Real or Surreal. Do you throw accuracy out the window for "better" sound?

"Real" as "flatus vocis"; me like! But then, to some degree, ALL language is flatus vocis, since words are not the things they stand in for. On the other hand, Webster says that words should not be, but "correspond" to, some "objective reality" in order to be more than (or other than) mere flatus vocis. If that's the standard, then the word "real" used in the audio evaluation context surely is NOT a mere flatus vocis. The "real" here which is to serve as the "corresponding objective reality" is the sound of a piano, violin, cello, guitar, voice produced not by one's audio system, but by the things themselves.

Unless, of course, you want to insist (as Mahgister always does) that "perception" is not "reality." Granted; I'm a Kantian, too. But then, we're back to my first disclaimer here: that ALL language is flatus vocis! 

The point: if we can't use the word "real" in discussing a "reproduction" of something—if it is a "mere sound without a corresponding reality"—then there is no way to evaluate the "re" in "reproduction," and we must just shut up altogether. "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen."

i am not nominalist...

Perception is not the capture of a non transformed nor participated reality outside an isolated subjectivity...

We dont perceive the world through a head set...

We "resonate" and "synchronize" with the phenomenon we focus on and we perceive them with some filtering through our specific species evolutive and personnally acquired filters...The fil;ters are not arbitrary either...

Words exist on two levels : conscious and unconscious... Each word exist as a Poetical metaphorical MUSICAL deep grounding on some layer in the body/world relation and history and on a prosaic conscious habit and conditioned surface manifesting level...The iceberg peak... Any meaning is the result and the cause at the same time of this partially unobserved dynamic...

Then when you use a word we condition our mind in some perspectival take on the phenomena but this conditioning is unconscious but never completely arbitrary ...

UNIVERSALLY ALL WORDS are born from a metaphor...Because the prosaic level is completely derived from the basic poetical-musical-metaphorical deepest level...

When Saussure established the belief in the COMPLETE and ABSOLUTE arbitrary of signs by commodity for his analysis he was wrong and his disciples make a dogma of this isolation tool principle ...

But going there and explain it will be too long here...

The choice of words matter...Yes...

When we say a sound is REAL , the only objective meaning come from experimental acoustics and psycho-acoustics ...

Timbre, transients, dynamic, tonality, etc all concepts are scientifically described in controlled acoustic settings as a laboratory ...

But when we dont know these concepts by experience , we used isolated conventional metaphors and we use the words as metaphors to translate our subjective experience with the gear disconnected from acoustics conditions and knowledge in many case...

Then using the word "real" to qualify our system experience has no clear meaning for someone else...This metaphor is then disconnected from the necessary acoustic concepts necessary to assign meaning to it... We say often our system experience is "real" because we are unable to relate our experience with acoustic concept to substantiate it ... It is not false because it is not even wrong ... We must live always on two language levels but we must distinguish them but not negate one at the exclusive profit of the other...Creative non conventional metaphor revived our dead prose but must be inspired by real experience to do so...

 

Here is my philosophical belief as an aside :

 

I dont believe philosophically in a world completely separated from consciousness ... I am a Perceian not a Saussurian and i am a disciple of the french linguist Gustave Guillaume whose works even if very different different from Peirce semiotics perspective, anyway as Peirce himself negate an absolute separation between the sign and the meaning, as between the soul and the Body separated in such a way in the Cartesian frame ...

Here what Peirce think :

«Peirce understood nominalism in the broad anti-realist sense usually attributed to William of Ockham, as the view that reality consists exclusively of concrete particulars and that universality and generality have to do only with names and their significations. This view relegates properties, abstract entities, kinds, relations, laws of nature, and so on, to a conceptual existence at most. Peirce believed nominalism (including what he referred to as "the daughters of nominalism": sensationalism, phenomenalism, individualism, and materialism) to be seriously flawed and a great threat to the advancement of science and civilization. His alternative was a nuanced realism that distinguished reality from existence and that could admit general and abstract entities as reals without attributing to them direct (efficient) causal powers. Peirce held that these non-existent reals could influence the course of events by means of final causation (conceived somewhat after Aristotle’s conception),[1]and that to banish them from ontology, as nominalists require, is virtually to eliminate the ground for scientific prediction as well as to underwrite a skeptical ethos unsupportive of moral agency.»

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/peirce-and-the-threat-of-nominalism/

In a word, qualitative experience and subjective experience are not completely arbitrary meaningless isolated experience from a reality itself isolated from consciousness ... Husserl go deeper here after Goethe...And Peirce is philosophically right...It is the greatest American thinker...With Whitehead who is British anyway...

 

@snilf There is no corresponding "objective reality." That’s right. Everything that "is" must be somehow taken by us. No raw given, no way to check. Even the "real, objective" cello on the stage, playing live, is heard by me -- my sitting position, my ears, my distracted mind -- and, most important -- my interpretative taking of that acoustical experience.

If, in my home, I want to experience what I did in the concert hall -- ok, then I try to figure out how to do that. (And, as @mahgister points out: there are a hundred interpretive acts which are between me and that moment: engineers, mastering, etc.) But in this enterprise, let me not fall into the trap that I’m "really" getting back to something "more real." That’s folly and, worse, obfuscation. But it makes for some great chest-beating online.

Exactly... Thanks...

@snilf There is no corresponding "objective reality." That’s right. Everything that "is" must be somehow taken by us. No raw given, no way to check. Even the "real, objective" cello on the stage, playing live, is heard by me -- my sitting position, my ears, my distracted mind -- and, most important -- my interpretative taking of that acoustical experience.

If, in my home, I want to experience what I did in the concert hall -- ok, then I try to figure out how to do that. (And, as @mahgister points out: there are a hundred interpretive acts which are between me and that moment: engineers, mastering, etc.) But in this enterprise, let me not fall into the trap that I’m "really" getting back to something "more real." That’s folly and, worse, obfuscation. But it makes for some great chest-beating online.

I find that a speaker’s frequency response should measure flat on axis under anechoic conditions, and follow a downward tilted curve at the listening position something close to the Harman curve to sound best overall to me. That seems to be one measurable metric and established standard I can count on to work for me. Of course it’s not all that matters, but it is important and works for me every time. Indeed, some surreal and interesting effect can happen with boosted treble. I’ve been working on some new speakers recently and have been down that rabbit’s hole again, adjusting levels up and down by ear on the treble, mid, and bass to see what happens. The initial goal is to do tiny adjustments but then I sometimes go hog wild with it and hear some beguiling things. Like the OP said, the boosted treble and bass can be good at low volumes, acting as a loudness curve. Overall I just prefer to let the midrange become naturally more prominent as the volume goes down.

 I estimate myself to be in the more "real" than "surreal" camp. Some recordings sound surreal no matter what you do, and that’s fine. I don’t want to add my own particular flavor of surreal to every recording.