@holmz "And it does not matter what every member of the audience is hearing..."
If you’re a member of the audience, it certainly does! It matters to oneself.
Ultimately, it does not matter what every measurement is telling me, if it doesn’t sound great to me, with my ears, in my room, to my taste
@fleschler I try it again, but it seems I am not making the point simply enough.
If there is a singer, and people are listening to the singer, they are all listening to the same thing. Maybe those audience members not hear above 4 or 8kHz, or miss out on any low frequencies… whatever it is that they hear, if the same song was played back flat, where there is no difference between the real singer and the playback, so they would hear the same thing in playback as the live performance.
And… that applies to everyone in the audience.
I suppose that we can talk about the room that the performance is in not be uniform, and that at different locations there is an actual difference of sound… but let’s ignore that.
The audience may all hear differently, but they are hearing the same thing.
And if it is played back exactly the same then they should hear it as sounding the same, and we can quantify how accurate it is.
The glasses and laser surgery are more like room correction, to make the vision be the same.
Whether you, or anyone else, prefers the tone controls adjusted is all fine and dandy… but brightening up the high frequencies by 10 or 20dB to account for hearing loss will result in the playback not being like the actual singer.
That actually live performance would then sound dull… which is fine if it is admitted that the playback is preferred over the live performance. But it is not the same as what was heard live.
And similarly; when people look at a Van Gogh painting, whether they see in black and white, or blurry, they are looking at the same painting. If the colours are shifted in hue, then it may look better, but it is a different rendition of the painting.
We should not confuse what is technically correct with preference. Whether we like it correct or not, is indeed taste and preference.
The tread topic was about spec and measurements, and how almost none of the manufacturers provide that data. Now it almost seems like you do not care about that data, and do not want to see it, as it doesn’t matter anyhow and you only want to get what aligns with your preference. Which seems to ignore, or imply, that you preference cannot correlate with any measurements or specs… and that it is a hopeless endeavour to even try?
The idea of manufacturers specs and measurements is that if one wants it correct, then they have an easy way to find that gear. And if they want it to have the BBC sound, then it makes it easy to identify the gear that has that particular sound.
Without measurements and specs, we have only the option to fly or drive around and find shops that carry that gear, and listen to them all… to figure out if it aligns with our preference or not.
Once we have heard a few systems and decide we like (for instance) the BBC sound, then we can pretty quickly go from hundreds of speakers choices, down to dozens… and it becomes a more tractable problem of listening to only those.
Personally I prefer more neutral speakers and lower distortion.
I can just throw a tube preamp in to tailor it to my preference, and then I only have spice in the preamp, and not scattered throughout the system. Or I can use a DSP.
We can have the specs and measurement and ignore them, but we cannot choose to look at the specs and measurements if they do not exist, or are hidden. I would rather have the choice of them existing and what the manufacturer is making to be advertised truthfully and transparently. I can always choose to ignore it if I want to.
