Thanks to mrmb for directness: "I buy equipment based on my sonic preferences; more importantly however, I almost exclusively come here to read posts from others regarding their personal sonic preferences and experiences."
And to mitch2 for calling out hyperbole: "how much reliance do you have in posters who report that the sound of their systems are 'totally transformed' just about every time they install a new cable, fuse, or other tweek? Is that even possible, or are they just prone to exaggeration?"
But my original post really had a fairly simple point that these two extremes don't address. I come here for advice in solving audio problems (for which the dearly departed MC was more helpful than anyone, even when he was wrong—which was most of the time) and for input on purchasing decisions. Now, if the only relevant criterion in audio is how it sounds to you (or me), then it's a mistake to seek advice on purchasing options from anyone else. But I don't believe that's the case. I also make, and taste, a lot of wine. By the logic of most who have responded in this thread, it would be pointless to suppose that there are any objective criteria when it comes to something so obviously a matter of taste as wine. And yet, the differences in cost between bottles is enormous, as it is between audio components. One hopes that those differences are not just driven by the placebo effect, and that seeking advice from fellow enthusiasts who have lots of relevant experience would not be a complete waste of time. In fact, of course, there is "objectivity" in wine tasting: someone with experience and a refined palette can reliably identify the grape, the vintage, and the quality of what they're tasting. This is what I thought I was looking for in audio on this site.
But if that's to be true, then there must be a way to mitigate "subjective taste" with some kind of appeal of objective facts.
Bottom line: I guess I won't come here looking for informed advice anymore. I'll just enjoy my own ears, and my own system, and not pretend that anyone else can tell me anything that might educate my judgment on such subjective matters.
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I give up. Mahgister, how you can think I'm "attacking" you is a mystery. I did not "equate" you with teo_audio; if anything, I was contrasting the two of you. The point about the dubiousness of the "objective" is the only point of contact here, and that's a point with a deep and noble pedigree. In any case, do you not recall the several exchanges we've had in the past year about Goethe, Kant, Nietzsche...? Does my recognition that you cherish Goethe constitute an "attack" on you?!
Sorry. This isn't a philosophy forum. I'll restrain myself in the future.
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Wow. Although I am a philosophy professor, and I have started "philosophical" discussions on this site before, I didn’t intend this one to be. "deludedaudiophile" is not deluded about this: all I was suggesting is that, if a forum like this exists to share informed opinions about the quality of gear (and I think that is its main purpose), then those opinions should be "informed" by more than just personal preference. They should be supported by "objective" "facts." The quotation marks are made necessary because of comments from mahgister (as usual), teo_audio ("the OP asked [for] it"), and several others. If you come here just to vent spleen or enthuse about your enthusiasm, fine; do that. But if you’re going to advocate for some audio technology, whether it be a brand, vinyl vs. digital, tubes vs. solid state, or whatever, I am open minded enough to be convincable. To convince me, however, you will have to make an argument of some kind. That is going to appeal to some set of values we hold in common as rational beings with bodies. These sorts of things are what I meant by "objective."
Of course, the objective is really just what a plurality of subjects agree about, as teo_audio was, I think, trying to say. We don’t experience the world itself, we experience a certain kind of sense input from the world which we process in our brains in a certain way. Different sorts of animals will experience the "same" reality differently. But there are, of course, features of our experiencing mechanism that we all share in common, if we are humans. That's why we all agree that it's "true" that 2+3=5 and that a straight line is the shortest path between two points. That shared reality is what we call "objective." It's really more like subjectively universal.
FWIW, and to placate mahgister, let me quote his beloved Goethe once more (I’m copying this from a previous thread that was deliberately "philosophical"): Goethe: "...it is possible to say that every attentive glance which we cast on the world is an act of thoerizing.... Theorizing is inherent in all human experience, and the highest intellectual achievement...would be to comprehend that everything factual is already theory." Goethe’s Faust ends with these great lines, which also conclude Mahler’s Eighth Symphony: "Alles vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis." Untranslatable, but basically the same idea expressed in prose in the words I just quoted—so, something like "Everything that passes / Is but a symbol [or parable]."
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Probably very few are still following this thread, so I'm going to risk a few provocative comments.
