What does listening to a speaker really tell us?

I may have been misusing the word all along, but when I speak of 'transparency', I'm referring to the amount of information on the disc that is actually conveyed, sort of the opposite of veiled or smoothed over.

What I gather is that you are speaking of here is more a question of neutrality and accuracy, no? As in, how do we really know if what we are hearing is exactly what was recorded? I'm not sure that we do, frankly.

Personally, I draw the line between audio systems that sound like recorded music, and those that sound live. I need a connection with the players, and many audio systems lose me for the same reason that a lot of abstract art does. Because somehow I'm supposed to relate to the final product, but not the artist him/herself. An audio system that does not convey the humanity and energy of the players first and foremost loses me in a hurry. And while you may be alluding to accuracy and neutrality, I believe those judgments to be more intellectually based--and thus, more distancing--and have less of an gut-level, emotional impact than transparency does. In other words, IMO live music doesn't convey pleasantry. Rather, it bites down hard.

Very interesting topic!

Mark me as a person who having once fallen for "look at the perfect sine wave this unit produces" eventually graduated to a more mature understanding of the audio ARTS in all their varied subjective splendor. The good news is that anyone, who got suckered on accuracy as an equilvalent of audio nirvana AND is willing to admit to it, merits an opportunity to explore the wonderful world of perception called musicality. Great topic!

So ignorance is bliss?

So, I hear a lot of people saying that the only thing that matters is whether the speakers (and the rest of the system) present a pleasureable experience. I guess what I was saying was that, if you do that, you have two variables in that equation: There is the quality of the performance and recording and the quality of the playback that influence one's experience. If your playback system is NOT absolutely transparent, and what your hearing is NOT a pleasureable experience, how do you know if it's your system or the performance/recording that's causing the displeasure? I would think one would like to put the burden on the performance/recording to meet our needs and use our system to prop them up.

Pawlowski,
I think that's exactly what has most listeners conclude that XYZ component/cable/system is the "best", because it makes the music sound the way they want to hear it. We are always the litmus test for the system AND the recording. And where do each of us purport to stand on that malleable scale of evaluation? At dead-center neutral. Our perspective always looks to be the most sensical, the one against which all others are measured generally as being equal to or less than. Add one more like-minded vote to our own and we have successfully converted opinion into fact. Or so we would like to believe.