@allears4u
Lets say you go out to eat. All you want is a steak cooked right but the chef has it too salty or too well or its too tough. You never would have "evaluated’ the steak quality unless some "distortion" would have caught your attention. You intended to simply enjoy the steak meal but you were jarred out of your naïve wish but these cooking errors. And so it is with audio for me and I suspect for most of us. We fully intend to just sit back and enjoy our choice of music when we are jolted by the "too much salt" issue. We weren’t looking for the "distortion" but it forced itself into our palate uninvited. Are audiophiles too picky. spoiled OCD obsessives looking for blemishes in a blemished world? Maybe. But frankly the crap some people tolerate calling itself music reproduction is the reason so few bother or believe music can be an exhilarating. engaging, and an enlightening experience.
very well made point (well, at least up to the point you mentioned the raven amp 😂)
no, seriously, this is an apt description of what i go through sometimes, when i sit down to listen for a while.... i am listening to the music till something starts to grate sonically (of course i make allowances if it is new music, thus just the recording quality)... i make a mental note of what the sonic ’problem’ is... keep listening, if it recurs, then i am flipped into problem solving mode, and out of just ’enjoy the performance’ mode --
just like as you say, i want to enjoy the steak - then bite in and think 'man this is real chewy...'
