Questions about Resolving Systems

I do not see it as "subjective." There may be a family of adjectives involved and not everyone agrees about what are the most important. That said, one might consider the following:

Instruments positions are spread out and in definite locations.
(Opposite: they come from everywhere or are only vaguely "right" or "left", etc.)

Instruments sound like themselves -- an oboe sounds like an oboe and not a clarinet, etc. Moreover, they sound like particular, individual instruments.

Small details in the mix can be heard because of the separation and, as mentioned, the low noise floor. Test you can try: compare a complex track on two systems; the one that contains "more" in it is the more resolving one.

None of that is subjective. It is clearly perceptible. And perception is an objective fact in the world.

These three comments really nailed it, I think.

A highly resolving system will allow you to hear everything but not at the cost of anything....It will be done in a relaxed yet rich and full manner....Think of substituting the edgy brightness with a burnished quality. 

A high resolving system starts with a fully acoustically treated room. It is so much more important than the choice of audio equipment imo.

 it's a balance of detail and warmth.  

the answer is, It’s different for different people....To each their own.

There's no overlap? Nothing to share, then? It's all so subjective that there are no common rules of thumb? We wouldn't have a hobby or be able to have a disagreement if that was true. 

The underlying message of "to each his own" is -- why bother? That's an escape hatch to having the conversation, but it's not an answer to the conversation. We are far more similar than we think.

@asctim 

William James' work on non-focal attention (or "fringe") may be of interest, here. 

Here's an interesting and influential paper on the subject:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810083710081

This is a very promising paper on the "fringe" and the uncanny in experience. https://philarchive.org/archive/MANTUV

@asctim

I love the example of the muppets because they align with something Steve Guttenberg likes to say — namely, "abandon the quest for perfect realism," or words to that effect. What we want is something that pleases us. We might call that "comfortably real."

Your post made me consider that there are lots of ways a system can be comfortably real, and that involves (as you put it) "alignment with real physics and real human motion." Another way of describing such alignment is "natural" or, more humbly, "the way I move, too."

Your post also made me consider that there are things a system does in obvious and overt ways which also create other non-focal aspects. We could call these the "fringe" or background that makes us feel at home. None of this is unusual for an interior decorator, who understands that colors and placement of objects — however much we’d call them environment or background — are critical to making a house feel like a home.

What we may be making explicit, here with audio, is that same kind of thing. Music that makes us feel "at home."

@lucmichaud1 

When listening to a full orchestra symphony finale, most systems present a wall of sound that is a bit garbled. In a concert hall, you hear all the instruments together, but not mixed. For me , resolving is the ability of a system to get close to that.

This is a very important point. This is where my system still struggles, but given all it can do with just about everything else -- including letting older, more compressed recordings still speak their truths -- I'm likely to just forgive it. Remember what happened in Hawthorne's "The Birthmark"? We mustn't kill beauty as we seek perfection.