First, as to objective measurements. The scientifically-trained engineers who create the stuff we buy rely heavily on measurements to work their magic. That's an incontestable fact. So saying that measurements are irrelevant is like saying that, if you are a believer in God, knowing God's intention when creating the world is irrelevant to our enjoyment of it. That may be so, but only given certain perverse assumptions. If you want your understanding of experience to correspond as closely as possible to the Creator's, you need to know the creator's criteria.
Second, there are many ways for a system to sound good. The wine analogy I, and others, have used here and in other threads is an analogue: comparing one fine system to another is a bit like comparing a fine Pinot Noir to a fine Cabernet Sauvignon. They're different, all right, but it would be absurd to reject the one on the basis of what one values in the other, or vice versa. Bottom line: expensive systems almost always sound better than inexpensive systems, even if in different ways, and they do so to everyone, not just to audiophiles. We obsess over microscopic details that most normal people neither notice nor care about, and those constitute the majority of "debates" on this forum. But I have not yet meet a person with ears who is not impressed by a "good" system, even if such a normal person doesn't consider the cost and emotional investment necessary for assembling that good system worthwhile.
Third: Chacun a son gout/De gustibus non est disputandem. Some of us like listening to Tool or Metalica; others can't stand such music, and prefer string quartets. Some of the latter love Beethoven's quartets but can't stand Bartok or Shostakovich. Those different sorts of music are so different in character, content, and aural impact that it would be crazy to suppose there should be universal agreement about what constitutes the best possible musical reproduction. But this does not contradict my second point, and it relates that point to my first: all music—indeed, all sound—is ultimately a matter of frequencies over time. That's a matter of physics, interpreted by brains attached to bodies. So the technological devices designed by engineers to reproduce those sounds with the greatest objective accuracy will, almost always, be the ones that listeners prefer, no matter their musical preferences. A distorted tone will not compellingly convey Hendrix's feedback, nor the sweet woody sound of a fine violin.
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Thanks, prof (from one to another, apparently) for taking my OP seriously. However, I suppose I buried what I’d meant to be a fairly simple point in too much philosophical baggage, and confused even a careful reader like you. You suggest that my original question was "muddied" by misusing the term "subjective preference" when what I really meant was "subjective impression." Accordingly, you restate my question as really being this: "Do you fall on the side of the inviolability of subjective IMPRESSIONS, or do you insist on objective facts in making your audio choices?"
But no, that is not what I meant to ask. OF COURSE subjective "impressions" are inviolable. As Kant writes, although this insight is more commonly associated with Nietzsche: "In a representation of the senses —as containing no judgments whatsoever—there is also no error." Subjective impressions are just that; they make no claim, by themselves, to being "right" or "better" or, well, to being anything other than what the subject himself or herself experiences. But that is indisputable, and not what I was asking about.
What I’d like to know is how those who deny the validity or value of measurements, of "objective" criteria of some kind, and who (reasonably) appeal to the experience of listening to music on audio equipment in place of looking at graphs and other data, would wish to recommend this or that component, this or that recording or playback technology, or indeed, anything else of an evaluative nature. How, briefly stated, do you mean to persuade me that your "subjective impression" is such that the judgments you make because of it (your "subjective preferences") are judgments I should be persuaded are reasonable, well-informed, and worth taking seriously?
How, that is, is your subjective preference to be defended to another subjective mind without appeal to objective criteria like measurements? You don’t have to defend your "subjective impressions"; they’re yours, they can’t be mine, and they make no evaluative claims. As Nietzsche tweaked the Kantian lesson, "The senses don’t lie at all; it’s what we make of the senses that introduces truth and lies."
But I’m sorry I brought this whole thing up. Someone above sagely remarked that the reason he spends time on this site is to share enthusiasms. I guess I’m just hung up on wanting enthusiasms to be shared with sufficient passion and cogency that I might be persuaded, by reading your post, to share yours. There may not be "objective facts" in the experience of "sound quality" other than those that can be measured, and the consensus is that measurement geekhood is a matter of barking up the wrong tree. Sure, that makes sense to me; if I wanted objective evidence, I would go to the measurement gurus for it. But I would appreciate more articulate expressions of enthusiasm than are usually found here.
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Prof—and yet again, mahgister, and mijostyn too: thanks so much for your insightful comments. Prof, I will look at your "thread"; this is just the sort of writing about audio I love to read: about the equipment, but grounded in an appreciation of the reproduction of the real sound of instruments. Your paragraph about the woody timbre of woodwinds, the brassy sheen of the brass, voices that sound like flesh and blood rather than electrons...that's what I seek, too, in listening, and also in reading on this forum.
