@kerrybh
I agree with your comment about how people used to congregate at audio salons and learned about music. A corollary though, is that the music we had available spanned the time from analogue to digital, so many of us were accustomed to acoustic instruments. The younger crowd’s music is mostly electronic (going by the pop charts), so it’s not surprising they don’t react to a beautiful violin solo. The problem with that is that nearly all audiophile equipment is designed to make acoustic instruments sound like ’themselves’ as heard live. How do you evaluate when you listen to music that is "assembled" (e.g.,, the guitarist phones in (literally) his part of the music? I call it ’The Frankenstein effect’ in pop music: everything assembled, but very little of the music is ’real’ instruments.
It’s no surprise that the young thing audiophiles are delusional and ’hearing things.’ They haven’t heard what we have, and consequently it is MUCH harder for them to evaluate music, when most of their musical diet is ’made up’ sounds from a computer. I’d think it snake oil, too, if I didn’t know intimately, the sound of a Yamaha flute, and someone was going on about all the ’low-level’ supposed detail. The kind of detail that distinguishes what Brand/model an instrument is instead of sounding like a generic flute (or any other instrument).
