How much reality do you really need?

My own feeling is that it is 80% speaker and room, 15% amp and 5% everything else. The cheapest system I have heard do this was in and around $90,000 in todays money.

You are right in the first sentence....

You are not wrong in the second sentence,but give me 15,000 bucks and i will make it sound like the 90,000 bucks one....Why not if i can make my 500 bucks system sound like a 15,000 bucks one ?

There is no reality. It is all an illusion.

This is naive philosophy.... When all is illusion, reality exist, it is the "relation" between all these illusions....Call it consciousness... If you cannot spell it by this name it is because you are a naive "materialist"...



«Reality bind all illusions and they become " real"  illusions like in a game; illusion and reality are one loving conscious act called playing...»- Anonymus Smith




«Music is not sound, this is an illusion; music is through sound, this is reality»-Anonymus Smith

«I was just thinking the opposite....»-Groucho Marx 🤓

Go to a club. Every table (and thus, every patron) is oriented differently towards the sound-vibrations projected from the musicians onstage (each of whom hears their combined efforts differently). There's the guy running the sound-board, the woman in the tight black dress shunting drinks and over-priced sushi from the bar. . . who's actually perceiving "reality" in this scenario? Seems to me, reality is the combination of all of these perspectives or aural focal-points. You can arbitrarily choose one location in the venue as your baseline and then set about assembling a system with the goal of trying to replicate how sound vibrations are behaving in that particular location, at a particular time. . .  If that floats your boat, go for it.

What I seek in listening is a sense of heightened aliveness and this is what determines my gear choices. "How alive do I feel in this room with this music, on this system, right now?" is, for me, the operative question.
Call me unsophisticated but I don't want to be burdened by worrying about whether what I'm hearing is an accurate replication of what ocurred on a December night in 1962 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio. 

"I would ask: look at the sky, what color is it? You say blue and I say red."
Should read: "I would ask: look at the sky, what color is it? You say blue and I say blue.". However, in my reality, I see blue and call it blue. You see (my) red and call it blue. There is no way to prove this is not happening.

“Music is not sound, this is an illusion; music is through sound, this is reality»-“
Beautifully put.
Now apply that to sound reproduction.

The real question to the audiophile  is, “how much reality do you need” to enjoy your system?

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ZERO for me. I really don't care what anyone intended to be heard. I'm only concerned in what I like to hear.  I'm under no obligation to reproduce what someone else was trying to do..

Think of Yoko Ono. Wouldn't you TRY to change that convergence of unholy noise?

Holy water required BEFORE and AFTER a needle drop or push the play button.. :-)

Purest I'M 100% opposed too, "Run what ya brung" kind of guy.. plain and simple.. No tone control..

Not me!  I like tone control at the Preamp (remote access too) DSP for the bass (again adjustable from the seated position) and a tube EQ for the whole monitor section. THAT, I have to get up for.. PITA too..

gravel, gravel, mumble, mumble.. LOL

MY REALITY is fine, yours, maybe not.. "The Matrix"

Regards