiophilia seem to clearly go hand in hand."

This could explain a lot, in terms of what goes on in these forums!  

  .

@stuartk ,

You're right, I think the absurdity must be part of the attraction.

Let's face it, we're not like the other 99% of the population.  Unlike the vast majority for whom the medium is little more than about conveying the message. We seem to be far more passionate about our interest in the entire field of audio playback.

It's not always about maximising  absolute performance, some of us might also care about cosmetics, about brand/tribal loyalty, the relationship between ownership and self image, or perhaps about what someone else has said or written about a particular product, or what's domestically acceptable, and financially viable etc.

The main point of contention, perhaps the only point of contention, seems to be when strong disagreement erupts over the suggestion of better sound quality / performance. 

This 'suggestion' (it's never more than that) can be conveyed by a multitude of channels. It might be coming from a reviewer, or perhaps some clever ad which tries to distract and bypass our critical faculty, or maybe even some enthusiastic poster on a forum like this.

Perhaps the last 60 years of audio and it's lapse into relativism (nothing is objective) is merely a symptomatic of a much larger malaise. 

The world today seems more divided than ever, and trust in politicians, banks, global commerce must be at an all time low.

The only thing we can be sure of is that money remains the only global language. The rest is very unclear.

"And you know something is happening but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?…"


Suddenly we all seem to have become Dylan's Mr Jones. A quite absurd situation.

@cd318"

I very much enjoyed youir post. 

You mention both "passion" and "critical faculty" and it occurs to me that perhaps the defining hallmark of this hobby is a convergence of right and left brain activities. 

Arguments over whether the hobby is more about "music appreciation" or "gear appreciation" could be seen as an expression of the discomfort that can be generated by the tension by this convergence.  

We may prefer to veer to one side or the other, rather than hang out in the "no man's land" in between the polarities. And of course this has implications regarding your broader comments regarding society and culture wars.  

But, back to my main focus, audiophilia would appear to require a willingness and an ability to rapidly shift our primary focus from one lobe of the brain to another. 

There is also the very masculine, logical drive to pin things down-- know what's what--to organize and rank our experience (and by "masculine" I don't mean "male", necessarily). 

Contrast this with a more ferminine (again, not necessarily "female") 
impulse to approach experience from a more intuitive, global perspective that tends to be more focused upon what's arising in the moment and seeks to perceive what unites rather than differentiates, aspects of experience. 

I won't make generalizations about others, but I tend to operate more in the masculine mode when it comes to evaluating gear and more in the feminine mode when listening. I do realize this is not necessarily true for everyone!

Having said that, I'd venture to guess most of us tend to generally rely more upon one mode than the other. Consider the arguments that continue to erupt regarding whether cables sound different !  

How about this: 

Which aspects of this hobby are subjective?
Which are objective?

If we cannot even reach concensus on these questions, how can we hope to communicate? We end up, in effect, speaking two mutually indecipherable languages with the result being, as you suggest something like...

And you say "Well, what does this mean?" and he screams back "you're a cow-- give me some milk or else go home!"

I meant to say "Arguments over whether the hobby is more about "music appreciation" or "gear appreciation" could be seen as an expression of the discomfort that can be generated by the tension OF this convergence".