How much money do you want to waste?

Wow, really interesting we can try to pull Kant into the picture of audiophilia. This sort of begs the question of whether the enjoyment of music via hi-fi is a physical or metaphysical one: i think most true audiophiles such as yourself will agree it's the latter. Just to make things clear, though, Kant never delved into subjectivity. Rather, he reinforced the validity of Hume's objectivity by combining it with a lens of a priori, which is super-real, not subjectivity.

It is also quite interesting how we audiophiles have a sense of space and time (would this be considered prat?). However, is this sense of space and time, in audio terms, a priori or synthetic? I would argue it is synthetic because it is an conglomeration of many things we've experienced before audiophelia such as the pace and rhythm of live performances, different degrees of spaciousness such as sight-seeing at the Grand Canyon (yes, space and time is deemed a priori by Kant, but, I think reproduction of space and time is semantically and realistically synthetic).

Regarding subjective vs. objective in terms of building a hi-fi system. I must maintain my position that it is an objective means to a subjective end. I have to say building a system of physics, engineering and trial and error. Let me make a strawman example, if subjectionist is in charge of producing stereo equipment, we might have a stereo company composed of surrealists that are trying to sell us breadmakers and claiming they are Krell amps (which reminds me of the king's new clothing).

Regarding audio neurosis, these people who are competing with the Jones can have both good and detrimental effects, based on their intelligence and taste. Their money is obviously going to the pockets of audio researchers and designers who will improve on the status quo. Lets hope these money go to the right people who have integrity and dilegence to reproducing true audio sound for the enjoyment of the end users. These people with neurosis have good ears too, I hope.

This being said, I am some what neurotic too. I enjoy audio, yet I am never happy truly with it. Maybe I should pick up an instrument and learn to play for myself. Nah, I rather like immersing myself in my own system; sort of like Zen and Motorcycle Mechanic...(or whatever that book is called).

The intermediary step between objectivism and subjectivism is rationalism, why things sound the way they do (or at least more rational answers as to why they sound the way they do, not just because I changed a cable, but what about this cable and its particular design is changing the sound, and express this in even more precise manner, mathematize it, scientifically audible terms). From there we could lay the truth as our source and say some things are more accurate than others (now whether or not they sound better is another story since the source itself may be bad), more faithful to the source, and then we'd have objectivism. What's amusing is their very methods, and/or the things they espouse, could never have even come to exist under their philosophy in the first place, nothing would have ever progressed to this state under subjectivism: lets bash current mirrors on the input stage of an amplifier and praise some simpler asymetrical resistive loading? That said the subjectivist ideology and its place in the current audio world certainly lacks, consistency, if nothing else.

OK Smiley.

What kind of cables did Kant use?

Viggen, I think we would, at this point, have to talk in person to carry out this conversation; the connection is breaking down because it would take too long in this medium to define what you mean by "metaphysical" vs "physical" vs. "super-real", "surrealist", "sight-seeing", etc.

I stand by my view of Kant, however; outlining a space/time interpretive matrix in the mind is the essense of a discourse on the subject-mind, or subject-ivity, regardless of its ultimate failure in displacing Hume and the progeny of British empiricism in Western culture.

Again, I don't know what you mean by "synthetic" structures in the mind. We, Homo sapiens, possess a space/time matice in our mind because life emerged into a reality of space/time dimension (or, more accurately, Newtonian reality is suseptible to a space/time embeddedness by a mind and our forebears adapted to that potentiality in reality, if you can follow that). This existential-orientating matrice is inherent in all minds, human and non-human. As such, I don't know how one could characterize it as "synthetic" in any way (unless you are saying that it is self-created delusion...but this is unclear. I haven't heard of anyone displacing Kantian space/time theory this century, but you never know...).

As for space/time reality projected by a stereo being "semantic[ally]", I don't know how that stereo recreation, in terms of the mind's subjective experience, is related to the construction of language.

On the breadmaker analogy, this is exactly what I've been talking about, namely, the assumption by objectivists that a subjectivist mind that creates a stereo from perspective of catalyzing the fading of objective thinking is delusional per se (assumably, you mean one who adopts this perspective exhibits dream-like irrationality by using the term "surrealist" [which, actually, is a school of aesthetics, i.e. Tanguy, Dali, etc. so, again, we are having trouble defining our terms to each other]). A mind that compares one experience to the next IS conducting an empiric experiment, the only difference being that the listening experiment can only be confirmed to himself. This does not imply delusion (or, fraud, as your King's clothes analogy implies). As for believing that a stereo piece comes before the mind's desire for the beauty of music - a position that claims that the intent to create a "technological" instrument is subsequent to the creation of technolgy - well, without the mind no piece of technology would exist. That I would think even a mind attached to the technology would have difficulty denying.

Anyway, we have tried people's patience enough (I can hear the rumble of the townpeople rising over the hill, pitchforks in hand. The what-cable-for-Kant comment has a point, and I LIKED IT!). Thank you for the FUN. At this point, we will have to agree to disagree. If you want to carry this farther, please feel free to contact me. Mark.