Why are we here?

[Gedeon]

[begin rant]

As someone who plays trombone, acoustic bass, and electric bass, plays in jazz gigs, is a symphony donor/goer. and does volunteer recording engineering for local community orchestras.....

.....I'm going to say that the longer I'm in the hobby, the more I'm starting to think the "musician" connection is a thin one, and possibly getting thinner.

Most musicians I know are just fine with "good enough" hi fi (which is pretty decent at budget prices these days)

And too many hi fi enthusiasts I know use music as a way to listen to the gear.

Whenever I read about how some guy spent $100K+ on his stereo system, because it "sounds more like live music", aside from calling BS (nothing really comes close), I also think to myself "you're not really much of a music lover, else you would have spent that traveling to musical events."

My eyes were especially opened last time I was in Vienna and met several people from London who had come to Vienna for the weekend just to see that specific performance of Aida, with that specific cast. Those were real music lovers.


[/rant off]

Can't agree more.

That's why this place is really good. You can check if the gear you are planning to acquire reachs some "minimal" specs. Sadly, some doesn't.

In my very personal case (like everyone else, since we are different individuals), I'm pretty happy with the results of room correction applied by Audissey through a Marantz SR6012 feeding a power amp attached to my speakers, and also pretty happy using and old iPhone 5S with 668b headphones for casual listening.

I don't like music too loud, so I'm at one point in which I seriously think that putting more money or adding new elements won't make my experience significantly "better". My ears are also aging so less reasons to spend money in getting theoretical (even measurable) improvements which I would be unable to perceive.

 

[thefsb]

About the question of the symphony in the kitchen.

Here's what I think: the sciences are on the cusp of creating complete integration into acoustic spaces. A boxed speaker is really limited spatially and otherwise. It's directional cues don't allow it to settle into the background noise. So no matter what the played music will sound somewhat removed from its surroundings.

What ASR, through Amir, has proved is that the entire playback chain outside of transducers has nothing to do with preference, and the entire set of distortions and such can be made user-definable. But, the fact that these issues have broken away from being inherent to the device and carry a mainly aesthetic value is less an indication of a particular triumph (though it is that) than of the limitations of our era.

I think some breakthroughs will be made in the coming years which will have little to do with vanishing distortion and everything with acoustic integration. I don't know what it will look like but I'm certain that the divide between the acoustic environment in your kitchen, and the requirements for ideal stereophonic listening (inclusive of treatments, positioning and so on), will be less and less actual as time goes on.

I also see that as possible and highly desirable.

I haven't brought the topic up at ASR yet but I am antagonistic to the tyranny of stereo. For many (most?) practical reproduction purposes we'd be better off with mono. I sit at the bar at Anchovies and listen to the left channel because it's in front of me and the right is way over there. Makes me laugh when some weird stereo effect comes on, e.g. the Galileo bit in Bohemian Rhapsody. And then on the other hand some composers have used N-channel audio and large arrays of speakers for at least 50 years. But somehow home audio consumers and the industry that supplies them with equipment and recordings stick with stereo as if it were the correct answer.

Now of course we have surround sound. Iiuc, there are consumer distribution formats with up to 8 discrete channels. That's cool but it presents a very interesting problem for the audio engineer that I can't imagine approaching without assumptions of speaker arrangement w.r.t. listeners. Even so, mixing music to 8 channels involves a lot of complex aesthetic choices. Recording an acoustic event for surround is a different matter and, Idk, may already be largely solved (as it is for 2-channel) but we're still stuck in the seating position relative to the array.

So yes, a breakthrough in "acoustic integration" might be just what we need.