a good sound experience has little to do with taste or money and not even with only specific better design quality of a specific component as much useful are a better design and it is ...
Yes, like many endeavors, high end audio is driven by intention.
Perception is both a process of registration by the brain and interpretation by the mind. Kant argued that nothing is perceived "as it is in reality" because in order to make sense of reality, it must first be taken in and conditioned by our understanding. Even the measurements you’re speaking about are done with human instruments, using human metrics, with patterns which humans notice. Everything measured is also an interpretation. Even what seems solid -- invariant readings, for example -- are only invariant due to human interpretation. Change the scale of the reading, and it becomes invariant, again.
So, it’s all interpretation -- whether one talks in terms of numbers and machine readings, or in terms of more literary sounding descriptions (i.e., "taste").
@hilde45
Trust me on this one- if you lose your keys in your house, they won’t get up and move by themselves; regardless of your perception, they will stay put until found. If philosophy were the only variable, the keys would be in your pocket when you looked for them, because you thought you put them there. But physical objects have a way of not caring about our made up stories of life.
Similarly, the measurements we make with instruments have a similar solidarity as they are not subject to the whim of our perception. Once the instrument is built, it will do things like your keys do- like stay in one place until moved. And the bits inside that make it work will do that regardless of what we think about them.
If it were as you say above, VU meters would impossible; in fact the industry of audio would be impossible if human hearing perceptual rules were not common to all people!
For example the ear detects sound pressure on a logarithmic curve. Imagine if some people used a linear curve instead.
Recordings would become impossible.
Designing an amplifier or loudspeaker that could be used by anyone would be impossible.
Music itself would be challenging at best if not also impossible, all just with that one variable. No-one would be able to agree on how loud to play.
Let’s imagine if the masking rule didn’t exist. I don’t know if I really can. It might make it impossible to communicate by speaking since quiet sounds would be heard at the same volume as louder sounds.
The simple fact is that human perceptual rules are a constant (not meaning to step on anyone’s toes but they are honed thru millions of years of our ancestor’s survival). Plain and simple; not knowing this fact one might speculate, but it would be all made-up stories; scintillating to philosophize about but in the end all just made up.
IOW its not a philosophical dilemma, unless you are willing to argue that humans might have 20 arms and 18 eyes, in either case you’d simply be wrong (no judgement).
Taste is entirely different. No accounting for it.
Some people might want to hear more treble. That’s fine- turn up the treble control. That is not the same as brightness that occurs from distortion.
That the 2nd harmonic is well-known to be musically in lockstep with the fundamental tone has been known for most of human history and can be shown mathematically. Philosophy has nothing to do with it, other than to take a contrary position simply because one can- yet I’m sure you’re likely to stop when a traffic light turns red.
