George, Pathological skepticism, which we see rear its ugly head from time to time, especially on this particular fuse thread, but also many others, was addressed thoroughly in Zen and the Art of Debunkery. Perhaps you missed it. The author wrote, "Skepticism is an integral part of the scientific method, professional debunkers — often called ‘kneejerk skeptics’ — tend to be skeptics in name only, and to speak with little or no authority on the subject matter of which they are so passionately skeptical.” Sound familiar? It should.
I can certainly understand why those who were trapped in the paradigms of the 80s and 90s got left behind the real audiophile journey. Not the fake audiophile journey that most people, like yourself, apparently, are familiar with and accept as real. One reason I employ the subtitle, Advanced Audio Concepts, for my company (Machina Dynamica) is the recognition that many audiophiles, for whatever reason, view anything that is outside or beyond their ken or experience as foreign or alien. "Unexplained" as you put it. One assumes you guys down in the remote islands in the Pacific don’t get a lot of the memos the rest of us get. That might explain your confusion and anger. An audio device or tweak only needs to be sufficiently advanced to be labeled magic or BS. Do you believe cameras steal your soul?
From introduction to Zen and the Art of Debunkery:
"Seeing with humility, curiosity and fresh eyes was once the main point of science. But today it is often a different story. As the scientific enterprise has been bent toward exploitation, institutionalization, hyperspecialization and new orthodoxy, it has increasingly preoccupied itself with disconnected facts in a psychological, social and ecological vacuum. So disconnected has official science become from the greater scheme of things, that it tends to deny or disregard entire domains of reality and to satisfy itself with reducing all of life and consciousness to a dead physics.
In forgetting that all knowledge is provisional and subject to new discovery, mainstream science seems to be treading the weary path of the ossified religions it presumed to replace. Where free, dispassionate inquiry once reigned, emotions now run high in the defense of a fundamentalized “Scientific Truth.” As anomalies mount up beneath a sea of denial, defenders of the Faith and the Kingdom cling with increasing self-righteousness to the hull of a leaking paradigm. Faced with provocative evidence of things undreamt of in their philosophy, many otherwise mature scientists revert to a kind of reactive infantilism characterized by blind faith in the absoluteness of the familiar."
An ordinary man has no means of deliverance!
geoff kait
machina dynamica
advanced audio concepts
