High Performance Audio - The End?

@dannad 

I don't think I have had enough caffeine yet this morning for this thread.

This thread gives me a headache, coffee or no coffee... ugh

@daros71 

I largely agree with your post, except to say that even the 'realistic' school of audio recording and reproduction is still painting a watercolor more than taking a realistic image of the event

how do you fit a live band, jazz ensemble, much less an orchestra into a home listening room?

we are talking downscaled and artificial facsimiles here... and our minds do the rest

@dougeyjones

what is 'EDM'??

music producers of course are commercially driven

they produce music carefully, with defined objectives targeting their intended audiences to drive sales

the issue or challenge for us who have our very high end gear is that much of that music is really not made to sound best played on our systems - we are simply not their target audience

mass market vs niche...

properly voiced opinion

which is why consumers who seek and chase ’ultimate resolution’ from their rigs at some point realize it is a massively flawed exercise that doesn’t lead to musical satisfaction

imo too many hifi geeks don’t get to hear real live (unamplified or minimally amplified) music - and thus lack the reference for what natural sounding music sounds like

otoh someone who goes to coachella or hears springsteen in the meadowlands amongst 40,000 people and treats that as their live music reference point -- well then chasing ’real and live sounding’ music from their home hifi may well lead them down this primrose path smiling

pretty much everybody has an angle, a schtick to play the angle

youtubers want views, so they put up click bait and say stimulating/controversial things

high end audio salespeople seek big fish, won’t waste time with tire kickers and peons

even if folks have good intentions (or no mal-intentions), the profit move overrides and the behavior, actions and attitudes follow suit (not to mention other biases towards sloth, self aggrandisement, etc etc)

way of the world folks... capitalist society... human nature... need to eat, so need to hunt and kill - some get angry, disillusioned, jaded in the process, life is hard for most

some other folks are lucky, plenty of money gotten somehow, so kick back, enjoy, observe, try to be neutral, without agenda -- but even some in this position are out for themselves (...more is better, greed is good, keep score on money in bank... etc etc)

but most aren’t in that position - especially in ’passion driven’ industries like fashion, cars, music, watches, movies, tv - these are populated mostly by hungry folks trying to scrape by to the next week, much less build a nest egg

funny (and maybe) a little sad when folks on the forum tell others what and how to enjoy - we shouldn’t be so heavy handed, best to maintain some modesty - the beauty and journey of this pursuit is to learn and acquire what sounds good for each of us!

a system can certainly be high resolution and also enjoyable to listen to... all things equal, higher res is better than lower res, but often higher res comes at the expense of some other tonal tradeoff, especially in more budget oriented systems

the difficulty is that different recordings are mixed and mastered hot/cool, with/without spatial cues, overdubbed to death vs simple honest mic-ing

kinda makes the case for old school tone controls, loudness button for low level listening etc etc

you can enjoy it all, played all the same on the same system... just a function of what an individual learns to enjoy (or call ’enjoyable’)

his other points aside, i feel guttenberg certainly calls it right that high res systems that have super revealing treble can often become grating when playing modern (or even 90’s) super hot mixed pop albums... i guess those are still enjoyable if you turn down the volume enough LOL

more heat than light here in this latest tussle around doug schroeder’s words

a poor choice of words, no doubt, that has elicited negative responses, folks feeling talked down to - even if doug’s intent is hardly to have that effect

reality is more expensive systems, done right, money well spent, will sound better than more modest ones ... no doubt about it, better is better...

... but the dimensions of ’betterness’ comes are many -- fill a big room? image like a real performance? produce natural timbers of real instruments and voices? resolve microdynamics to the n-th degree? sound pure and full at low volumes?

it is all in the relative prioritization - hard to have it all in an affordable system for the ’average hifi nerd’ wanting real good sound

to me it is what this board is all about -- learning about yourself, your tastes, your priorities, learning about equipment, its advances, SQ available at various price points, how different pieces dance well together and what doesn’t -- then you find your ideal spot on the value curve and build your system

@lukiluki

you are new here

your question should be asked on a fresh thread, with the topic shown properly in the title -- see the button above called ’Start a New Discussion’.

putting it here in this discussion about something totally different is not the right place