FWIW, I also share your privileging of the subjective, if I may put it that way. It is "like something" to be an experiencing consciousness—like something to be a bat, but also like something to hear a string quartet or a beautiful soprano. It may well be that such a subjective experience is conditioned by neurons stimulated by physical phenomena, but as mahgister never tires of pointing out, psychoacoustics is where the subjective and the objective meet. In any case, you put your finger on the fallacy of supposing that only objective measurements are intersubjectively communicable. I completely agree that, even if my reaction to, say, a given speaker is due to its bump at 1 kHz, or whatever, I don't experience that pleasurable sensation as a 1 kHz bump—and what matters, of course, is how the physical phenomenon is perceived, not how it may be described in terms of physics. One certainly can, as you so eloquently show, persuade others without leaving the shared realm of the subjective.
Thanks for the treat of reading all this.
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Ah! Prof, I just looked at your thread—and realized why I recognized your "name" on this forum! I actually copied and pasted that thread some time ago into a document for storage in my "audio" file on the hard drive of this laptop, for future reference. It is a wonderfully clear and vividly descriptive account of a lot of desirable speakers, as the reactions to it from just about everyone also attests.
Frankly, I’m not sure why I frequent this forum, or why, for that matter, I even consider myself an audiophile. Yes, I’ve loved good audio equipment for most of my life; most of the time, I enjoy music more in my living room than I do live (a point of contention between my wife and me; she was a musicologist and music critic in her former life in Europe, and is more interested, I think, in the social aspect of live performance than in the music itself). But, despite my love for audio equipment, I don’t own much. My system sounds very good, and I have lots to compare it to: we have a very active audio club here on the California Central Coast, and I’ve had many opportunities to critically listen to systems in purpose-built acoustically controlled rooms that are vastly more valuable than mine. But I don’t covet any of them, and have long been happy with what I have. And by "long," I mean decades: my amplification, turntable and speakers all date from the last millennium. So, in other words, your experience, critical acumen, and talent for expressing your "impressions" are much appreciated to the extent that they share our common enthusiasm so effectively—but not because they might be useful as guidance for purchases, since I don’t feel I need to make any. I guess I’m lucky that way.
Back to the music, then! The Orpheus performance of Beethoven’s music for "The Creatures of Prometheus" is playing now, and is just gorgeous. The overture to this "incidental" piece is well known, but the rest of it isn’t, although it should be for anyone who loves Beethoven’s middle period. And the audio quality of this recording is stunning! One of the dance movements begins with a harp on the left, then the violins join, also on the left but in front of the harp; then a single flute, also on the left—which is joined by a bassoon way over on the right toward the rear of the orchestra, and then by a clarinet next to it, toward the center from the bassoon. A few bars later, a solo cello carries the theme, also very precisely located in space in front of the bassoon and clarinet, still on the right. And every instrument has a tremendously realistic, almost tangible presence and accurate timbre. This is audiophile bliss!
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gregm: agreed. I think. The uncertainty concerns what "consistency" would mean here. Am I "thorough"? Yes, I hope so. "Spontaneous"? Sure—at least when I'm not too concerned with being "thorough." Do I prefer baroque, classical, romantic? Yes! But I'll throw in some classic rock, too, and I'm listening to Tool's "Fear Inoculum" a lot these days (mesmerizing played loud on a good system). Do I seek to "simulate reality" in my room, or rather to "reproduce what's on the medium"? Again, it depends. Those on this site who insist on "live performance" as the Original, the thing in itself that needs to be accurately represented, will have trouble convincing me that this is either really possible or even desirable when the original utilized microphones and electric instruments through amplifiers in imperfect noisy spaces. But even concerts of acoustic music cannot really be simulated very closely when the ensemble is large (say, a symphony orchestra) and the venue grand (say, the Musikverein). Solo piano, or cello (my wife plays the former, I the latter): yes, then I want my system to sound like the instruments do in my music room.
All of which is to say, I suppose, that I "agree" with you to the extent that what you really seem to value in someone else's opinion is that it be expressed well. Isn't that the bottom line for any kind of performance, in writing or in notes?
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Don't know how or why this discussion got off onto this particular set of rails, but hey: this is my wheelhouse, actually.
