Romy the Cat wrote:

rowuk wrote: When communicating on line, we need mutual understanding for the things that we want to discuss (the audio press has done little to help here). I can explain my views of accuracy and musicality, both have nothing to do with gear however. Musicality is something that a musician does with his/her play. I think that this word is misplaced in the audio world. Accuracy is also a function of definition. Geometrically, it is impossible to have accurate playback. There is no recreation of the original space - regardless of the effort and money invested. Pitch and timbre coulds have degrees of accuracy, but what was the original, what microphone, how close was the microphone to the instrument, what EQ or compression was used? As there is no way of knowing, I feel that we must replace the word "accurate" with the word "plausible". With these reservations, someone could talk to me about my "sound" or my "opinion". It is ridiculous how much I disagree with the above. I am absolutely fine with the notion that it is impossible to have accurate playback, but, in my view, you, Robin, attribute accuracy to live music. I do not. Accuracy is not live music. Demanding that playback reproduction be, in any way or form, a reflection of live events is an absolute abomination of audio objectives, and this is what I have been opposing for over 25 years.   Music is just one of the forms of consciousness that impacts us. If your doctor sticks a syringe in your ass, do we need to care about the syringe or about the medicine that it contains? The whole fucking audio industry has invented a mechanism of worshipping and adulating disposable plastic syringes, arguing about how one syringe (audio) is different from the “true” syringes (music). This is the most boring and idiotic objective, in my view. The only accuracy that exists is the accuracy of the medicine in audio syringes versus music syringes. The form, shape, or any other property of syringes are wonderful observations to make, and you can publish a lot of publications to corroborate them, but it is all irrelevant bullshit that simple-minded audio morons consume as some kind of “wisdom.”   Can a syringe impact the quality of the medicine it carries? Ironically, yes—but not in the way audio people think. They are trained to believe that there is a direct relation between syringe quality and the performance of the medicine, and this works fine for anyone at the first level of meta-cognition. As soon as a person begins to question the value of their own understanding, knowledge, and perception, the whole charade of sophisticated syringes collapses.     What I am trying to say is that music itself is not privileged. It is one of many carriers through which consciousness is altered, informed, or provoked. Sound, language, image, chemical agents, silence, memory, meditation, and imagination all operate on the same substrate. Consciousness does not discriminate based on delivery medium. It consumes content, not containers. It does not ask how the signal arrived; it only registers what arrived. The moment a person begins to question their own perception—its limits, its conditioning, its expectations—the mythology collapses. The elaborate hierarchy of “better” syringes reveals itself as a house of cards: impressive in construction, empty in foundation. What remains is the only question that ever mattered: what, exactly, is being delivered to consciousness, and why?   At that point, playback ceases to be a fetish and becomes what it always should have been—a tool. Not a shrine. Not a competition. Not a moral ladder. A tool for exploring how consciousness responds to structured stimuli. Everything else is noise, in my view.  rowuk wrote: When our system becomes a tool to explore our minds reaction to stimuli… When our system becomes a tool for exploring the mind’s reaction to stimuli, it ceases to be a hierarchy of syringes or musical experiences and becomes a hierarchy of consciousness. Consciousness does not give a flying fuck about whether information arrives through audio, music, literature, conversation, psilocybin, meditation, intellectual inquiry, or anything else. Consciousness consumes content, not delivery systems. It is indifferent to whether that content comes via a syringe, a song, a poem, a painting, a play, or simple reflection during active imagination.

Romy the Cat wrote:

Now we are talking about something interesting, and for me “interesting” means that it has no relation to the subject of musicality versus accuracy. The concept of musicality versus accuracy has meaning only within the context of sound reproduction, when the objective of the entire sound-reproduction ceremony is to produce a very specific sound or a very specific cerebral impact on the listener. It sounds noble, and all the necessary G-spots of audio and musicality are certainly being pressed. The problem begins when, instead of cognitive or emotional benefit, the objective of the listening session becomes informational, something that can be penetrated, exchanged, and processed on a consciousness level. At that point, the listener begins to dive elsewhere, and very interesting manifestations start to re-emerge. The process of listening is no longer defined by sound or its impact; sound becomes an almost irrelevant variable. Everything sinks together: the LP record, grid bias, amplification topology, cable elevators, the skill of the musician, the quality of the performance, even the deeply interpretive meaning that a great musician brings to a work becomes as relevant as VTA on a tonearm. I know, Robin, this is very difficult for you to hear, because how could some jerk from Boston claim that everything musicians do is about as relevant as the type of suspension a speaker has while playing music? But in my view, the destruction of meaning is absolutely mandatory for any serious engagement with deeper meaning. Only after a complete denial of everything known and understood, at a subconscious level, does the room become clean enough to formulate a completely new principle of musical consumption. At that point, it is no longer based on what is heard or projected by the listener’s psyche, but on what is understood. Before, a person might think what plate voltage will give me better sound, or what breathing technique will allow me, as a trumpeter, to produce a more refined impression. After passing through the shadow of having no convictions, that person builds a completely new cardinal system in which technical aspects of playback or the ability to manipulate an instrument are mapped directly onto the quality of one’s own understanding. This is where an entirely new kind of audio begins. I really need to record a video about the events in my life during the night in 2025 to explain where all of this comes from. I was actually planning to record two videos, one technical and one philosophical, and together they point in the direction I am describing above. I completely understand where you are coming from, Robin, but I no longer feel that it is my way of thinking.

• Reduced defensiveness and increased self-acceptance.
• Greater control over emotional reactions and triggers.
• Increased capacity for intimacy, empathy, and creativity.
• A deeper understanding of one's own "darkness" and, consequently, that of others.