I don't want to beat a dead horse but I'm bugged.

Acoustic sound experience is subjectively registered FIRST and studied with objective measured implementation only after that...

Musical interpretation CANNOT be tought to an artificial Intelligence why?

Because it take a body rooted in the earth soil to make music meaningful experience...

Without a living heart sound cannot be an emotion... An emotion dont live in time but GENERATE his own time into the body metabolism by the way...

In acoustic and psycho-acoustic we not only try to replicate human hearing up to a point, but we study what make human hearing IRREPRODUCIBLE in the phenomenon called musical interpretation and perception...

Measuring gear and thinking that it is valuable to pick a piece of gear without listening to it is pathetical move...Ignorance to the third power...

😁😊

Physics is born with music and Pythagorean school in Greek time...There is no objective descritption and explanation of tonal playing perception even now...

And the geometer Fields medallist Alain Connes just connected music, primes numbers distributions and the deepest mysteries of quantum physics together...

And someone think that we can reduce sound experience to few measured tools? and what about music experience which even transcend sound itself ? why?

Because say Alain Connes "music"  reflect the non commutative geometry behind TIME experience itself...What is this source of diversities and variations behind time? it is a moving consciousness out of time...Emotion generate his OWN time out of time...

The musical tone scale is non commutative...

Musical time and tempo cannot be measured by a clock BY DEFINITION...

It is the reason by Valery Gergiev say that no one succeeded to imitate Furtwangler tempi...They emerge from music they are not put over the notes externally by a mechanical clock.....These tempi cannot be measured they only can be feeled in a body resonance effect... Call it ectasy or emotions...

Then Amir disciples are deluded crowd to the extreme... They are separed from reality by three qualitative gap: sound experience....music experience.... spiritual experience...When we listen we reunite these three gaps in one body/emotion

Anybody can hear but we must learn to listen....

I guess for some folks, having a super-precise instrument/piece of gear is of more importance than how it sounds.

As long as each side respects the other, seems equally valid to me, though I'm into sounds myself, not measurements. 

Bingo! I would take it a step further. I don’t think we will ever be able to “fully align our perceptions with measured performance”. And, you know what? I like it that way. Notice how there is always one very important word missing from these discussions, particularly on the part of the objectivists: MUSIC.

How does one quantify the reason that one drummer can lay down a fantastic groove; while another sounds accurate, but like a machine? Or, the sense that he and the bass player are in total musical sync, as opposed to in their own musical universes? Or, the subtle, but crucial feeling of tension, like a coiled spring, that an orchestra’s string section brings to the performance of a musical passage when they make a beautiful and seamless crescendo from ppp to fff ? What measurements exist that explain the perception of these very real things? And, aren’t these things what ultimately make the listening experience enjoyable? As in music, those are the things of the ART of audio electronic design; some designers have it and way too many don’t.

Great post  indeed that reflect also my experience...

Thanks

It's hard to imagine Amir grasping the beauties of tube amplification.

Let both worlds exist. Let the arguments continue to play out. Hope that laws aren’t passed that make it a crime to submit to one side or the other. I see the bumper stickers now. "Love a tube amp. Go to jail.".