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Romy the Cat wrote:

It played well, though I question if it makes sense to use that caliber music for audio evaluations.

Let just for sake of illustration to presume that any expressed opinion (a review) about audio element/component is a positive thing then, how could we understand the validity of an audio examinations in relation to musical material? This subject might be complex and as many others things has evolutionary nature. I personally recognize 4 stages of relationship between audio critiques/assessments and music.

1) First Level – the ”Moronic” Level.

At this level an audio expert uses ANY music. At this case music is a substitute for a noise generator and the audio expert try to register how those individual sounds got processed by playback elements.  At this level the critiques of audio is the pure criticism of “disconnected audio”, where audio has no relevancy to cultural level and the audio assessment might operate only at the First and Second levels of Sixth-Leveled-Listening Benefits ™ (SLLB). In my view the 90% of audio practitioners, including the professional reviewers and manufactures, operate at this level. In many instances the people who operate at this level include in their assessments the elements from the following Second Level but they do it just for publicity and self-hype as they have very little REAL connection with the level of demands and interests that dominates the Second Level.

2) Second Level - the “Real People” Level.  

At this level the audio experts already understand that playback system is not a “sounds rendering machine” but an environment is capable to exercise cultural, spiritual and divine demands of individuals and arts. The people of the Second level frequently have extended collections of personally selected music, generally good knowledge (at least about the trends or period that they most appreciate) and they evaluate the playback in context of how much a given audio solution serves their listening objectives. At this level the audio experts is capable operate at all 5 SLLB levels. Generally the Real People are around 9% of all audio practitioners. Interesting that is a manufactures is capable to use audio expertise at this Third evaluation level then it is very much does NOT mean that he/she will manufactured audio at this level. In fact, there is practically no audio that is manufactured at this level.

3) Third Level - the “Evolved” Level.  

The Evolved audio experts is a next level up from the Real People. The Evolved experts, after prolonging practicing at the Third Level, come to the observations that using very fine nuances of audio assessment to scale up the most valuable moments of human musical endeavor is not the most objective way to assess audio. The Evolved’s listening consciousness is capable to plug itself into necessary advanced communication algorithms, removing the playback’s capacity absolutely out of picture. The Evolved audio expert listen predominately very “contend-loaded” music and there is no room at this listening level for “audio failure”, as if the failure does take place then the awareness of the Evolved Expect overrides the audio’s shortcomings. It is silliness for Evolved person to appraise how a given pieces of audio plays Du Pre/Barbirolli/Elgar concerto, as the concerto performance is so powerful that  any inadequacies of audio might be shattered by interruptive  awareness of a person operating at the “Evolved” Level.  

4) Fourth Level - The “Unnamed” Level

I intentionally would not go into great details about the “Unnamed” Level. I will just mention that this level is an organic and non-conflicting merge between Third and First Levels.

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