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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…

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