I met a few days back a person who does high-end audio and in fact he does. He has multiple turntables, he has discrimination taste in audio components/elements, has his ideas how a playback might or should be built. For all intended purpose he is a proper high-end audio practitioner. Well, why write about it?

Well, this is not so simple. Many people who do audio have in my view a wrong perception what audio is. Over the ears the industry fools entrenched into the feeble audio mind a notion that high-end audio is some kind of special equipment, special sound reproduction techniques or special organization of listening environment. For sure they all are very important ingredients and I am not the one who would disagree with it. However, there is a twist in all of it. With all importance of the ingredients above those ingredients take time to conquer, in most cases year sand year and very frequently it is a life-long endeavor. It is very frequent that a person spent dozen of years to deal with the ingredients, spent enormous amount of money and time-efforts to set up the “ingredients right” and in the end experience very mediocre high-end audio result.

So, what I argue is that the proverbial composite efforts that are allocated for entire high-end audio shall not be spent so heavily on the setting up the ingredients.

In audio we discover the “ingredients” first and then we engage the ingredients and try to see how the benefits of the ingredients work out for us. I am not a bit supporter of allopathic medicine (ironically it is a husband of chimonc is taking here) but in allopathic medicine doctors do administer to a patients all available range of pharmacologically active agents hoping that one of them hit the source of the illness. In contrary the allopathic docs study biology, physiology, anatomy, the impact the drags have to the body and try to surgically match the active pharmacological agent to the given symptoms. You understand that it is not how it works in audio and all my frail efforts to advocate this concept for years mainly are not understood by audio public. Here it is 10 years back:

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=432

A regular audio Moron reading all of this shall experience disgust as I am making him or her to read another blubbering about audio without telling what component to buy, which knob to turn and what next golden bumper to polish. The whole story is that the expectation of audio public of the efforts that they spent in audio is very much miss-allocated. Public feels that better audio deliver better result or at least a better satisfaction but they act like the allopathic drug designer who do not know biology, physiology and anatomy.

So, what is the point of all of it? I do not advocate people to study music; I do not think it is necessary not to mention that majority of crap that audio people ordinary play is hardly music. Studying music have own problem as music education is not necessarily focus on the right things. What I think need to be done is to be developed a New Realm of Reason in audio and good 80% of audio efforts a person spends in audio shall be targeted toward that Realm of Reasons. After all we do not looking for “sound” but rather for “satisfaction”. As now the audio people derive their satisfactions from glow of the tubes, from knowing that this sapphire cable elevator cost more then their neighbor car and from his/her feeling that frustration that was planted in him/het by the industry has found a resolution. If however people would discover within themselves a different drive to satisfaction, something that I call the New Realm of Reason in audio and spend the majority of this audio efforts to serve that Realm then I think the audio practice and audio results would be very different.

If you remember I started all of it with the example of the guy with multiple turntables who I felt did not have “it” in audio? Was it possible that he had “it” but in the audio language that we use there are no way to communicate about true audio? It is highly possible. If he has pin in some kind of internal organ and I have the identical pain then instead of taking with each other about pain we are talking about Obamacare prescription coverage for the drags that presumably would cure the pain. That is how far audio people set apart from each other because instead of dealing with Realm of Audio Reason they deal with peripheral irrelevancy.

I do think that audio people need to re-sell audio to themselves.