2. misc-audio
  3. 157421-139355

Sound, neutrality and the pursuit of everything

The audiophile hobby is inherently a pursuit of some ideal. That ideal might differ from person to person, but what I am curious about is how each of us define that ideal. 

I kinda like where my system is at. I cue a well recorded track and think: damn that sounds good. But compared to what? Do I have a point of comparison to the original performance, the day it was recorded? Usually not. To use an overused album, unless I was sitting at the Olympia concert hall in Paris when Diana Krall performed there in 2001 and have a perfect auditory memory, how do I know my system if reproducing it with “fidelity”?

If the pursuit of perfection is useless as perfection is an illusion, how do you all define your level of satisfaction or achievement in this audiophile pursuit?

jabar102

Showing 1 response by hilde45

hilde45's avatar
hilde45
5,386 posts
 
+1 @bkeske. When you eat a good meal, how do you decide whether or not it lives up to reality? You don’t, because it IS reality. And you are enjoying it. 
Above and beyond that there’s not much I can add to the good comments above. There is no way to get back to a neutral sound, overall, but there is some thing like the sound of a guitar or an oboe or a clarinet that we can hear live. 
But even if we are trying to recapture a concert, are we talking about the front row or the back row? In what kind of room? And everybody’s hearing is different so who’s hearing are we trying to reproduce? It is impossible to get back to a single reality because there are so many different variables and perspectives. So what we are trying to do is have an experience. Question becomes, does the gear produce an experience we want to have again?
More to discover