Phaser's assumption: accuracy = reality.
Remember, though, assumptions are the lens we all look through. If you assume before you start to look (or hear or taste, etc.)that "accuracy" will give you The Truth, then that is where you start from, and, perhaps, stop. I think Immanual Kant said something about this...
Basically, this is a debate that has been raging for a long, long time; namely, on one side are the scientific materialists, who say that Truth is solely found through breaking up what you see (or empirically experiment upon)into little bits. In this approach, objectivity is the grail, discovered through using the cognitive faculties to objectify what one is looking at. In stereo, we see this reflected in people who default to "accuracy" and try to make their soundstage into a statue garden (an analogy Jonathan Valin once used, now discarded, perhaps wisely). We have heard these types of stereos: everything carved out as if the sound emanations are "things" that we can nearly see (hence, the visual-related language to decribe such stereos - transparency, etc.). This mind wants sound-things that its mind can "see." It is not a coincidence that such cognitive analysis directed at sound results in a stereo that we many times say is, analytical.
On the other side are the Romantic Idealists. In this approach, science becomes something that is evil, the "other," and the mind defaults to only the subjective, and which drives the accuracy folks nuts because it just seems like to them as mystical regression (hence, accuracy's charge that pure subjectivity is an illusion of the mind upon itself). In stereo, we see this in soundscapes that are less "accurate" (i.e. sound is less of an object to control) in default to the experience of sound as meaning. This is where we see all of the Zen language associated with SE triodes, etc. And, sometimes, the threads of angry judgement that can be directed back at the accuracy camp (and, which, I would note, has little to do with the search for Beauty...).
Then there is a third way, a middle way. Actually, its not a middle path between the accuracy and romantic camps at all, but one that transcends them. This approach values the objective/cognitive, but realizes that it can't get you all of the answers (and that answer can then lead to questions like Phaser's). This way sees "accuracy" as a cognitive tool to get you some of the way there, but not all of the way. This approach knows that, if attached upon, accuracy can at some point get in your way. This way eventually gives up trying to wrestle more answers from reality (or from a stereo) with "accuracy" only, and begins to know that truths are also derived through "seeing," and "hearing into."
Now, I know that I can't tell you in language that this "seeing" or "hearing into" is True (because language is based dualistically in cognition), but...
Its like this: one man is in an airplane at a low altitude and see a coastline and it looks jagged. A second flyer decides to go higher and see the coast is less jagged, smoother. Its the same coast, but the first flyer has only seen the more jagged coast and so maintains that that is the True coast. While the higher flyer knows that one is not truer than the other, but that a True knowledge of the coast can be found at many altitudes (infinite altitudes, actually), with each altitude disclosing a deepening truth of the coast, through a knowledge of all altitudes, together. Now, the two flyers could argue about their different symmetries of Truth all day until they are blue in the face, but because they exist at different levels of sight, the lower flyer only sees through the knowledge lens of his or her own altitude and can't admit, even to the possibility, that higher sight exists. He's comfortable at his altitude, and the attachment to that comfort is the lens that keeps him there (but not for long, there's only one way, and its up, eventually).
Of course, the higher flyer should know better than to jabber on, but, hey, he knows that even by asking about "accuracy" the lower flyer is already become a searcher for higher altitudes, even though he may not know that his plane is starting to inch upwards, and may even deny the possibility of such movement while its starting. And, of course, before we start camps again, we should also see that there is no higher or lower. At a deeper place of sight, the flyers are seen as the same; they are both equal in their potential for higher flight, only separated by their will.
Phaser: this says it much better than I can,
From one side: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." - Albert Einstein
From the other side: "One may explain water, but the mouth will not become wet. One may expound fully on the nature of fire, but the mouth will not become hot." - Takuan
But, Takuan and Einstein would surely hit me with a stick because there are no sides, only One side, with the division into altitudes merely a tool of my mind (and I get hit because I talk too much...:0)
So, how do I want my stereo to sound? I don't know enough to say that. Here's something, though:
"The wild geese do not intend to cast
their reflections,
The water has no mind to receive their images."
Its a haiku, I don't know what it means. But I would like my stereo tool to accurately and trans-accurately create sounds that catalyze my consciousness towards an experience of the meaning of music, like that haiku "sounds" in my heart.
Thank you for your indulgence.
Mark
