For myself it’s a no brainer as to what HEA folks want to call things and I don’t much get involved in the debating team. The signal is highly tunable and that’s the part I care about. Saying that, I’ve always studied in the area of the four fundamental forces (interactions) and don’t see many in this part of the industry talking much about this. The basics though are that these are the four interactions that all other interactions boil down to. All of these are forces and motion and all are a part of vibratory structures. Where the audiophile world wants to weigh in on this is really a variation on the variables.
Glupson said "Sound is, in the simplest term, a vibration. No vibration, no sound." and this is the basic building block. No matter what audio science theory wants there are they must be a part of the fundamentals. Everything else is fun but many times speculation.
What I have found to be true is, I feel, most important to audio here’s why. If the four fundamental forces ring true this means there is no such thing as absolute isolation, no such thing as absolute inert, no such thing as absolute measuring and no such thing as being void of motion. This turns many HEA beliefs on their heads and needs to.
The ultimate technology to successful playback is going to be a variable. That means that at the end of the day there is one basic method for dictating how anything sounds if we are going to be in control "The Method of Tuning". This changes our industry paradigm. It changes the way we look at audio because being variable sets in motion a whole galaxy of old rules that we have over looked.
I’ve attempted to present this many times to our hobby and each time there has been a certain amount of progress but in the end the money that ruled didn’t want to take the marketing wheel this direction. It didn’t change the truth but it effected the reality of the marketplace. Now that we have started to move beyond the paperback days and have gone through the internet cycle of trolling we can get down to business and give a righteous birth to our inevitable future "variable audio". We’ve always had it but got sidetracked by Plug & Play and the money game.
Once our technical heads have a meeting of the minds Tunable Audio will become the norm and the (I don’t want to say next) industry will adapt a more physics based path. Not a what if path but a basic fundamental foundation.
mg