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

Wow, @mahgister who the heck said room control only addresses the frequency domain. That is BS of the highest order perpetrated by people who have no idea what they are talking about. Equalizers can only address the frequency domain. Only a digital system can affect time by delaying groups that are ahead. Phase can also be corrected. New systems with 64 bit floating point processors and systems can easily correct 30 dB, but to tell you the truth I have seen some pretty bad rooms and I have never seen one cause a 30 dB deficit and I have been measuring for quite a while. 

There is no such thing as a tuned acoustic room. The best you can do is Boston Symphony Hall and I doubt you are going to stick one of those in your house.

My brother is a MIT Ph.D. acoustician and he never uses his ears for anything!

The problem is not the ear or ears. It is the brain connected to them. 

@kennyc 

I think you need to go to some live performances. You will quickly realize that a 300B amp is not going to get you very far even with very efficient loudspeakers. I'm not tube adverse, I run 220 watt mono tubes amps. If you like the mystique of glowing 300Bs CS Port has the amp for you, the 212 PAM2 mono tube amp, on sale for one day only at $194,000 a pair. You even get 40 watts a channel, enough to drive your grandmother's table radio. 

The job of a phonograph cartridge is to translate or transduce what is on the record leaving it unscathed. It is to sound like nothing. It is to add or subtract nothing. It is not musical or detailed. It can not read you bedtime stories. It simply turns a mechanical vibration into an electrical signal. Only with loudspeakers do we settle for imperfection because there is no choice. Getting the electrical signal back into what the band sounded like during the recording process is a fool's errand. Given what some people are spending on HiFi they might as well hire a band. May I suggest Primus, I hear it is magister's favorite.

If to be an “audiophile” means that one has to completely dismiss the idea that there are aspects of the experience of listening to music (any art) that cannot be completely described via numbers/measurements (of any kind), then count me out. To believe otherwise is to miss the point of what, TO ME, being an audiophile really should be about: the quest for good sound that is in the service of the music. Not the other way around,

Music is expressed via sound. Music affects listeners in very personal ways. It is impossible to honestly discuss the sound of music in a way that is completely separated from the art. Art is a very personal experience. Our perceptions of the sound of music are always impacted, to some degree, by how the art in the sound is impacting us. It may seem like a quaint (at best) notion to some, but the science should always take a back seat to the art.

This is a long winded way of saying that I completely agree with mahgister’s basic premise that, ultimately, we have to let our ears decide.

frogman, you are a musician, so you got almost everything wrong. Music is first of all mathematics not art in a usual sense.

There is no music without sound. Sound is the foundation. Silence also sounds.

Neither sound is in the service of music nor music is in the service of sound. That one was beyond wrong. It's a different system.

You are romantic, and this one is good.

I have not heard of any SS amp unquestionably better than top Boulder. 

If I win a lottery I won't give anyone a cent. Even less likely will I subsidize any school. They will learn nothing there, anyway, waist of time and effort. I will buy Berlin Philharmonic along with the concert hall. I guess, for that I must win big lottery. I don't need London orchestra or any other.

Music does not have to be a sound.  It could be an idea in someone's mind (A STEVIE WONDER REFERENCE) or notes on a page.  Furthermore, in the right context, any sound can be music.  Even 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence is music.

You should be able to enjoy the music you like on pretty crappy systems.  Think table radios or car systems.  Music you like can still sound exciting on these systems.  Will you enjoy it more on a better system? Of course, but at some minimum level of fidelity you should be able to relate to what the artists are doing.

And yes, I agree education is a waist of time.