Merry go round

@sns 

+2 ;-)

I'm continually amazed at the number of "audiophiles" who spend enormous amounts of money on equipment without having any idea of what they really want their systems to sound like.  Forty years ago I heard a pair of ProAc Response 2's and a little Cary 300B amp, and I thought, that's what I want.  A while later a friend sold me his ProAcs for a song, and I started experimenting with building my own tube amplifiers, and that's where I've pretty much been ever since.  The system has improved as my building and tuning skills have improved, but even if I couldn't "do-it-myself," I'd be very happy with any number of vintage tube outfits.  I've even heard some solid-state equipment I could live with. ;-)

Another sound I'll never forget was performing as a spoken-word artist in the midst of a symphony orchestra.  The warmth, ease and relaxed power of that sound is something I always think back to when judging an audio system.  It would be practically impossible to actually recreate in a home environment, but as a guide to what music really sounds like, it's been a touchstone for me.

@hilde45 -  if I may, your analogy of food is not quite correct, because regardless of what you prefer there, you’re still eating the real thing - you’d need a simulacrum of the experience of taste and smell to make a more relevant analogy with sound reproduction in hifi audio. I could well say I prefer soft furry things to sharp edges in relation to what my fingers touch, but I cannot deny the realism of either, regardless of preference.

Regardless of whether it’s sight, sound, taste, smell or touch, the only basis any of us have of gauging the quality of what has been reproduced has to be founded on the criteria of how close that reproduction is to our closest understanding of the original, and not some random criteria of preference, of all things.

And to say we all hear differently, is another unsupported argument audiophiles persistently make - sure we all hear differently, but the basis, the source of reality of what we each hear is the same, and it evens out as a collective understanding - meaning, your sense of what constitutes reality cannot be different from mine, simply because the perceived source is the same. We may receive it differently, but we can each point to the source itself as its definition. While we may each taste real beef differently, we all recognise the taste of real beef as real beef, regardless of how it’s prepared. And that simulacrum of your preferred beef would have to be itself gauged together with the particular reality source (sauce haha) it was prepared with. You may not like your beef rare, or with mustard, but your only gauge of how good, or ‘accurate’ that simulacrum of rare beef with or without mustard, could only possibly come from your having actually tasted the real thing. 

Accuracy in music reproduction does exist, even if it’s more convenient to say our preferences matter more.

In friendship - kevin

@kevn

Thanks for your friendly post.

A meal has ingredients, such as beef, which comes from a cow. The cow is processed and the material is configured in various ways that leads to the experienced taste perceptions.

A reproduced song has ingredients, such as sound, which comes from a plucked guitar (say). The sound is processed and the material is configured in various ways that leads to the experienced audible perceptions.

Everything at every step of the way is real. But all that means that everything at every step of the way exists. That’s a truism which we barely need to add.

The idea that there is some single "reality" or "original" which everything goes back to is, I think, the fiction. There is an event, an existence, at the start of the chain of causes. But it doesn’t have a meaning until someone interprets it -- selects certain details and omits others, emphasizes certain qualities over others and then takes all of those intial emphases and combines them (fries the beef, equalizes the audio, etc.). In other words, there is no "source" in a meaningful sense; there is a cause but not a reason which we could all agree on.

How close is the beef in the meal to the original? Or the audio sound to the plucked guitar? Depends who you ask, because people differ on which criteria are most important. 

So, when you say, "While we may each taste real beef differently, we all recognise the taste of real beef as real beef, regardless of how it’s prepared" -- all I can say is the word "real" is not doing any work here. In the same way people will disagree about whether something said was a "witty remark" or a "subtle put down," people will disagree about what beef "really" tastes like or what a plucked guitar really sounds like. We can each "point to the source," as you say, but that doesn’t solve anything. There is nothing automatically meaningful to converge on.

This is how I see it. I agree that accuracy in music reproduction exists, but it exists in the same way that "pawns can move one or two squares on the first move" exists. In other words, accuracy is a word we use in a certain style of talk, about audio. It means something different in archery. That’s all we have to go on, but it’s enough.

In the last fifty plus years I have changed everything in my system more times than I can count.  And as of right now, I’m close to my happy place. Improving my DAC is coming, but I am not in a huge rush to do so. I’m currently able to listen to music at comfortable levels for hours without any fatigue and for me, that’s what it’s all about.
 

Now if I hit Powerball, all bets are off.😁

@hilde - thank you for your kind response ; ) - just to clarify, I am certainly not saying there is one kind of reality, only that at any one venue that live music is being played, no one is going to point at the plucked string of a guitar and say that doesn’t sound like their sort of preferred reality. It is ‘real’ for everyone at the venue, for how they each hear reality. It is the same string, the same guitar and the same resonant air.

One may well ‘prefer’ the taste of us grade prime beef over that of New Zealand stock, but if high fidelity is indeed what one cares for, one certainly cannot prefer the recorded sound of a plucked guitar string over that plucked at a live performance. This sort of comparative evaluation is our only gauge of how well resolving a system is, not a random personal preference of taste regarding sound reproduction.

If you disagree, I would certainly like to understand how you critically evaluate the performance of your system ; )

In friendship - kevin.