@millercarbon
Plus I often had the vague sense of some things begin better, but in a way that was more a feeling than anything that could be put into words.
That's very, very interesting to me. The vague experience that has portents which need to be somehow teased out, unpacked. It's not articulate or articulable at first but is very much *there.* Excellent!
Your comment about the AVR being so important at the beginning that you didn't really note the difference in speakers is a telling comment, to me. It indicates how focused you could listen even near the beginning of the journey you're describing.
So yeah, serious case of audiophilia nervosa. The cure it turns out is tubes and turntables. Well, sorta. There is a bit more to it.
LOL -- Good one! There has to be more to it, because those conversations about tubes can go on forever, also!
All I know is they said don't hear nuttin. My response was pretty much this thread: there are a lot of things people can hear that we haven't yet learned to hear.Thus the question: How do you do it? How do you learn to hear what you don't know how to hear??
Right -- that's where their ability to reflect and use language is crucial. It's why there must be more to this hobby than "It just gives pleasure" or "Thinking about it ruins it." But, we know, there are people who say this about life. This has been around a long time-- see Cyrenaics. [Wikipedia is good enough on this one.]
"The Cyrenaics were a hedonist Greek school of philosophy founded in the 4th century BC...[who] taught that the only intrinsic good is...positively enjoyable momentary sensations. Of these, physical ones are stronger than those of anticipation or memory....They thought that we can know with certainty only our immediate sense-experiences (for instance, that one is having a sweet sensation), but can know nothing about the nature of the objects that cause these sensations (for instance, that honey is sweet). They also denied that we can have knowledge of what the experiences of other people are like. All knowledge is immediate sensation....Feeling, therefore, is the only possible criterion of knowledge and of conduct. Our ways of being affected are alone knowable, thus the sole aim for everyone should be pleasure."
That boils down pretty easily to, "I don't need to know nothing, because I know what I like." Not my way of looking at things because actual experience has shown me that even sensation and pleasure themselves can deepen with the influence of knowledge and language. As long as the "knowing mind" relaxes and lets the "flow" of experience happen on its own terms later, it's all to the better.
