High Performance Audio - The End?

there can be no denying that the vast quantity of popular music that we listen to is not particularly well recorded.

That’s been the case for as long as I’ve been alive. People who only listen to pop music mostly just listen for fun and don’t really care about sound quality that much, so the stuff is mixed to sound good on a Boombox, crappy earbuds, or stock car radio. That was as true in the 70s as it is today and so I fail to see the point. There will always be a population that cares about making and listening to good and well-recorded music, and thus there will always be equipment made to play it back as faithfully and/or artfully as possible. To think otherwise is to me just an exercise in rhetoric.

On the flip side, turntables are starting to become “cool” again, and bars where people can just sit and listen to well-recorded music on good systems were starting to catch on before the damn virus hit — the theory being that people are so inundated with being plugged in and always “on” that they’re starting to embrace ways to disconnect, slow down, and just be in their own heads for a moment. If that continues and more people get to experience what a decent system can actually do and for not all that much money, who knows? Maybe in a counterculture kinda way higher-end audio could experience a bit of a revival.

A lot of truth to that. A big bunch of my favorite music sounds best as mp3's in the Honda. But some tracks from the same recording sound fabulous on the big rig. A good session sounds good on anything.

I gave up years ago trying to ever improve.  It got to the point where I was listening to equipment and not the music.  I could tell you the pieces and parts of a song but not the melody.  It was totally less than satisfying.  I sold all my stuff and went much simpler.  I probably dropped back to 80%, but the enjoyment factor shot to 100+!  I just turn my kit on and listen, it’s really made a big difference for me.

Could it be possible that the future of high end audio be totally different in a decade or so? Maybe some day soon, nobody will be spinning discs anymore . All of your music will be either in the cloud or on some hard drive. Your cell phone will have a great DAC built in and your speakers will be hung on your wall, where DSP technology will make it sound great. Our current gears will be collectors’ items and we all will be old men reminiscing about the past on some forum or telling our grand children how our amplifiers could heat up our listening room during the winter. Who knows?

His videos always leave me disappointed, and wondering if he really believes his own BS or is he just okay with selling his audience short. Because every time he gets the chance to tell people the truth he instead panders to their vanity, fear and ignorance.

Revealing is nothing like what he is talking about, which is bias, hype and coloration. He's saying its actually good to make your system sound bad, just as long as it sounds good to you with certain music.

This is exactly the crap you'd feed someone if you want to sell them stuff, but its terrible advice if you're truly intent on helping someone build a satisfying system.

There's no such thing as a satisfying system that works the way he describes. Anything like this is colored, plain and simple. And so whatever it sounds good with is at the expense of making other stuff sound bad. That's literally his advice. 

So what happens is you buy something like that and you're so happy for a while, but only a while, because systems like that are boring, uninteresting, and you inevitably tire of what you once found exciting, and eventually so sick of it you just have to get something, anything else.

This site is chock full of posts every week of people asking that very question, they want to get some speaker, amp or whatever and always it "I listen to this" or "I listen to that" or sometimes even "I listen to this, that and the other thing" but always as if that matters. When what really matters is finding what makes everything sound equally good.

Which he says cannot be done. Which is strange, since I just bought Moabs and practically the first thing I say is everything sounds good on them. Not just good, but fabulous. When everything fabulous is to be had for under $5k by what stretch of the imagination is it impossible?

One thing he got right, sort of, is that with entry level and mid-fi gear, and even to a certain extent high end, when push comes to shove its better to err on the side of smooth vs detailed. But not by much, and its a total judgment call. Which is why he only sort of got it right, because he just said smooth. 

Oh well. I'm sure he knows his audience better than I do.