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In the Forum: Audio For Dummies ™
In the Thread: What is it all about? Destination vs ceremony.
Post Subject: What is it all about? Destination vs ceremony.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 8/6/2019
I few weeks back I went for a job interview and the
gentlemen who did the interview asked me an interesting question. He googled my
name, found the site, read it and was asking: what this hobby of yours is all about? It is
very hard to explain to a person who is not familiar with the subject what the
high-end audio is. Identically it is very hard to explain to a person who is
familiar with the subject what the high-end audio is truly all about. But the
most complicated of all is to explain to yourself, to a person who has been
doing audio all my life, what the high-end audio is all about. The guy who
asked me was very nice and very intelligent and I was trying to response,
explaining to him that audio that I have been practicing is about obtaining
unique experiences by virtue of musical playback. Then I added more to one and another
directions and then I begin to talk about some confusing subjects and certainly
were irrelevant for the setting we were involved.
The point was not to explain to my interviewer what high-end
audio is all about but to make myself to be able to express it in a way how I
feel comfortable. That turned out to me more difficult. What I discovered
during the last few days is that it is much more complicated than I thought because
making any definitive statements to explain high-end audio I perfectly
comfortable can advocate a contra-point to the made statements. The common
80/20 theory and the proposal that the high-end audio focuses on that 20% regardless
of means projected to yield sounds like a reasonable explanation but very much
exclude a person with a boom-box who has his head properly aligned. I do insist
that a person with a table ratio if the rest is properly set in hear might be a
very strong case for high-end audio.
So, what is high-end audio and if you think about it further
then: is it a destination or ceremony? Is it a direction of journey or an amusement
of ourselves during the journey? Is it a set of self-inflicted conventions that
high-end audio practitioners imposed upon themselves? If high-end audio is a
methodology to reproduce sound or is it a practice to consume Sound? How much music
true interacts with high-end objective? What would be the function of high-end
audio if you live in technological vacuum, let say at an uninhibited island?
What would be high-end audio for a person who have lost hearing? Why definition
of high-end audio so greatly fluctuate with a culture of musical perception and
culture of sound consumption? Why culture of sound consumption is decoupled
from music? I can pose zillion more
questions but it is not the point…
I personally feel that truly understand high-end audio is
impossible being within it. Somebody told that in an autobiography of any great
painter there is always a chapter “Fire”. That super educational purgative
event that strips all materialistic binds and degaussed perceptions or
objectives… the magic fire from the 3rd act of the Das Walkure …
I certainly do not claim that I own some kind of definitive
definition of what high-end audio is all about.
I do insist however that most of the folks who feel that they involved
into high-end audio are not necessarily have a defined meanings of what the
high-end audio all about. I am not looking for answer but I am fascinated with
the process of finding the answer, definitely the ceremony…Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site