Let's forget about being politically correct

Asa, you did it again. RE: your 04-14-03 post, well said, I completely agree. Just after I resolved that you and I would have to agree to disagree, you offer two posts that suggest that we agree on more and disagree on less.

Unsound, yes, actually we agree on this - I have always known this. But also, I always liked your scappy spirit. As I said, it was fun too.

Many of our ideas, however - that we get from the societal matrix of assumptions, in our time it happens to be scientific materialism - many times get in our way. We are all here talking because of what Shubertmaniac says so eloquently (and, relative to me, concisely!!). So, do you think it is a karmic coincidence that we all meet at this nexus called Audiogon? What are we sharing? And, see this: I am not pointing towards anything that we all don't already know; we are all seeking this beauty in music - the musical event between our mind and the sound, the event where mind and music merge. This is why my positions are so "strong"; they are not necesssarily strong in content, although that may be true sometimes, depending on the context, but are strong in pointing to something we already know. We all sit down with music to experience its meaning. And, if later, while you start thinking again with societies' assumptions, and these assumptions tell you that there is no meaning beyond what you can divine with objective measuring, then OK. But that mind still has to confront the truth of his/her whole experience when listening to the music; the scientific materialist must eventually admit that he experiences "something" even when he is not thinking through the prism of his assumptions. And, in fact, he must admit that his/her deepest experiences of music, verging on the ineffable, are not within his assumption's grasp of explanation at all (which frightens him/her, hence the emotion you sometimes see as the scientific arguments are deconstructed).

So, I start off these discussions with a big advantage: I know that they know, beyond their attachment to the security of their matrix of ideas, that they already know what I am saying, because they have already performed the experiment of listening to music-beauty themselves, on themselves. This is the irrational part of the arguments from those who then claim that such experiences are irrational, ie anything outside of an objective scientific expanation of reality is some sort of mystical regression (Stone the Witch!!). They conduct an experiemnt on their own mind of listening and then, most un-scientifically, then engage others denying the results of that experiment. They engage others not to change the others minds, but to hold unto their own matrix of ideas, which makes them feel safe (hence, the rigid shouting down you sometimes see). Science does this also, and not coincidentally: denying the mind that created science in the first place! It is also not a coincidence that the same people who themselves experience the beauty in music, and yet still deny that experience later in default to the presumed security of their inconsistent matrix of ideas, are the same minds who are attached to scientific assumptions and feel that the manipulation of matter (tools; technology; THD) is the only way to truth, or the only way to find the truth of/in Music.

Interesting, eh?

Asa: Science does have meaning. Science is not only a manipulation of matter but of ideas, too. You stated
Zeno's paradox. The great physicists Newton and Liebnitz solved this apparent dilemma by discovering the ingenious "limit". Without the limit we would not have to the ability to manipulate and solve differential or integral calculus problems. Without differential equations we would not have ac circuits, and without ac circuits we would not have audio. And without audio we would not have the matrix of audio/music/oneness. So science does have its place in the realm of ideas. Man's ability to reason deductively or inductively has allowed us to manipulate and understand the material universe so that we can ponder our oneness with the uniqueness of self and the cosmos around us.

Shubert, you are swinging to the other end, without need I don't think; I didn't say that science had no value, much less no meaning; in fact, I believe I said the opposite (please see above again).

On the assumption that you are playing a devil's advocate role, let me address what you ask.

First, the "What Is," aka Reality, is quite accommodating in its suseptibility to cognitive approximations, science being one of them. Now, if you want to set up an assumption so that your assumption will work, that's OK (as in a differential finite assumption so your math will work), but I don't know how ingenious (read: novel) that is; all mathematics is based upon axioms. And, yes, I'm glad it works; I like my stereo, this chair, my car.

Yes, science is ideas - I think that is implicit in what I said, my reference to tools/technology being the product of empiric methodology (although Homo Habilis struck a rock and used it to kill, so technology is not limited exclusively to what science has wrought in that regard. A quickening as of late, let's say).

Can you walk out your front door and point to "science"? No, because it is not a thing, but an abstraction that refers to a set of assumptions about reality. I have gone into this before, so I'll be brief, but the cognitive orientaion of the "scientific" mind is orientated towards matter, or form, hence the "materialism" in scientific materialism. Modern science, as it has evolved as a discipline, however, is quite tied the exercise of the result of that power of the mind focused on matter, namely, an increased power to manipulate matter, which forms we call tools. So, no, science is not the tools it produces from an exercise upon matter of its assumptions, but the assumptions themselves, ie its thought-rules.

