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RE: Herb Reichert: Our Man At Stereophile

Posted by Joe Roberts (M) on January 14, 2016 at 08:35:44

In Reply to: RE: Herb Reichert: Our Man At Stereophile posted by Paul Eizik on January 13, 2016 at 20:59:32:

>Neither side seems to really want to look into this very deeply.

I'd agree with that. It is a minefield where only fools such as myself care to tread.

It is difficult to open up a dialogue when everybody thinks they are 100% correct and nobody really wants to address the deeper implications of their naively-held positions.

Not just difficult...hopeless...painful, even.

In my understanding of the game of audio evaluation, received knowledge in the human sciences greatly favors the naive subjectivist over the naive objectivist.

The main reason is that subjectivists are "testing" as part of real life, in natural use contexts, whereas objectivists reject the real world and set up artificial controlled situations that they think helps them rise above the messy contingencies of day to day living.

Only these test situations are, in fact, not adequately controlled and there is no rising above the realm of culturally-conditioned, contingent interpretation and human variability. These are the elemental conditions of human life. And that holds for the testers as well as the listening subjects. Curtains and AB boxes can't change that.

Electronics is a science, music listening is not.

So how can we KNOW what sounds different, what sounds better?

If the goal is to arrive at some form of indisputable knowledge that will convince all skeptics and hold for all listeners in all situations, then we will never fully know.

If we are trying to understand what works for us as individuals with tastes, biases, musical preferences, different kinds of systems, variable physiological and psychological makeups, and so on, we can get there by using the tools in our typical audio lives and decide over time. Don't expect to convince anybody else.

Hence, I think that theory favors the naive subjectivist, not that I agree with them half of the time. But that is precisely the point...why should we all agree? How could we all agree?

Theory in no way supports the crude scientistic assumptions and methods of the so-called objectivists, although they believe they have a massive corpus of scientific theory behind them. In practice, however, it is typically junk science with lab coats and hand waving and it is borderline-evil, dehumanizing, human science.

I can empathize a little bit with the objectivists. They believe they are on the righteous path, but very few seem to have any actual training in the subtleties of human research and they probably learned everything they know about audio evaluation from magazines and forums, which creates a self-perpetuating bubble.

Beyond that, I think that the cultural power of the "unity of the sciences" program which sought to bring all human experience under the canopy of positive science remains strong among those who haven't the educational background to see this wildly misguided and discredited paradigm for what it is/was. After all, many of us "old guys" learned this way of thinking in school because it took a long time to shake out of the system, and seems to still persist in a few remote niche subfields such as Acoustics.

But who among us is going to run out and take high level courses on philosophy of science and social science and seminars on social aesthetics and anthropological linguistics to figure out how we might truly _know_ if a piece of wire sounds different?


Yes, it is as though nobody really wants to dig deeper, and it can get very deep indeed.

The preponderance of the dialogue on this topic follows the same old well worn paths, with participants talking past each other and spouting the same old rote jive.

That said, I applaud any contributions that derail the commuter train and get us thinking in new and deeper ways about our relationship with musical sound and the toys that make it happen. Universal agreement should not be the goal, but a more reflective and nuanced relationship with our important life-enhancing pursuit of musical sound can't hurt.

A good audio writer to me is somebody who encourages an original thought or two once in a while while laying his/her heart bare. Herb can do that. I like Michael Lavorgna's contributions because I can sometimes see my struggles with computer audio reflected in his reports. Smart, perceptive guy. And Art Dudley dragging in various vintage gear is always a hoot. All of these writers are very sincere and open with their thoughts, and share their own versions of "I'm just visiting this planet and trying to make sense of it." That's what I'm trying to do myself, for myself. Learn.

Proper audio evaluation requires us to dig deeply, most of all into ourselves, but also continually examine and hone our evaluation systems.

When the language, assumptions, methods, questions and answers become frozen and over-formalized, so do we.












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Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent -- Wittgenstein

Free your mind and your ass will follow -- Parliament/Funkadelic

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