who wants tone controls on your next preamp?

Herman,
That type of mental exercise is a little naive as the only ones who have that type of traceability to the original performance where those who were there. How many of your CD's/LP's have you been a witness to their original recording/performance? You are obviously not familiar with the recording process, mixing and the mastering process. How do you know that the microphones pickup the entire spectral spectrum and spatial cues? You owe it to yourself to get the Stereophile Test CD1, which has the pickup of many different microphones on the same live person/speaker being switched real-time; it will shed some light on the effects of the recording chain. Ideals are only that!

Naive? please. You completely missed the point of my post.

The poster stated that since you and I hear differently then there is no absolute. I was refuting that idea, not that we would know what all original performances sound like. I stated that if we heard the exact same thing, even though our auditory systems might process it differently, if we heard the exact same thing again we would recognize it. That has nothing to do with traceability to the original performances of my recordings.

So yes, there is an absolute, or ideal as you put it. If our systems were ideal then we would be able to record a trumpet player standing in front of the room or any other sound and play it back and it would sound exactly the same. Jumping from that idea to assuming I though I would be able to know what every original performance sounded like is a bit of a stretch.

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Don't need them. Just got a pair of Katans and have my DBX 14/10 EQ for sale. Things (amp, preamp, sources, wires, ic's and speakers) must match up and that's a lot harder to do than using a good eq.

Herman,
So how does the "Absolute Sound" relate to "Audiophilia"? Not only would the playback, aka stereo systems, have to be ideal but the whole recording process, which is clearly out of the listeners control. I think that is a bit of a stretch! Check-mate!

I am with herman on this point. And it is an often used arguement that we hear differently therefore a standard can't be used for calibrating our listening systems, which is not true.
If my hearing accentuates certain frequencies, say at 2000HZ, therefore making a live trumpet sound more 'brillant' than another might hear it, then when a trumpet is reproduced over my system I would expect that trumpet to also sound 'brillant', if I have set up my system to be faithful to the source played through it. Others listening to my properly set up system, would also recognize the trumpet to sound as they have heard it, even though it might sound differently to them than to me.

How the trumpet is recorded is really irrelevant, since both I and others would be able to recognize if the trumpet sound is different than what is expected.

Salut, Bob P.