The need for variety and endless search for new details

Humans often crave variety. In our plays, books, hair cuts and even cooking. Reliable is good but there are usually some areas where we simply don’t want the same thing every time. The same dish at the same restaurant every day would sadden most of us. The same hair cut every time for many leaves us depressed. We don’t feel the same excitement the second or third time we leave the salon.

The problem comes in the illusion of new details I often read about audiophile writers chasing, especially in speakers, combining with our desire to hear more and more.

IMHO there are good and bad ways to create more detail. Bad way are to use uneven frequency responses which tickle our ears differently than whatever we were last listening to. "I’m hearing things I’ve never heard before!" is a key phrase. The problem is that it’s not really better, it’s just different. It’s a game of rock,paper, scissors played with large, heavy and expensive objects with explanations easily found in ragged mid and treble responses.

Legitimate ways of creating more detail IMHO are to improve room acoustics and or tailor dispersion to control reflections. This includes horns, planar speakers and wide-baffle speakers (Snell A/III, SF Stradivari, etc.), line sources, D’Appolito configurations, open baffle designs, etc.

I’m not against tone or loudness controls, at all. I’m concerned about fellow enthusiasts chasing an illusory "better" without fully understanding what they are looking for. For some of us, maybe we are better off with multiple amps and speakers we can cycle through rather than replace in order to find long lasting happiness.