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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Accuracy vs. Musicality (and YMMV)
Post Subject: Goethe’s path: events waiting to be witnessedPosted by Romy the Cat on: 3/15/2026
All of this is correct, but I would suggest looking at it from a slightly different perspective. You tend to look at hi-fi as an object — a discipline, a hobby, a business, or an industry. But try, for a moment, to abandon that approach and consider hi-fi as a concept. I simply want to offer a prompt that you might find interesting.
The concept of hi-fi assumes that, through different hierarchies of sound reproduction equipment, we can influence the quality of our audible experience. This is correct, but only at the level of acknowledgment — not at the level of consciousness or the understanding of meaning.
Still too abstract? Let me put it more simply.
You have a good playback system. You listen to a remarkable performance, and something in it leaves a deep impression on you. Now take the full amplitude of that excitement and imagine attributing it to perhaps two hundred different factors. The role of the audio equipment would be only one of them. After all, we are all economists in one form or another when it comes to profit attribution...
So why is it that when we have a life-shaking experience during playback, we so quickly attribute that experience to the playback system itself? If a person die in his sleep, then we do not blame that he die from. If you begin to examine that question carefully, you may start to see where this line of thinking is leading.Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site