Helen Schmidt wrote:
Anyone's concept of truth-to-life is relative to that person's set of
potential concepts and how they are weighted; in short, how they
listen and what they listen for. Although the objectivists would like
to claim some special weight to their opinions about the
life-like-ness of audio systems, their opinions are merely their
opinions, and hold no special weight above the opinions of others.

It appears that a couple of times I wrote "Vinyl is better at XYZ" and
forgot to put "relative to my listening;" however, this was simply an
oversight. (Because I never expected that all other people in the
world would share my experience, I didn't realize how I had to make
this *absolutely clear* to the objectivists.) The objectivists are
quick to remind anyone who starts a sentence "Vinyl is better at ..."
that they are "merely stating an opinion." Funny how they never apply
that to their own opinions about digital.

The real argument here is not about who's opinion is right. That would
be a very boring argument. Of course some people find digital to be
more lifelike and some find analog to be more lifelike. That is
elementary. The real argument is about the way objectivists attempt to
undermine the conceptual basis of opinions they don't like, and their
subtle epistemological errors in doing so.

What does any of this matter, if we aren't going to change our
opinions? After all, I'm not trying to convince Stewart to prefer
vinyl. At the end of the day, Stewart will still like CD, Chung and
Bob and Steven Sullivan will still like the things they like. So why
does this matter?

Personally, the reason it matters to me is the effect on new people
entering the hi-fi field, and kids growing up and starting to learn
about audio. They hear the adults and the more experienced people
assert things about the world, and they are influenced by that. A kid
might hear an explanation of why format XYZ is superior to format ABC,
and he might internalize this assertion, and (and this is key) he
might take this explanation to be a truth about his *subjective*
experience. People are prone to taking objective statements and
thinking they define in some way subjective truth.

This definitely works both ways; I have the same issue with a high-end
salesman who gives an explanation of why vinyl is technically superior
to digital.

So to be more specific about the objectivist's errors:

A pervasive error is what I call the "level transfer fallacy." This
is the notion that all means of characterizing, describing, or
perceiving a signal at one level will transer directly to that signal
at another level. A visual analogy will make clear that this is not
generally true:

Suppose we have a photograph which reproduces a scene. We can inspect
it one of two ways: we can view it as a whole, or we can inspect it
one square cm at a time through a viewfinder. It is trivial to propose
distortions in the photograph which would be perceivable at one level
but not the other. A grainy texture would be far more apparent in
close inspection and possibly invisible at a distance. On the other
hand, a distortion in perspective (such as slight barrel distortion)
would be imperceptible in close inspection, but immediately obvious in
a whole view.

Since the objectivist is no longer concerned that looking at the
low-level details misses some part of the big picture, he then
declares that the lowest level is *fundamental,* absolutely the most
important level to work on in the service of fidelity.

True, and not an error or fallacy on the objectivist's part. If it were
merely an assumption, as you imply, then it might well be a fallacy.
But it is not an assumption; it is an evidence-based theory. It is a
physical, biological, and psychological fact.

If you have evidence to the contrary, we'd all like to hear it. But if
all you can do is pretend that the evidence against you doesn't exist,
you are contributing nothing.

This is an understandable mistake, because often in science, knowledge
is built layer-on-layer. Most complex truths are built on simpler
truths. In mathematics, a theorem can be proven by breaking it down
and proving each component separately. So surely audio perception can
be understood by breaking it into elemental components? Musical form
can be understood by breaking it down into individual notes and
perceiving those notes separately?

No it can't. That's the error--to take the composition property of
objective reality and apply it to subjective reality, where things
aren't the same. Understanding musical notes *does not* move one
closer to understanding musical phrases. Understanding how a
microphone sounds *does not* move one closer to understanding how the
details of music work together to create the musical meaning.

I call this the "subjective composition fallacy"--that subjective
reality can be understood by composing together many smaller
subjective impressions.

This is what we call a straw man. No one claims it. But you need to
pretend that someone claims it, because you need someone easy to argue
with.

bob