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

Every form of art has boundaries

You are right for sure ....But at the root of creativity in the internal "physiology" of the creator, the boundaries melt in one complex creative gesture...

This is how opera was invented coupling theater and singing...Or this is how poetry as an oral artform and much later as a written art form is born from speech and music or this is how speech is born, before poetry itself was born as a separate art, speech begun as a complex rythmical and melodical gestures set BEFORE music as a separate art form ...

The boundaries between arts and sciences resemble more to the skin of a creature under metamorphosis than to static boundaries through history and through creativity ...Some people perceive synesthetically... Etc... With Artificial consciousness science in his birth cradle we must understood how was orchestrated the cosmos to manifest consciousness... Here we must read the book " nanobrain " by this Indian genius who identified the microtubules as quantum computer few years ago and created the first artificial brain :

https://twitter.com/anirbanbandyo?lang=en

Goethe created the physiology of colors science by going on in spite of these "boundaries" separating optics as a physical science and the color qualities, and he created then their relation to the perceptive physiology and a new science ...This is why Edwin Land admired him so much and many others ...

Goethe created the morphogenetic and dynamic description of mammals or plants trespassing the boundaries separating the static objects and the static perceiver ... All his method is described by the physicist Henri Bortoft very clearly in three books ...

Music and Audiophilia are two separate issues. One is art the other is technical with the exception of speaker enclosures and faceplates. Any artistic intent is purely visual.

This is not even wrong then you are right in a way ...But without acoustics which is also a craft not only mathematical equations and a controlled subjective experience and set of experiments not only a science; without acoustics and without musical knowledge, audiophiles are lost in marketing and lost in an audio vocabulary which has lost his roots from the acoustics vocabulary as well as from musical concepts ...

Distinguishing between audiophiles and musicians and music lovers is certainly legitimate but separating these three activities may make them more and more meaningless ...

I am a photographer and this is the same debate that occurs in photography circles. And just like in photographs, I tend to notice excesses and be disturbed by them. The best sort of photograph for me is one in which I don’t question anything. Just enjoy looking at it. The same for music. This is however not set in stone. I do like black and white and I can go over the top in my processing. With music, I can enjoy room rattling bass at times. Elevated treble not so much. But will always return to what I feel is a natural sound for general listening.

Exactly....Thanks for the post and welcome here...

I am a photographer and this is the same debate that occurs in photography circles.

True photographer are painters in their own way they dont collect the photographic gear and they dont focus on the gear collection as their main activities ,they choose it and they use it, and they dont despise painters either as some "audiophiles" can live well  it seems without learning how to understand music language and genres......But it is not at all the general case at least i hope...

True audiophiles are first and last music lovers, musicians in someway even with no musical abilities as me and acoustician in the egg not gear collectors and price tag collectors ...They studied acoustics as photographers studied painting and drawings as much as colors theories and hues ....

@brev

My dad was a photographer. One year I was at the county fair looking at the photographs and saw one that looked like something my dad would do. Sure enough, it was his picture and it got some kind of award. The thing I mostly noticed was how he didn’t push any colors. He took the shot with film, but he liked more subtle films. It was a nature shot with mountains and lots of pine trees. Nothing vivid about it, but very pleasing to the eye and natural.

I argued a little with him abut this approach. I always liked his photographic look and style, but I didn’t feel that it necessarily portrayed the scene in a highly realistic way, although I wasn’t sure why. I knew he was correct about the color saturation, but the real scenes seem to have more impact. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s mostly brightness. The pictures are often viewed in-doors under relatively dim light compared to the brilliance of daylight. Also, print media does not have much dynamic range. We can correct for that somewhat mentally, but I think some amount of delicately pushing the saturation and curves can help in a way similar to a loudness curve on a stereo for low level listening.

I’ve recently updated my system to more efficient and bigger drivers, which can play a lot louder without strain because they are both more efficient and can easily handle more power. The result is that I end up turning it up more without really noticing. It doesn’t sound loud because I don’t hear the telltale signs of strain. Another thing this new setup does is use an open baffle configuration for the 200 to 2000 Hz range, which does something different to the how the room responds, so the room also seems to stay under control better. The resulting impression is a much more vivid and lifelike sound, with apparently much better dynamic punch. It sounds more lifelike and more pleasing at lifelike levels. Bass and treble comes through a lot better without having to be boosted. The clarity is amazing, but this only really reveals itself when the volume is up at a level where the old bookshelf speakers weren’t holding together too well. Those little things had some elevated treble, as some reviewers complained about, but they are also volume limited, so they work pretty well at the levels I ended up listening to them.

Back to photographs, if you haven’t tried it, it’s interesting to see your raw photos properly displayed on a newer HDR TV. I haven’t found an easy way to do it, having to import my raw photos into a film editing program where I would color grade them for 1000 nit HDR and export the resulting movie in a format my TV would properly recognize as 10 bit color encoded. It’s still not as bright and dynamic as daylight, but it really does add some impressive pop to colors just by giving them some extra dynamic range. The key is brightness, and the TV has to be able to do sustained brightness over a large area of the screen for outdoor daylight photographs, so OLED won’t cut it. If you shoot scenes that are darker with bright highlights, OLED should look amazing.