objective vs. subjective rabbit hole

Prof—and yet again, mahgister, and mijostyn too: thanks so much for your insightful comments. Prof, I will look at your "thread"; this is just the sort of writing about audio I love to read: about the equipment, but grounded in an appreciation of the reproduction of the real sound of instruments. Your paragraph about the woody timbre of woodwinds, the brassy sheen of the brass, voices that sound like flesh and blood rather than electrons...that's what I seek, too, in listening, and also in reading on this forum.

FWIW, I also share your privileging of the subjective, if I may put it that way. It is "like something" to be an experiencing consciousness—like something to be a bat, but also like something to hear a string quartet or a beautiful soprano. It may well be that such a subjective experience is conditioned by neurons stimulated by physical phenomena, but as mahgister never tires of pointing out, psychoacoustics is where the subjective and the objective meet. In any case, you put your finger on the fallacy of supposing that only objective measurements are intersubjectively communicable. I completely agree that, even if my reaction to, say, a given speaker is due to its bump at 1 kHz, or whatever, I don't experience that pleasurable sensation as a 1 kHz bump—and what matters, of course, is how the physical phenomenon is perceived, not how it may be described in terms of physics. One certainly can, as you so eloquently show, persuade others without leaving the shared realm of the subjective.

Thanks for the treat of reading all this.

Ah! Prof, I just looked at your thread—and realized why I recognized your "name" on this forum! I actually copied and pasted that thread some time ago into a document for storage in my "audio" file on the hard drive of this laptop, for future reference. It is a wonderfully clear and vividly descriptive account of a lot of desirable speakers, as the reactions to it from just about everyone also attests.

Frankly, I’m not sure why I frequent this forum, or why, for that matter, I even consider myself an audiophile. Yes, I’ve loved good audio equipment for most of my life; most of the time, I enjoy music more in my living room than I do live (a point of contention between my wife and me; she was a musicologist and music critic in her former life in Europe, and is more interested, I think, in the social aspect of live performance than in the music itself). But, despite my love for audio equipment, I don’t own much. My system sounds very good, and I have lots to compare it to: we have a very active audio club here on the California Central Coast, and I’ve had many opportunities to critically listen to systems in purpose-built acoustically controlled rooms that are vastly more valuable than mine. But I don’t covet any of them, and have long been happy with what I have. And by "long," I mean decades: my amplification, turntable and speakers all date from the last millennium. So, in other words, your experience, critical acumen, and talent for expressing your "impressions" are much appreciated to the extent that they share our common enthusiasm so effectively—but not because they might be useful as guidance for purchases, since I don’t feel I need to make any. I guess I’m lucky that way.

Back to the music, then! The Orpheus performance of Beethoven’s music for "The Creatures of Prometheus" is playing now, and is just gorgeous. The overture to this "incidental" piece is well known, but the rest of it isn’t, although it should be for anyone who loves Beethoven’s middle period. And the audio quality of this recording is stunning! One of the dance movements begins with a harp on the left, then the violins join, also on the left but in front of the harp; then a single flute, also on the left—which is joined by a bassoon way over on the right toward the rear of the orchestra, and then by a clarinet next to it, toward the center from the bassoon. A few bars later, a solo cello carries the theme, also very precisely located in space in front of the bassoon and clarinet, still on the right. And every instrument has a tremendously realistic, almost tangible presence and accurate timbre. This is audiophile bliss!

@snilf 

How, briefly stated, do you mean to persuade me that your "subjective impression" is such that the judgments you make because of it (your "subjective preferences") are judgments I should be persuaded are reasonable, well-informed, and worth taking seriously?

Very good question, one that applies just as well to (classical) music reviews, etc, so let me reverse it:

I would be persuaded your judgments are worth taking seriously if I knew you to be consistent, and I knew you to be comparing to a known and shared yardstick (say, live music), and I knew some of your listening traits (are you thorough - are you spontaneous, do you prefer baroque, classic, romantic... combination thereof, do you like to simulate reality in your room or are you after reproducing what's on the medium... etc).

Your judgment will then lead me to extrapolate my own preferences and approximate whether the device (or system, or performance, for that matter) in question is one I might like -- or not... regardless of whether you ultimately liked it; if you are consistent in your judgements and I "know" you, your informed opinion is always valuable whether or not we always agree or disagree.

A brief point on measurements: surely no-one disputes that when it comes to speakers, FR measurements, FFT, etc are useful; these easily correlate with what we actually hear. Regards

We are the ancestors, the makers of machines, machines that can exist under circumstances we can not. One day they will rule the universe and like billions of species before us we will become extinct. 

@mijostyn - pretty much a given that we will evolve to a human/machine hybrid. I don't see any other way for us to progress.