Interesting video: The Audiophile's Philosophy

[Chrispy]

Yes but, excluding perceptual differences in hearing, with enough exposure to accurate systems, or great wines, one should learn to prefer them.

Maybe....but taste still comes into play which is somewhat useless.

 

[Chrispy]

Yes but, excluding perceptual differences in hearing, with enough exposure to accurate systems, or great wines, one should learn to prefer them.

LOL great wines are even worse than audiophilia.....there's accuracy and then there's preference....not the same thing.

 

[Vandemann]

LOL great wines are even worse than audiophilia.....there's accuracy and then there's preference....not the same thing.

As Dorthy Parker once quipped, "You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think."

 

[Chrispy]

As Dorthy Parker once quipped, "You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think."

Yet whores have more culture than much of western society otoh....

 

[Vandemann]

Yet whores have more culture than much of western society otoh....

I guess that depends on how you define culture, especially these days.

 

[Chrispy]

I guess that depends on how you define culture, especially these days.

Maybe. "Western"culture is pretty bad generally....

 

[Chrispy]

I guess that depends on how you define culture, especially these days.

Just revisited this, so you're talking about your wife/partners paricularly? That could definitely influence definition....

 

[Chrispy]

I guess that depends on how you define culture, especially these days.

Maybe just depends on your limited actual experience with the subject....which I assume is fairly low based on your comments so far....

 

[LightninBoy]

It's in the last 3 minutes, from about 18:00 on that it gets interesting. The punchline, that it all leads up to, is:

The transmission theory of music, the one which aims at a neutral, transparent conveyance of the original reality, sees each element in this sequence atomically, connected contingently, but on a model premised on continuity elements in sequences have heuristic reality only. They are more profitably understood as interdependent and co-constitutive.

Do you have any idea what this means? I do not.

It doesn't matter as "the transmission theory of music, the one which aims at a neutral, transparent conveyance of the original reality" is a strawman. No rational consumer of audio should be striving for that be they objectivist or subjectivist.

 

[Newman]

Sorry. He kinda pissed me off when he at the end asked for comments and then closed youtube comments.

Excellent point, well spotted.

Hypocrisy doesn’t make him wrong, but it does make him unacceptable.

 

[moonlight rainbow dream]

If you're listening to acoustic recordings of live performances, then utmost neutrality should be your system goal. If you're listening to studio engineered music, then it's perfectly reasonable to EQ it to your taste, because some dude (sometimes with a little and sometimes with a lot of input from the artist) EQ'd it to his taste and there's no reason that the two would match up perfectly. And it makes sense to do this with EQ and not via system voicing, because we want to be able to listen to all sorts of different artists and kinds of music.

 

[Newman]

It doesn't matter as "the transmission theory of music, the one which aims at a neutral, transparent conveyance of the original reality" is a strawman. No rational consumer of audio should be striving for that be they objectivist or subjectivist.

Exactly! I was about to point this out.

As soon as I encounter anybody making a rather obvious statement that the pursuit of the original musical performance experience is futile and unobtainable, and then they use that as their excuse for pursuing sheer hedonism with no regard to any kind of accuracy, I identify that as a strawman argument. Furthermore I question whether they are making this mistake deliberately, or whether they are genuinely accidentally misunderstanding the point of sound reproduction.

The truth is fairly simple and is certainly achievable, and worth striving to attain. And that is, to reproduce with fidelity the actual recorded music production that was made by the musicians in concert with the sound engineering and recording team. The experience that they had in the mastering suite is a work of technical art wrapped around a piece of musical performance art, and they made that sonic experience and not any other sonic experience, and striving to hear what they heard, and reproduce what they produced, is worthwhile and worth doing.

And that is why this philosopher has supremely missed the boat, and then ended up journeying way into the upper reaches of his own Ganges. He took a swipe, completely missed the ball, and announced that he had scored a home run.

cheers

 

[Vandemann]

Maybe just depends on your limited actual experience with the subject....which I assume is fairly low based on your comments so far....

Get off your cloud.

 

[Gorgonzola]

Or just the system you prefer despite how good it is in terms of accuracy, in audiophlia this is common.

This is true enough. When I first got into hi-fi in the early '70s people used to seriously talk about "high fidelity" as a goal. But some began to drift away from the in the mid-late '80s with the reemergence of interest in tube equipment. Today many self-acknowledged audiophiles will admit to no caring at all about measured accuracy.

 

[Gorgonzola]

Yes but, excluding perceptual differences in hearing, with enough exposure to accurate systems, or great wines, one should learn to prefer them.

One might expect and hope for that, but a confounding factor is the quality of recordings. Some recordings just don't sound very good, (e.g. many are simply too bright in the treble). So tube equipment that adds 2nd harmonics, especially at the higher frequencies as many, will mitigate too-bright recordings. This simple fact is too frankly admitted by tube-loving audiophiles. For my part I know that the best recordings don't need that treatment.

 

[Pennyless Audiophile]

The truth is fairly simple and is certainly achievable, and worth striving to attain. And that is, to reproduce with fidelity the actual recorded music production that was made by the musicians in concert with the sound engineering and recording team. The experience that they had in the mastering suite is a work of technical art wrapped around a piece of musical performance art, and they made that sonic experience and not any other sonic experience, and striving to hear what they heard, and reproduce what they produced, is worthwhile and worth doing.

Well, that's your opinion, but I beg to differ. I can modify what I am listening to my taste in the same way I can print out a copy of the Mona Lisa and doodle all over it.

 

[egellings]

Don't know what that quote means at all, but it sure sounds sciencey, hey? You know, truthy.

 

[gsp1971]

Well, that's your opinion, but I beg to differ. I can modify what I am listening to my taste in the same way I can print out a copy of the Mona Lisa and doodle all over it.

What is the point of modifying everything away from the original recording and towards individual taste?

 

[Wes]

Do you have any idea what this means? I do not.

Of course. It is intuitively obvious that the meaning, in a interdependent sense, is a co-constitutive conveyance of the heuristic reality in a contingent connected continuity when premised on the more profitable understanding of pyscho-neuretic atomistic elementally by the observer.

 

[gsp1971]

Of course. It is intuitively obvious that the meaning, in a interdependent sense, is a co-constitutive conveyance of the heuristic reality in a contingent connected continuity when premised on the more profitable understanding of pyscho-neuretic atomistic elementally by the observer.

my thoughts exactly ... don't forget to use the word heteroscedasticity in there somewhere. it is catchy.