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. 

Romy the Cat wrote:

I applied Jungian ideas fully to the subject of sound reproduction, and this led to a kind of fireworks display of observations that, in my view, completely redefine audio and, to some extent, music—at least as I understand it. I listen far more than I used to, but more importantly, I listen differently: different things, with different expectations, with different reference “what music is”, and through a completely different playback, built on entirely different underlying principles.

Romy the Cat wrote:

I am planning to cover some of this in a video I would like to make. I promised to do “my audio during 2025.” I have recorded it twice already, but I feel that I still haven’t expressed what I really wanted to say. To be continued…

N-set wrote:

I could not follow the discussion as my son was just born …  I mentioned some time ago that I believe that study (Jung) can be applied to the audio practice, but forgive me, never had time to elaborate.

Romy the Cat wrote:

Paul S wrote: Great answer, Romy, at least for me. I still like Camus the more for excluding Stalin (the person), even at the expense of Sartre, and of course I do not conflate Communism with... whatever. I like the way you are working with language here, like a young Peirce. Dialog may still be possible, to judge by that post. Paul S Mike, it’s interesting that you mentioned dialogue. Yesterday I had a conversation with my audio friend about how my thinking on audio has evolved over the last four years. I brought him up to date on where I am now and asked whether it makes sense to speak about this publicly. His reaction was that almost no one would be able to understand it. He is right about the difficulty of comprehension, and wrong about the significance of that difficulty. I’m seriously considering recording a video and laying the whole thing out, not as advocacy, but as clarification. I’m no longer surprised by where I ended up; in retrospect, the trajectory is coherent and almost unavoidable. What has lost all mystery for me is how trivial, and often absurd, most of our so-called audio frustrations appear once you step back and examine the objectives that drive them. In audio, and in music more broadly, many of those objectives are poorly examined substitutes for meaning, transcendence, or control, and the frustration they generate is largely self-produced. From a certain perspective, the consumption of musical or audio experience unfolds in a vacuum, detached from its own sonic, aesthetic, and ultimately even ethical context. At this point the act of composing and listening cease to be primarily sensational and become informational, a form of communication operating at the level of consciousness itself. When techniques emerge that allow communication directly at that level, much of what we produce as music—those shamanic, quasi-ritual gestures of shaking air with instruments or machines—begins to lose its centrality. This is a delicate threshold. Music can serve as an initiator of a conscious stream, a structured sequence that catalyzes awareness, perhaps even guiding possibility into experience. But the conscious stream does not belong to music. There is a subtle and essential decoupling between musical intention—the attempt to evoke consciousness—and the consciousness that arises in response. Music may open the door, but what passes through it is no longer musical in nature.

Amir, let me give you another direction to consider.

A few days ago, I had a very interesting date. The woman was well developed intellectually and practiced various Eastern philosophical traditions. She acknowledged the presence of spontaneous insights and symbolic serendipity, and she recognized their importance. Then suddenly, the difference between her and me came to me with a certain ironic clarity.

She is a woman, and her primary psychological orientation to be recognizing patterns and creating circumstances within which she can navigate life successfully while acknowledging serendipity. I am a man, and my psychological orientation is to go into the world and reshape (and frequently to fuck it up) it according to how I feel it should function. For me, acknowledging serendipity is only the first step — just a knock on the door of reality. I am an engineer, and I approach it from a completely different perspective. I want to know where it comes from, what within me is responsible for it, what it represents, what it means, and, most importantly, how to integrate this serendipity with everything I know about the world. Learning is comparison, but only through learning can you, as a creative person, construct something meaningful in order to take advantage of what appears to be “unpredictable serendipity.”

Yes, it may sound as if I want to control serendipity. That control does not have to be narcissistic. When you water your plants or provide them with fertilizer, you are influencing their growth, and there is no negative stigma attached to that. It is about investing time and attention, and trying to understand how those subtle acts enter the subconscious and whether they have their own underlying mechanisms and reasons.

We attended an ecstatic dancing event where the organizers seemed to believe that intention could be established through the introduction of what I consider the ugliest form of techno music. I have an exceptionally low tolerance for this genre. Years ago, when I lived in the city and this music was played loudly during a gay parade, I forced myself to move to the suburbs simply to escape what felt like sonic aggression. But I stayed at this event not because of the music or the dancing — I stayed because of the woman, and I remained there for a prolonged period.

Then a strange kind of serendipity came to me. I suddenly felt as though I were a first-generation German born after World War II — it was the 1970s, and I was in West Berlin, in a decadent club filled with drugs, darkness, hopelessness, guilt, and meaningless music. I began to experience what I imagined the generation of Germans might have felt at that time: the pain of belonging to a once prosperous and industrious culture with extraordinary cultural roots, and then feeling complete detachment from it, along with a deep confusion about how to become proud of oneself again.

It goes without saying that I have never been to Germany through that period, and everything I felt was a product of imagination. I was naive enough to share this experience with the woman, and she understandably felt it was an insult to the event she had helped organize. But this story is not about the date.

The point is that a musical event — let us call it that, although I experienced it more as a form of sonic identity assault — triggered a state of consciousness in me. Simply acknowledging it was not enough. I began diving inward, trying to understand where it came from, how it related to other elements of my psyche, and most importantly, what mechanism in the sound produced this psychological response. In my engineering mind, I am convinced that if I can understand the mechanism, I can understand — and perhaps influence — the message. This investigation is what I have been pursuing over the last year, and it defines my current understanding of audio.

I have made many discoveries in this process. Unfortunately, communicating them using conventional audio language is almost impossible, because most of the technical vocabulary we use in audio has little direct relationship to the listener’s consciousness.

 I believe there is a great deal here to unpack for yourself, Amir.