Last, while, yes, science can be used to see Oneness as reflected in the interconnectedness of the material plane, if you believe that it is only experienced that way, then you are limiting yourself by that assumption - which is, I beleive, what I said above, not that science per se has no meaning. It has relative meaning in the context of experiencing as a whole, and not determintive, and has greater applications, obviously, upon the material plane (cascading axioms or not).

If you choose to see holism from the sum of its reductionism, then that is a good pointing too, but modern science as a discipline remains highly enjoined to the product of its thought-rules: technology, or matter manipulated into forms of itself for purposes of utility, namely ours. Add to that the Capitalist assumption of infinite greed and the accumulation of product, mix it up with the scientific materialist/tecnologic tie-in and you've got...well, what we've got. And, alas, what we don't have...

I am going to lift my imposed self ban on posting at Audiogon to respond to this thread.

Saying that in general tube preamps are better than SS preamps to me really has no meaning. My example of this would be when I got my Ayre K-3x w/phono stage preamp. Before, I was using a Sonic Frontiers 3SE preamp (the best tube preamp SF ever made) and a seperate pur tube phono stage (made by Cursio Electronics out of San Jose, CA). The SF3SE had upgraded Brimar tubes in it, and I liked the piece very much.

However, I brought the Ayre K-3x into my system, and all I can say is WOW! The K-3x with phono was a significangly better linestage in my system than the SF3SE. It was also a much better phono stage than my pure tube phono preamp. What does this tell me??? This tells me it is meaningless to make the generalization that tubes are better than SS for preamps. One must listen for themselves and make that decision on a case by case basis.

Getting into abstract philosophy of science and music rhetoric is an interesting endeavor. And I can tell Asa has studied a lot of philosophy primarilly because one of my majors is in philosophy. But where the rubber meets the metal, one must make a determination for themselves.

Before I made this preamp move to the K-3x, I had friends and 'experts' tell me there was no way is hell that the K-3x could outperform the SF3SE. They also said that the K-3x phono would in no way out perform a pure tube phono stage... Go figure...

Funny thing is that if someone with a good ear were blind folded and listened to my system, they would probably think it had at least 1 tube component. My system does sound more like tubes than SS. I have friends who are tube freaks (and hate SS) that love the sound of my system.

So much of listening to music is subjective. We all hear a little differently. Some of us cannot hear altogether. We all have mostly different systems more or less. We all have different rooms. And recordings... People tend to forget that the music they hear from a system first goes from the artist into a mic through wires into a mixer device of sorts into some sort of medium writer then onto some sort of medium which is then transposed/copied onto another medium which we play in our systems. If you really want to get technical, our music systems will never be able to actually portray music because science tells us that due to the vast difference in nature between music projected from an instrument and music projected from a speaker. There is a great article that was in Stereophile on this subject:

http://www.stereophile.com/showarchives.cgi?78

I try to always write from experience and not from the theoretical. I strongly feel that following generalizations in audio like gosphel is not a good thing. It is like reading the specifications of a manual and thinking you know how a piece sounds. I personally have no idea how any piece would sound in my system until I put it in my system.

This is the difference between experience and the theoretical. One can theorize about anything, but in the end, one is not going to really learn anything until a person has experience. Philosophy and rhetoric (and advise) only get us so far. One can read books all day about music and listening to music. But this does not give us any experience with music. You have to do the listening if you want to experience music. We have to try out different things in our respective systems if we are going to learn about them and how components/cables/cords can influence the end sound of our systems.

And in a way, Audiophiles are scientist. Through a lot of trial and error we build our systems to sound better and better (hopefully). This last judgement may be somewhat subjective, but science is a lot ways IS SUBJECTIVE. Especially when related to the human body. I like pointing out that Nutritionalists love to debate about what is a good diet for us (see Mr. Atkins). The operation of the human body is still a mystery to science in a lot of ways, and only likely stories have described certain things. Scientific explanations themselves are likely stories that are surpassed by more likely stories when more accurate data has been obtained. Audiophiles are scientists of sorts... scientists that are have a very small test group making the experiments and judgements. It may not be like black and white number theory, but it is better than putting change in a spring wound meter and assuming that you are going to get your full 30 min for putting in two quarters. (On a side note, it took some 10 year old kid to do an experiment for a science fair on the old spring wound parking meters to see if actually one got the amount of time they had paid for. The meters he experimented on deviated so much (from exact time) it caused such a scare in the city (I think some folks sued class action), that all meters were replaced with digital ones. This pretty much set a trend for the entire US. No 'adult' or 'expert' initiated the childs experiments although as adults we are the ones that pay seriously for parking.) Go figure...

KF