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Re: Yes, the acceptance of the complexities in audio is liberating.

Posted by thetubeguy1954 (A) on January 21, 2007 at 07:19:58

In Reply to: Yes, the acceptance of the complexities in audio is liberating. posted by soulfood on January 20, 2007 at 08:34:17:

Soulfood,

Since my premise is quite simple: When you finally get that new audio component home, if you like what you hear, if it makes you tap your foot and if it brings a smile to your face, what else really matters?

I can see how you translated that to mean I'm inferring, affirmation of one's preferences or audio ideology shouldn't matter much and for the most part you're correct in that assumption. Still affirmation is and can be a very postive thing, provided of course such affirmation comes from a reliable source. A relaible source IMHO is someone who attends a lot of live unamplified concerts so they actually know what that sounds like!

However I believe defending one's audio preferences in a forum like this -often times isn't something that really matters very much per se. Afterall here in PHP forum we are dealing with all sorts of audiophiles/music lovers, which as I stated elsewhere will most likely fall in to one of three main catagories...

1) Those whose end criteria is to have a system that gets as close to live unamplified music as they possibly can achieve.

2) Those whose end criteria is to have a system that simply sounds like they like it to. (Regardless if it sounds like live unamplified music or not!)

3) Those whose end criteria is to have a system that measures a certain way. (While listening in this case can tell you whether or not the music sounds like live unamplified music, what listening reveals about the measurements depends on the measurements that were taken. Very few, if any people listen and say damn listen to that amp. It measures as having .0000001% distortion and that's exactly what I hear!)

So what would it matter to me what people that fall in group 2 or 3 really think about my audio choices? Their affirmations would mean little to me because they aren't trying to achieve what I'm trying to achieve. Attempting to defend my beliefs to them won't accomplish anything either, as is witnessed by the never-ending Sub vs Obj types of arguments here which simply repeat over & over again.

In addition to that I never really know who I'm debating with on an audio forum. For all I know they could be people who like to argue just for arguements sake. So where's defending my beliefs with them going to get me? Or perhaps they're firmly convinced their POV is correct and nothing anyone says will convince them differently. where's defending my beliefs with them going to get me? Maybe they need to believe their $500 Pioneer receiver "sounds" every bit as good as a $50,000 Krell monoblock. So once again where's defending my beliefs with them going to get me? I'm sure there's a myriad of reasons I cannot even think of as well as to why defending my beliefs with someone here is often a dead end street as well.

So in the end I've come to the conclusion that there's two main audio guidelines I have:

1) I'm not throwing my hard earned $$$$$ away buying components that provide improvements that don't exist!

2) When I finally get that new audio component home, if I like what I hear and that is based on it sounding like live unamplified music to me, if it makes me tap my foot and if it brings a smile to my face, what else really matters?

These two things of course don't preclude the fact that I might wish to post here or even defend my audio beliefs. What it means is I don't really care what most if not all people say about me or my audio choices. In fact the only affirmations or criticisms that should really matter to me would be those that come from people in group 1, because these people are trying to achieve what I'm trying to achieve. But even when talking with that group of people they could have different preferences and biases than mine. So in the end I'm back to 1 & 2 above anyway...

Thetubeguy1954

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Atma-Sphere Music Systems, Inc.

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