What you say is true about people identifying with movements, but we do not live in a vacuum, and movements surround us all the time and at every level: they are just so pervasive we do not see them. Science is a movement which started with Bacon, Galileo & co., but it can be taken too far. Capitalism is a movement, as is democracy and so on...it is the human condition. But new movements bring with them new ideas. Was not the American revival of the Greek idea of democracy called The Great Experiment? Russian Communism was also a movement and an experiment. Our hobby itself is a movement. No getting away from it, as you say, the human condition. In audio we are living in all sorts of movements, and the measurement camp is still very much alive, and does pervade it at various levels and in various ways. It's not all so innocent, as we are often persuaded by our peers and the media into bad decisions, which we then justify in various ways, while being musically unfulfilled (this has economic consequences as well). Movements are necessary, and affect philosophy, how we choose equipment, and design. They also teach us what is possible: one of the first "audiophile" experiences is the discovery that two-channel stereo creates an "image". New movements may, no make that "will", reveal things we do not yet know which will improve future designs for our musical edification. Empirical science was such a movement. Narrowness of thought reduces choice.
The High End and Glubglub
The High End has had many arguments in which certain types of equipment were and are considered inherently inferior for a variety of reasons: among these the single-ended tube amps which were dismissed by many, single-driver speakers, the ever-popular idler-wheel drives which I espouse, let's not forget tube amps which were practically universally dismissed in the late 60s and through the 70s, and so on. So what was going on in these varoious and ongoing debates? I sumbmit for your perusal the following gem I found in a discussion of logic: "What he (the skeptic) wants it is logically impossible to supply. But doesn't the logical impossibility of the skeptic's demand defeat his cause? If he raises a logically impossible demand, can we be expected to fulfill it? He says we have no evidence, but whatever we adduce he refuses to count as evidence. At least we know what we would count as evidence, and we show him what it is. But he only shakes his head and says it isn't evidence. But then surely he is using the word "evidence" in a very peculiar way (a meaningless way?), so that nothing whatever would count as a case of it...Might he not just as well say, "There is no glubglub?""
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- 15 posts total
- 15 posts total