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The whole notion of the de Charlus’ quest I find to be very interesting. Charlus feels that only use horn topology and compression drivers is able to deliver “superior” audio result, at least it was his experience. I do not feel that horn topology has an exclusively for greatness but if we do embrace the premise of the inquiry than what might be done by a person to achieve something closer to the proverbial “end of life” acoustic system? Charlus thinks that use the Macondo topology and line-level passive multi-amping, supplementing the system with the very best drivers is the most promising direction to go. It might or not might be the case but this certainly opens a platform for a very interesting subject: what and how a person can go if s/he is willing to undertake a direction of “end of life” acoustic system?

Well, this is a huge and very interesting subject and I slowly will be posting my thoughts about it. First we need to define the basic ground rules. A desire of a person to have new big speakers is absolutely irrelevant for the progress of the project. The DIYaudio.com web site (and many others) is full with all imaginable people who come up with all imaginable projects, one more stupid then another and most of them extremely bad projects with very unfortunate sonic consequences (with VERY few exemptions). Why most of audio projects failed? Because people try to build just new audio but this is very insufficient. Anything you do in audio will produce some kind of sound, so they render some kind of projects and up with “some kind” of sound and… that is end of the process. The reality is that the “serious audio” is much more than that.

I few days back in response to the Charlus initial post I started the thread “Where high-end audio starts?”

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=19524

…try your version of answers in that thread.

Someone might feel that I walk around the subject and do not bark orders what driver to buy and what capacitor to use. Well, that proverbial “someone” who feel this way is idiot and I hope it will be stop to read this thread now. The reality is that building a serious audio is rather a ceremony of learning about yourself then learning what drivers to buy. Only when person understand, very tangibly, own listening feeling, motivations and objectives, only than the person could put on the uniform or audio maker and start to think about own acoustic system…. at least about the acoustic system that I would be interested in.

Now is the main plot of my today’s post.

Pretend that you are a newcomer wanna-be-doctor to USA from a non-English speaking country. You have pretty much a need to learn English before you become US authorized physician. There is however another way to do it. You might start to study medicine in English, disregarding the fact that you are clueless in English. By doing this you are will learning foreign language IN CONTEXT to your professional skills and acquire of English proficiency happens almost itself. Ironically it is how it works with Audio.

If you “build audio” you end up with juts “another set of audio”. Instead of building audio you need to develop some kind of objectives that would be MUCH HIGHER THEN AUDIO ITSELF.  By perusing those “super objectives” and by utilizing audio as an instrument (or as a rendition language) of your “super objectives” you will automatically end up with a very serious audio. Practically none of audio people get it and most of them would not even understand the subject.  This is very unfortunate and it is not a surprise that there are not a lot of serious audio installations out there…

So, how do it in practically-strategic terms?  Discover and evolved in music listening your own NON AUDIO INTERESTS. Let for instance pretend that you are a full of yourself doctor-psychologist whose full-time job is criminalize natural humans feelings and to debilitate/desensitize people by injecting them with some idiotic psycho chemicals. So, you do what you learned to do, pay your mortgage but if you are not a complete Moron then you one a while feel for instance a nostalgia for humanity. Let pretend that you have discovered for instance Bruckner as some kind of self-therapy for humility and humbleness. Pretend you develop very specific and deep understanding of Bruckner humility and Bruckner-style of injection of humility into supremacy/inferiority balance. You would like to be able to consume more of those humility-enriching feelings but no one plays Bruckner around your town and if they do than they play it with complexity of Yankee Doodle tune. So, naturally you decided to invest your time and efforts into audio in order to be able recreate your cherished listening feeling by just pushing the “play” button...

Well, now you are about to build audio. Remember my example about the newcomer to USA from a non-English speaking country? So, do not build audio. Instead build a machine that would be the best to reproduce humility metaphors.  Yes, use the drivers, amplifiers, cable sand tonearms but they have to be just tools to accomplish something nobler and more important for you.  You will be very surprised to discovers that if your playback will be pushed to be able to operate objectively in the realms of let say “humility” than it will be super-capable to do all typical stupid audiophile sonic tricks.

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