Onhwy61 said:
(snip)Let's not lose sight that there is an objective reality somewhere beyond the firing pleasure synapses in our brains.
As soon as you bring a human being into the picture it leaves the realms of "objectivity". It may fire some pleasure points in each of our brains, or it may not, and what each of us does with that is entirely unique. It comes down to the age-old question, "If a speaker is playing loudly in the forrest, and there is no one there to hear it and analyze it ad nauseum here on Audiogon, then did it really happen?"
furthermore, from the beginning of that same post...
If I understand them correctly some people are arguing that if a specific piece of equipment makes them feel good, then it must be good equipment. That's an absurd notion.(snip)
I don't think that's quite it. The point is more accurately that if a specific piece of equipment makes a specific person feel good, then it is indeed a "good" piece of equipment to that specific person. Period. End of fact. Nothing, and it bears repetition, NOTHING ELSE MATTERS to that person, especially someone else's opinion of what is "good". User AgonArseWipe loves his iChing Final Fortune DAC. Does that mean the Final Fortune is a "good" DAC? No, it just means AgonArseWipe experiences it that way. Is there one single DAC that's going to pleae AgonArseWipe, SolidStateMadness and SET4Ever? I very much doubt it, and if there is, that same DAC may not at all please Gotmoremoney! Lets say the iChing Final Fortune DAC has the most uncanny ability to positively, and without deviation, reproduce a musical performance verbatim through some remarkably synergistic system. Do you think we'd all like that reading all the responses above? Do you think it may matter at all to most people? What is absurd to me is the idea of a black and white world where good and bad are absolutes. So what is verbatim? Is that something measured by machines and plotted out on graphs and in databases of zeroes and ones? Where is the humanity in that?! Sorry, but there is no 'objective' where humans are concerned. If you and I witnessed the same event from close to the same position, we would likely tell entirely different stories of that event. We would perceive and experience that event in different ways. Could be subtley different, could be profoundly different. But it ain't likely going to be the same. Such is the basis for the much simplified demonstration of the very principle in the child's game, "Telephone" where one person whispers a phrase into anothers ear, and that phrase is to be passed verbatim through a large group of people till it gets to the end of the line. It is pretty rare that the phrase remains the same from beginning to end, yet supposedly the translation from individual to individual is verbatim.
The whole thing is just as subjective as anything else in life. Who's going to tell you what the "best" music is? Or the "best" food to eat? Well, I guess there are plenty of folks who are willing to tell you, but are you really going to listen to them? And if some group of geeks in Redmond, WA came up with a program that they'd been working on for the last decade that actually analyzed and quantified such things into zeroes and ones and sine waves and pie charts, and analyzed all of that to spit out just exactly which food does taste "the best", would that data mean anything beyond a novelty to you as an individual? But the machines told me so!?
Marco
