Red, I've been following the above arguments for quite a while now and I am clearly on your side of the fence. In reading the above threads I began to wonder, if any member of the "honorable opposition" ever went to live concerts REGULARLY. But then, as you suggest, they are probably mainly concerned with the science behind the equipment,less with the musical event as such. They deride us as believers and do not see, that it is they who are also caught in beliefs, beliefs in a model of the world, which they mistakingly take for the world itself. They may be bright, well trained and knowledgeable, but as far as I can see, they seem to care little about epistemology and the inherent limits to anything we know. This is probably, why the "twain will never meet". Since we on our side of the fence seem rather on a quest for a musical experience, which would come as close as possible to that elusive goal of the "absolute sound", we are always on unsure ground in as far, as that we inherently will feel, what sounds right and what not, but we will never be able to "prove" this to a critical mind, who wants facts, which would fit into a MODEL of reality. ( That in many aspects this model is real enough, is obvious, without it we could not even switch on our systems, if there were any at all)But his model falls short of all possible experience. Its just a model not the world. We also have a model, which paradoxically is as subjective (none of us hears probably absolutely alike, both in measurable, as in qualitative terms) as it is psychologically objective ( the inner quest for that elusive absolute, which we all share ). To sit in the middle of a paradox is generally a painful experience, for how will you know what is "real" and what is "imagined." On the other hand, this dilemma will keep you aurally on your toes. It hones your listening acuity, trapped between the drive for "better sound" and the flints of doubt. Our often feeble attempts to translate what we expierience into "science", must sound to a trained scientific mind like the phantasmas of the Alchemists to post-Newtonian physics. And yet, if you remove the materialistic trappings from that, what the Alchemists were after, their efforts made sense in a spritial-transcendental way. To me here lies the hint of a parallel to what we are after. The Alchemist's substrate were base materials, and they of course knew nothing of the real chemical, physical changes they effected in their retorts. They developed a highly complex descriptive terminology to what they percieved, which sounds like ghibberish to modern science. Their actual goal, apart from those charlatans, who pretended to make gold from crap, seems to have been rather the quest for an elusive absolute, like in that lovely Zen story of the Ox and the Herdsman, where the quest is more important than the goal. We are on home ground here, deeply paradoxical indeed, because without that elusive goal, there would be no quest. We are like that famous donkey, with a carrot dangling in front of its nose. We'll never get it, but we are on the move. I prefer that state to that which identifies with whatever system, in order to have a nice warm place "behind the stove".
