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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Accuracy vs. Musicality (and YMMV)
Post Subject: Is Audio Personal?Posted by Romy the Cat on: 8/21/2024
It is a very interesting question, and the answer would be
the direction you look at the answer. Pretend you are building in your basement
a train model. You have a large table, and you spent thousands of dollars and
years of time to constrict your vision of the locomotive city. Are your
successes and failures are the mater of your existence and ultimately a Personal
matter of your life? Yes, you kids enjoy it, you friend and collaborations
actively participate in painting of your trains but in the end of all that
noise (that somebody might call life) it is strictly your Personal endeavor,
and you are obtaining from it you very Personal satisfaction, if you do. That
last “if you do” is very important in my view. Let me to explain.
Audio is no different from what I described above. There are
a lot of people in audio who feel that “painting of trains” is the purpose of
the high-end audio. They participate in constant equipment rotation and other
“painting of trains” and by doing it they are practicing audio as they see it.
There was a period on my life when I was doing the same. In my case, it was no
a social endeavor where I was community-supported but rather a personal journey
but it does not make is different from any other “trains painting”. In audio we
do not have a situation when an individual wants to get a truly great high end
audio experience; he or she stores and obtains it as a commodity partially
because the industry offering greatly undeserves the consumer and partially
because a consumer needs to go over a very lengthy and very turbulent ceremony
of understanding how to listen high-end audio.
It is turbulent because, along with the community of the
“trains painters,” an individual unavoidably gets infected by a set of
instructions of how to listen to the high-end audio results. To degausse
yourself from those typically barbaric instructions for the person who is plagued
in the high-end audio takes years and requires some amount of courage. I
personally met probably 5 audio people in my life who were deeply plugged in
audio but were able to lift the vail of the “trains painters” consciousness and
access the result of high-end audio inhalation in a proper way. All of them did
it in very deeply personal way.
So, the high-end audio is certainly not a Personal hobby as
much as McDonald's Big Mac is not a personal food; however, if you do not dine
in McDonald's but prefer the stakes from Wagyu beef, then it becomes a very personal
experience.Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site