Other than music, why are you an audiophile?

I have been fascinated with this hobby since I played around with my Uncle's Pioneer Quadraphonic receiver in the early 70's. Music is my thing because I played instruments growing up. I am also an engineer and so I like the technical side of it and the satisfaction of successfully improving the sound.

I'm not totally buying into this emergence concept. I work with and design systems. So I will say this: Components working together make up a system, but the system characteristics can be described mathematically and predicted beforehand based on the behavior of the components and how they interact. When the results do not match prediction, then some complexity or variable has been overlooked, that's all. We can experiment with parts and guess at the empirical results and suggest some incalculable response has been achieved, but that is like assuming that someone who solves a Rubicks Cube has just performed some type of magic.

I'm not totally buying into this emergence concept. I work with and design systems. So I will say this: Components working together make up a system, but the system characteristics can be described mathematically and predicted beforehand based on the behavior of the components and how they interact. When the results do not match prediction, then some complexity or variable has been overlooked, that's all.

You are quite right that, for MANY types of systems, system characteristics can be reliably predicted from component characteristics. These types of systems tend to be either aggregative or mechanistic. A representative example would be a mechanical system like an car engine.

But for SOME types of systems, system characteristics cannot be reliably predicted from component characteristics, at least with the current state of science. These systems tend to be either highly holistic or highly complex. A representative example would be a biological system like an ecosystem.

In other words, some systems are more likely to support emergent characteristics than others. For ones that do, like ecosystems or economic systems, it is notoriously difficult to predict system characteristics from component characteristics. In theory, it is possible to predict the system characteristics of even highly holistic and highly complex systems. In fact, some progress has been made in the last two decades with the mathematical modeling of these types of systems. But we are still a long, long way from being able to reliably predict the behavior of highly holistic/complex systems by studying the characteristics of their components.

What follows from this is that emergence, as a phenomenon, is largely in the eye of the beholder. That is to say, it is largely a consequence of the cognitive and perceptual limitations of persons. If we had the mind of God, nothing would appear emergent. But since we don't, some system characteristics APPEAR emergent that are altogether within the scope of physical laws. This is why, in the OP, I used phrases like "an audio system, taken as a whole, SEEMS greater than the sum of its parts" and "the phenomenon of emergence is what makes hifi SEEM like magic."

Of course, I wasn't suggesting that hifi is magic. I was suggesting that sometimes hifi SEEMS like magic, because the musical characteristics of an audio system are the result of the holistic/complex interaction of the electrical/mechanical/acoustical characteristics of the system's components. As such, they can be difficult to predict. Certainly for the average audiophile, they are often difficult to predict. But even for the designer of audio components, I would imagine that they are often difficult to predict. Otherwise, designers would not need to rely as heavily as they do on listening tests. In any case, the difficulty predicting the musical characteristics of an audio system from the characteristics of its components is what makes hifi sometimes SEEM like magic. And to me, that is part of what makes hifi special.

Hi Bryon - for me, it is all about the music. The technology can be interesting in and of itself, I suppose, but I am really only interested in understanding enough about that in order to help determine why I like the sound of one type of component over another, or one brand over another, for example. Like a few others who have already responded, I also believe that the newer technologies in audio have not necessarily been improvements.

As a professional orchestral musician, I very rarely have the opportunity to play what I choose to - I must perform what is put in front of me the vast majority of the time. So this hobby helps to keep me sane - I can come home and listen to whatever I want to. Another advantage of having a high quality system for me is that when I listen to things for study purposes, I can hear whatever I am listening for better than I could before.

Another thing that really fascinates my about this hobby is whenever I have the opportunity to listen to the same recordings on different systems, and hearing the sometimes large differences created by doing so. The variety that can be had in this way is always entertaining. Or listening to two different masterings of the same recording over the same system.

Record collecting is a big reason a couple of musician friends of mine got into the hobby, and that is fun too, though I am not so much of a hard core collector as they are. For me it is more about the fun of listening to different interpretations of a work rather than trying to find every single recording of it available.

There is no other reason but the music.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke