$9000 speaker Orangutan or speaker + amplifier

"Anyone attending regular concerts and wanting a very true rendition of the instruments at home can find the sound getting old after a while."

That quote of mine refers to the sound coming from a coloured transducer, in this case, the pleasant but coloured Harbeth.

Mapman, photography with a current $500 camera is a LOT better than nearly all high end systems.

I think you are mixing metaphors....mixing apples and oranges....the performance and orginal compositions/scores/melodies is the art in audio. Do we really want to change and sully that art? I certainly don't. And I've never seen a colored up version strike the hearts of listeners than a very literal version. Consistently, I see listeners get far more pleasure from very literal recovery from the record, as opposed to colored up versions.

"Mapman, photography with a current $500 camera is a LOT better than nearly all high end systems."

The fact that a relatively inexpensive camera these days can take such good pictures is just one reason why I often wonder how much beef there really is in high end audio.

And lets not even get started on the quality of HD TV.

IS it really so much harder and more expensive to reproduce sound well? Gotta wonder....

But there is a lot that goes into "good sound", that's for sure. Both objective and subjective. See the "$10000 power conditioner thread" for more fascinating banter on this topic.

Oh Mapman, you are goading me now with that type of crazy subject!

It really is harder to get good sound than good still images. The still images are static: no transients! Easy! And judging it is easy....it's static!

Movies are just series of stills....the static gets repeated every so often.

Not so simple with the ear, whose bandwidth is high, that is extremely time sensitive (so phase distortion shows greatly), and which no single transducer can effectively satisfy.

Consider this: the ear/brain system is 10 octaves wide!!!!

They eye is less than one octave wide in its frequency spectrum! Ouch, that ear is hard to satisfy.

As for "beef" in high end audio, there is little beef. Lots of guys saying they are from Bell Labs (tall tale from that guy), NASA (almost all of those but one that I know are false), NSA scientist (bogus).....so you are right, lots of experimenting, only a few that have real scientific / physics / engineering chops. The job is harder, the market smaller.

A lot of substance and good points from several folks in this thread, far more than in most.

Kidd,

Not aware of the concept of an octave being applied to light/eyes, so not sure how to digest the comparison to sound/ears, but I'll buy the timing considerations being more difficult part as mattering when it comes to playback of recorded music.