It's easy to agree. The human ear/brain/sensory process can change from one instant to the next. As prey/predator animals, humans have developed a highly variable sense of hearing attention. Once in effect, we strongly tend to listen for something. Imagine: You are camping in a forest meadow, reading a book in the sunlight. Your imagination is fully committed to the tale when you hear a twig break somewhere behind you. Suddenly, your senses are recommitted to determining the cause and distance of the snap. It is much the same with music listening. You listen along, then you think you hear something wrong. Suddenly your entire perception is redirected toward identifying what is wrong or different. When changing hifi components, you are sharply attuned to minute differences. Voila! You hear minutia.
Glass half empty versus glass half full:
As a human, you are poorly wired to hear similarities: you listen for something different. Most 'audiophiles' seem highly attuned to finding something wrong with what we're hearing -- not so much what is right. It is hard-wired behavior that we have developed to a very sharp point -- and to the disadvantage of our wallets and our contentment.
It is for this reason that I propose that some few of us acknowledge this. Instead of working toward perfection, we instead look to avoid annoyances that trigger our diversion away from music, to identify the bad, and look to the good. Thus, I believe that we preach annoyance avoidance rather than perfection.
This is what measurements tend to do.
From my perspective, this is how recordings are produced. The perfect recording doesn't exist and never did. But reducing annoyances will get the studio a lot more business.
-Just one man's view.
I totally agree here! Some of my audiophile friends don't seem to understand how I am perfectly satisfied with the same stack for years. How I listen to the same sets of components every day and I am just happy with them. But honestly because I am not trying to find something wrong with what I hear; the "annoyances" are gone with my current setup and unless something breaks (sadly I broke my USB input on my DX7 and the screen is fading) I don't think I will replace it.
My recent pairing of my Hivi Swan M10 w/ the Topping D30 DAC on my new "gaming / family PC" is a welcome upgrade from how these speakers were connected in my old house (line out on TV) and as such I think the D30 is more than capable of extracting the full performance out of these speakers.
I see music / audio similar in a way to video; once it reaches a good enough quality where you don't notice what is or could be wrong then there is no need to upgrade it again. I have a Sony Master A8H as my main TV paired with some Klipsch R-15PM & K100SW sub and using the TV as the "center channel" makes for a nice experience. Now here in my new house I will try to build a proper surround sound setup (since it wasn't possible in the old house) some day in the future.
Since I test products as one of my ventures these days; I have tested enough sound bars, speakers and other audio devices to have established a good "limit" of what "sounds good" vs technical perfection and how much that really is worth, at least in my book.
I think as a society we are driven by rabid consumerism and many people are always looking to buy the next thing just because we have had something else for a while. Rather than look to upgrade other aspects of our lives and spend money wisely when meaningful upgrades (especailly those that will improve quality of life) are able to be had for reasonable prices.
I am very proud of the great work that has done here at ASR by Amir and the contributing members who continue to enrich the audio world. When I joined this forum; technical excellence in DACs and Amps was expensive and mostly guesswork, with tons of products all claiming the same thing and no benchmark of what is actually good. Subjective marketing dominated this scene entirely and companies like Schiit were massive profiteers of poor performance and nice "stories" rather than technical excellence.
Fast Forward 4 years and technical excellence can be had for only a couple hundred dollars (or sometimes less). With amazing amp performance to boot and even Schiit sells very competent hardware now for very affordable prices.
Companies like JDS Labs no longer live in the shadows and once small time chinese companies now compete (or beat) the big names who have become lazy. Those who offer less than top tier performance for huge prices while other major names have defended their brands. With some putting up respectable performance on this proverbial battleground of benchmarks that has been created here.