Merry go round

@hilde45 -  if I may, your analogy of food is not quite correct, because regardless of what you prefer there, you’re still eating the real thing - you’d need a simulacrum of the experience of taste and smell to make a more relevant analogy with sound reproduction in hifi audio. I could well say I prefer soft furry things to sharp edges in relation to what my fingers touch, but I cannot deny the realism of either, regardless of preference.

Regardless of whether it’s sight, sound, taste, smell or touch, the only basis any of us have of gauging the quality of what has been reproduced has to be founded on the criteria of how close that reproduction is to our closest understanding of the original, and not some random criteria of preference, of all things.

And to say we all hear differently, is another unsupported argument audiophiles persistently make - sure we all hear differently, but the basis, the source of reality of what we each hear is the same, and it evens out as a collective understanding - meaning, your sense of what constitutes reality cannot be different from mine, simply because the perceived source is the same. We may receive it differently, but we can each point to the source itself as its definition. While we may each taste real beef differently, we all recognise the taste of real beef as real beef, regardless of how it’s prepared. And that simulacrum of your preferred beef would have to be itself gauged together with the particular reality source (sauce haha) it was prepared with. You may not like your beef rare, or with mustard, but your only gauge of how good, or ‘accurate’ that simulacrum of rare beef with or without mustard, could only possibly come from your having actually tasted the real thing. 

Accuracy in music reproduction does exist, even if it’s more convenient to say our preferences matter more.

In friendship - kevin

@hilde - thank you for your kind response ; ) - just to clarify, I am certainly not saying there is one kind of reality, only that at any one venue that live music is being played, no one is going to point at the plucked string of a guitar and say that doesn’t sound like their sort of preferred reality. It is ‘real’ for everyone at the venue, for how they each hear reality. It is the same string, the same guitar and the same resonant air.

One may well ‘prefer’ the taste of us grade prime beef over that of New Zealand stock, but if high fidelity is indeed what one cares for, one certainly cannot prefer the recorded sound of a plucked guitar string over that plucked at a live performance. This sort of comparative evaluation is our only gauge of how well resolving a system is, not a random personal preference of taste regarding sound reproduction.

If you disagree, I would certainly like to understand how you critically evaluate the performance of your system ; )

In friendship - kevin.

@hilde45 

- thanks for your response, there was a lot in there to parse out, and i hope you won’t mind me thinking aloud.

To start with, my apologies for not writing with greater clarity earlier - when I stated ‘one certainly cannot prefer the recorded sound of a plucked guitar string over that plucked at a live performance’, I did not mean any number of varieties of live performances, but specifically an intimate live performance, of perhaps one, or two guitarists in a duet. Nothing else to get in the way in order venue imperfections get in the way. Better yet, if we can even let go of the word ‘performance’, and just focus on the sound of a plucked string - for those accustomed to listening to the true timbre and tone of each instrument unblemished by space or venue, location in the space, room reflections and the like, there is a deeper understanding gained of how that ‘true’ sound changes with all those variables you mentioned thrown in, such that even with everything going on, there will be good sense of what sounds right, or if someone has messed around too much with the sound engineering. 

This was the unexplained context for my statement which, phrased better, should have read ‘one certainly cannot have a preference for any kind of recorded sound of a plucked guitar string over that of a live plucked string.’ The sound of that live plucked string, together with the sounds of live struck pianos, timpani or bass drums, blown piccolos saxophones and clarinets, forms the the basis of how we each calibrate our systems. None of it is preferential, however deeply involving, complex, or long the process takes.

I hope I’m making sense, so far.

And if you accept my reasoning, then many things follow that help explanation on the issues of listening and the common refrain that we are all different and selective listeners. Thing is, the fact that most of us are selective in what we listen for is far less of a virtue regarding our wonderful diversity than it is an indictment of our incompleteness as listeners. It is often stated we build our systems for each our own ears and no one else’s, as a banner to our individuality no one else need appreciate and yet, the common ground we all share far exceeds the individualism we espouse. Part of the problem is due to the fact many audiophiles believe our hobby to be about putting together a nuanced, resolving and dynamic system, particular to our individual tastes and selectiveness. At its most foundational level, however, I believe the joy of being an audiophile is simply about learning how to listen and to hear as many aspects of music and its recorded outcomes as is possible - to be a balanced listener rather than a perfect one. And, this joy comes not from whatever one might already know and prefer, but over every other aspect of listening we are not familiar with or aware of. 

And that is what I have found my journey of music reproduction to be - less one which is selective, but rather as encompassing as it could possibly be : ) - there is one other issue regarding your search for recording and mixing processes aligned with your sensibilities which, however much I appreciate, I also find limiting, primarily because of the huge wealth of everything else I haven’t yet learned how to listen for: I’ve mentioned it before that ‘good’ recordings are quite easily identified, whereas truly bad recordings are very very difficult to pick out - in part due to the ability of a particular system to tease out all the nuance of resonant air found in any recording studio, but also over our abilities to detect those less unfamiliar aspects of the entire sound spectrum. That said, Adele does have some of the worst sound engineered recordings I have ever heard 😂 - in any case, I hope you too find yourself challenged by this absolutely magical hobby we share : )

In friendship - kevin

@hilde45 - thanks for your reply - alls good, enjoy your journey! 
In friendship - kevin.