You talkin' ta me dude??
Not so easy to pigeonhole everyone into one neat slot or another. I'd be what you'd call an objectivist...if the measurements correlated well with what I hear. But they don't. The science is flawed, incomplete, has mistakes. Proof? Easy. Equipment that measures the same can sound different. Example of a one small step for engineers, one giant leap for audiophiles? The discovery of TIM. Of course it was deliberately made to seem so complex it would sound impressive in ad copy. But to engineers who understood gain bandwidth product the concept of TIM comes as no surprise. They're related like first cousins. So does that make me a subjectivist? Well all sensory perception is subjective. But to my subjective ears, no equipment I've heard sounds like live music which is what I enjoy most and expect. Now when sound systems were a few hundred dollars or a few thousand at most I could overlook the obvious shortcomings of the equipment, the concepts, the whole thing. Besides they promised things would get better. But today with systems costing in the tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands and still not sounding anything like live music to me, all I can say is the subjectivists don't seem to have much in the way of answers either. All I know is they rave about one piece of equipment after another....and then they trade up for something "better." The equipment is hardly out of the box before they're shopping for its replacement. So if these guys want to sell their wares for a few hundred I suppose I could put up with some of it but for the kind of money they want? Faggadeboudit.
So what does that make me, an objectivist or a subjectivist? Neither? Both? What difference does it make...so long as it doesn't make me an audiophile.
