I think you are misreading me - erroneously, as is clear if you look at my earlier post about separating the sound from the music. I think if you read that post, you will see we are in rather close agreement. Yes, of course, no two people perceive music in the same way. And, there is, of course, no way to measure the perception of the music. My points were you can have great sound even if you did not enjoy listening to the music. And, conversely, you can have mediocre sound and still greatly enjoy the music.
I do think measurements do a great job of describing the sound. Where we run into difficulty is when audiophiles put the sound and their perception of the music together as though they were inseparably one and the same, in the sense of greater apparent musical enjoyment = a better sounding system. "I really grooved to the music. It set my foot a-tappin' and it gave me goosebumps. I was able to single out details, such as the contra bassoon in the 3rd movement like I have never heard it before. Therefore, this is one helluva great sounding piece of hi fi gear" is total BS, as I think you will agree. Sorry for that lame and oversimplified satire, but it seems almost a characature outline of countless reviews I have read, even in prominent audio journals.
Yes, musical enjoyment is why we are all here. Better sound contributes to better enjoyment of the music. I am all for better sound and greater enjoyment of my music. But, greater enjoyment of the music is not necessarily a sign, in and of itself, of better sound.
Exactly! And yet: In my own private language, I differentiate between "audiophile -" and "music lover mode". In my experience they are not the same. When a particular performance gets musically under my skin, I could not care less about the sound. I feel atuned to nothing but the music, but will admit, that I feel jarred, when some "bad" sound bits from my rig jolt me out from my enjoyment.
Not so, when the recording is bad, but the musical interpretation to my liking. My ears will adapt to that. But a percieved fault in my rig, when enjoying music, will throw me from "music lover-" back into "audiophile mode" and music turns into sound for me then. In fact, I recognise two modes of listening critically in me. I can listen critically to a musical interpretation or critically to how it sounds coming from my system. Sometimes both can happen at the same time, my attention oscillates to and fro. I hate that however, it is tiring and at the end one side will prevail or I will stop listening alltogether.
In my very personal experience, the audiophile in me is the servant of the music lover in me. They are indeed not the same. One may in fact be the enemy of the other. They are antagonistic. The fact that I can love music and be taken in by it coming from some crappy bed side alarm clock is only an apparent contradiction to the above. I would not expect good sound coming from such a thing. But I do expect it from my rig and I did assemble and tweak it not that from some test lp it would track perfectly and frequency sweeps won't rattle the cups in my cupboard ( although of course it's nice if they don't), but in order to enjoy the music and forget about how the rig sounds. The only trouble is, having spent a lot of hard earned money to assemble it and countless hours in tweaking and critical listening, my expectations on the sound are high, too high. ( that fact is always driven home, when -after having caught a good seat- I come home from a classical concert and I am reminded that my rig's music is in reality made out of , or rather trying to do, a facsimile of a facsimile of some real event. Sobering thought, that one.)
But being as it may, the audiophile in me will slave stubornly away, so that the music lover will be happy. My point is, the former is slave to the latter. Music first, sound second. There is a hitch however: This, as already said, works with the bedside radio perfectly but not so with the stereo, because here we have generally great expectations. So, as in real life, sooner or later the slave will master the master. In spite of that, I know moments of bliss, rare enough though, when this seeming paradox in our "audiophile, music loving lives" of sound and music, of ear and brain, celebrates a happy marriage!
So Fitzcaraldo's beautiful persiflage of a review points out the BS contained in it at exactly that point, where the "reviewer" switches from music lover into audiophile mode, as he "singles out details". You simply cannot be in both modes at the same time, except for those very rare exceptions, when music and sound work so well together, that the objectve and the subjective worlds seem to blend. That, like haven fallen in love, are moments to remember. They are rare enough.