I've done a lot of thinking recently about AI and "consciousness." The new GPT-3 AI program is formidable; what it can do led to these reflections. I'll try to be brief.
For one thing, I don't think it's killer robots we have to worry about. Rather, it's that, little by little, AI is taking over the various cognitive tasks we used to perform for ourselves. Our cars decide when to turn the headlights on, when to lock the doors, when it's wet enough for windshield wipers...they even park themselves now, and drive themselves for a while. Our refrigerators decide what food we need to buy, and will even order it for us. GPS guides us to our destinations. But as a result, no one has a sense of their own physical geography anymore, no one knows where north is or how to read a map. The human brain is the most astonishingly capable problem solving technology ever developed by evolution; why would we willingly give up exercising it? The machines will take over not by force, but because we've gradually ceded control over our own lives to "labor saving devices" that do supposedly trivial chores better.
Anyway, GPT-3 is so damn good at, for example, writing creative texts that it has made me wonder if we're posing the problem in the wrong way when it comes to the "Turing Test" and the questions about artificial "intelligence." Maybe the question is not "Can machines think?" but rather: "Do we really do anything more than manipulate language when we 'think'?" Maybe a machine can be structured to manipulate a complex sign system, a language, in "creative" ways. But...I don't believe a machine can be structured to CARE about the result. The human experience, then, is perhaps not to be located in the creative act itself, but in the response to it—in the reader instead of the writer or, better, in the interaction between them. GPT-3 can even compose music "in the style of" whoever you like. But does GPT-3 enjoy music, listen to music?
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Prof: interesting point about how a measurement (e.g., a 4 dB boost at 150 Hz) can express a "subjective impression" to another specialist who speaks the language of decibels and Herz. Of course, this presupposes that the subjective correlate ("warmer" male voice, or whatever) is causally connected to that measured phenomenon. I'm not saying it isn't, but I think a lot of folks on this site would want to say so, or would want at least to say that there are other, and important, subjective impressions that don't correspond to any known measurement. I'm not saying that isn't so, either; I really don't know. But your point about "objective" phenomena corresponding to subjective impressions in such a way that professionals who speak the technical language understand measurements in terms of their own subjective experience is revealing here.
By the way, Descartes was not a skeptic, despite the game he plays with his "method of systematic doubt" in, for instance, the first Meditation. On the contrary, Descartes deploys doubt not in order to show that everything can be doubted, but rather, to discover what can't be doubted, what therefore must be true. This skeptical starting point is motivated by historical circumstance: the intellectual dominance of Aristotle in medieval science, and the contamination (for lack of a better word) of philosophy by theology in medieval Scholasticism. Were it not for Descartes' clearing away everything doubtful and building his system back up from a foundation of certainty using only logic (or, at least in principle, only logic), "modern" science would never have been possible.
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Prof: We don't disagree here about, well, anything, I think. Granted: all causal relationships "presuppose" a connection between cause and effect, and the correlation (sorry: causation) between certain measurements and the correlative subjective impressions is probably no more problematic than most other supposed causal connections. Note, however, that I'm still being cagy here. Hume may be right: the difference between "correlation" and "causation" may be nothing more than "habitual expectation," common sense and physics notwithstanding. But I don't mean to drag philosophy into this again. I completely agree with you that there are "objective measurements" that reliably correlate with intersubjectively identifiable experiences; for audio professionals who work in the no-man's land between measurements (the science that created the equipment in the first place) and customers with desires and expectations, the objective language of measurements may be fully adequate to unambiguously identify features of an audio component that are sought in a given situation.
Sorry for the remarks about Descartes. I guessed you weren't confused about his "foundationalism." But I spent the last two weeks lecturing on Descartes; playing my role as "professor" is a hard habit to break.
Here's the main point, though, to return to the theme of this thread. Few of us are "audio professionals" who have witnessed again and again the correlation (or causation) between certain measurements and a given desired subjective effect. For us mere mortals, then, some kind of non-objective language is our only option in trying to express what turns us on in an audio system. What my OP was asking for was some sort of standard by means of which your subjective impressions can be communicated to me with sufficient clarity to persuade me that you are actually experiencing something I might also expect or want to experience from a given component. I can't have a pain in your tooth, but I can be persuaded by your language that you do. That's what I look for in posts that rave about some feature of our shared hobby.
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