The eternal quandary

Hi Newbee,
What a beaut!! LOL. "audiophile analist approved" --AAA-- for short, I would suggest, but since AAA is already taken, I believe, by the motoring crowd, what would you think of "AA"-short for "anankast approved"?

Shadorne you make - as usual - an excellent point. Violins should be intentionally screeching at times. I am thinking of passages in string quartets by say Schnittke or Shostakovitch. Hilary Hahn can be quite strident in her splendid rendering of Bach's solo-sonatas and partitas. But the thought of an entire piece strident or screeching makes my ears close up even as I write this. At the moment I cannot even think of one. Generally music, like our speaking voice by the way, changes in pitch and modulation in many various ways of course.
Besides, an experienced listener, I think, will be able to differentiate between harshness, which is part of the interpretation and harshness which somehow is "wrong" and hence blamed either on the system or the software. Just a thought.

I am thinking of passages in string quartets by say Schnittke or Shostakovitch.

Indeed!! Russian composers are some of my very favorites - it is different from Bach, Vivaldi or Handel (dishwashing music to me - of course that is personal taste as I tend to like music to be challenging and exhilerating rather than just warm rich pleasant sounds)

If you like Shostakovich done "BIG" (the American way) then I highly recommend Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orhcestra on Telarc - not at all as emotional as some versions but hellish fun and grandiose!

Detlof , I believe AA is also taken.Possibly by some of the patrons of the bar you found when looking to sooth the savage breast.
Enjoy

From an epistemological point of view, the whole field of audio reproduction is fraught with a myriad of problems. Actually, it's a miracle that we can agree about anything! From the recording venue, the position of the microphones in the hall, the brand, model, number and mix of microphones, the different arrays, the cables, the recording medium, the engineer, all the way on through to the manufacturing of the CD that you're going to feed into your machine, there are just so many variables involved!

So what to do? Obviously, as many people remark, returning to the concert hall to refresh one's auditory memory as to what live sound actually sounds like (to you, on that date, in that hall--more subjectivity and variability) is important, as it is also to establish a kind of benchmark for what one hears at home.

But I think consensus is important too. Bertrand Russell might have you wondering if that coffee table sitting there on the carpet in front of you is "really" real, if it's really even there at all, but we get around this epistemological stumbling block by agreeing to accept that it probably is there, and therefore also we tend to walk around it (even if it isn't "really" there) so we don't get knocked on the shins.

If three or four like-minded friends agree that your system sounds good, then it probably does. (Reluctantly, I had to put that "like-minded" in because there is such subjectivity and variability out there too as to what "good" sounds like. Different ears; different criteria.) But here we have a minimum of consensus.

Likewise, if six or seven recordings of small classical chamber groups sound good on a given system, and one other recording doesn't, then I'm prepared to believe that there's some kind of problem with the recording somewhere in the recording chain, and that it's not the system's fault. (I'm talking about a level playing field here: for the purposes of argument let's stick with 17C sonatas with continuo and not drag Shostakovich into the mix...)

How does that, er, sound?

How does that, er, sound?

B.R. once said, "Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise."

This kind of sums it up for audiophiles desacribing the sound from their systems.