wrote in message
On May 3, 5:11 pm, wrote:
But "realism" isn't definable, whereas "accuracy" is
easy to define and gives us something concrete to work
towards.
I don't see why ease of definability should in any way
affect our aesthetic goals.
Because you can't hit the target if you don't know where
it is.
Well there you go.
Hold that thought!
In an earlier post I defined ideal realism as reproduced sound that is
ABX-indistinguishable from what I hear when I'm seated in my preferred seat
in the concert hall, with the same musicians, the same music, the same
performance.
IME, very few audiophiles have access to the resources that it takes to make
that kind of determination.
One of the most ludicrous examples of this showed up recently on the Gizmodo
site:
http://i.gizmodo.com/5213042/why-we-need-audiophiles
Billed as: "A Gizmodo Listening Test"
.....with the operative word being "test". In a triumph of high end
audiophile journalism over reason, we find that this isn't even a proper
test for lack of a reasonable reference standard.
In an example of one of the most poorly-thought-out examples of pro-analog,
anti-digital propaganda yet, the author demeans a good digital music player
in a bogus comparison involving two different pieces of music, two vastly
different recordings, one played on an iPod with presumably the standard
iPod earbuds; versus a high end audiophile system featuring $65,000 Wilson
MAXX3 speakers. No surprise that they found that the two systems sounded
different.
And that's the problem with so much audiophile posturing. How do these
people know what the recording they are listening to is supposed to sound
like? They can't, not in any reasonable sense. Their "reference standard"
is not "The Absolute Sound" but rather it is a figment of their imagination.