High Performance Audio - The End?


Steve Guttenberg recently posted on his audiophiliac channel what might be an iconoclastic video.

Steve attempts to crystallise the somewhat nebulous feeling that climbing the ladder to the high-end might be a counter productive endeavour. 

This will be seen in many high- end quarters as heretical talk, possibly even blasphemous.
Steve might even risk bring excommunicated. However, there can be no denying that the vast quantity of popular music that we listen to is not particularly well recorded.

Steve's point, and it's one I've seen mentioned many times previously at shows and demos, is that better more revealing systems will often only serve to make most recordings sound worse. 

There is no doubt that this does happen, but the exact point will depend upon the listeners preference. Let's say for example that it might happen a lot earlier for fans of punk, rap, techno and pop.

Does this call into question almost everything we are trying to ultimately attain?

Could this be audio's equivalent of Martin Luther's 1517 posting of The Ninety-Five theses at Wittenberg?

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Can your Audio System be too Transparent?

Steve Guttenberg 19.08.20

https://youtu.be/6-V5Z6vHEbA

cd318
My wife loves my system's improvements over the years because she listens to 70s and 80s rock, including heavy metal.  My ML Monolith III stats were awful sounding to her.  The Legacy speakers could handle the bass and dynamics of rock without brightning/hardening the sound.  Her Berlin and Foreigner CDs sound almost analog like.  I can listen to her Metallica and Prong "music."  I have sold 18,000 records over the past 40 years, mostly due to performance reasons and  due to poor mastering (compression-those 50s and 60s LPs that were made to play on cheap equipment or for radio broadcasts).  
Perhaps this is a bit like Frances Fukuyama claiming history ended when the Cold War ended, ensuring liberal democracy a long history devoid of any alternate system of governance.
The hifi busines should split in two areas:
Area 1) Music recorded from real sources in real spaces.
Area 2) Syntetized or strongly manipulated music.

Area 1 offers audio gear which follows the rules of "realism".
Area 2 offers audio gear which follows the rules of abstraction, subjectivity and so on.

In this way we finally stop expecting to produce abstract images using a Nikon camera or to produce 100% photorealistic images using watercolors, or even worst, to produce both using the same device.

This would enourmusly benefit both worlds.
I noticed this many times. It's kind of ironic, but your loathsome NTSC video signals of years ago adhered to some fairly strict standards; IRE units, color temps, many things all very technical. Two inch helical scan quad head video tape recorders the size of your stove and very expensive. Engineers on staff to care and feed them. Some of that continues with HDTV, perhaps as fussy or worse on the production side, Joe Kane and SMPTE and all.

Any idiot could go into a studio and record music.........and you notice in an afternoon of listening. Bass, treble, gains, all over the place.
@daros71 

I largely agree with your post, except to say that even the 'realistic' school of audio recording and reproduction is still painting a watercolor more than taking a realistic image of the event

how do you fit a live band, jazz ensemble, much less an orchestra into a home listening room?

we are talking downscaled and artificial facsimiles here... and our minds do the rest