High Performance Audio - The End?

'Perfect reproduction' will purportedly occur when the signal can be routed directly into your cortex of your brain.,,,

...and I suspect will just engender a whole new level of arguements over what methods and means to do so and what one experiences....

Any given subject and the way it's experienced will always be a source of 'discussion'.....human nature will be what it is for the forseeable future...

....imho....*S* 

...why one would bypass any reasonably decent pair of ears is a whole curiousity in itself....

The Quads were novel cutting edge,  in their day. Old Quads now are horribly compromised,  utterly incapable of handling today's music, as are most HiFi speakers.  When you hear the "hash" of it, you know the system is not that good, and/or was poorly set up. Superior systems play all music superbly.  

He's also into increasing his Youtube subscriber base, and the majority of his listeners are probably in the $5k-$20K range, so his topics may be tailored to gather the most listeners on the bell curve.  He wants you to relate to his site--I like him.  

douglas_schroeder,

But that's the point isn't it?

Either the Magnepans mentioned by Steve or the Quads that I heard are either not even good enough to play back mediocre recordings on - or they might just be too good, too revealing in showing up studio trickery that perhaps the monitors originally used in production didn't show up so ruthlessly.

On the Morrissey tracks I heard, various weird mixing desk / phasing effects could be heard that didn't seem to stand out with all the other speakers I have used.

For me, it's an important issue because 95% of my listening includes popular  music recorded between 1940 and 1990.

At what point in the hi-fi resolution chain does the music of the Beatles, the Kinks, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen, Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, the Incredible String Band, the Doors, the Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols, the Smiths, the Pogues, U2, the Who, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Peggy Lee, Judy Garland, the Mamas and the Pappas, Leonard Cohen, Cat Stevens, Buddy Holly, Paul Simon etc (not to mention the entire UK charts from roughly the same period) all start to sound worse?

Then there's the additional question of why do audio shows so heavily favour well recorded jazz and the like?

Why do they shy away from the stuff that 99% of the world's population actually listen to? 

Perhaps they know the answer already?