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Re: The Scientific Method

Thanks for the compliments on the system.

It took me a long time through a lot of trial and error to assemble a system that to me is able to capture the magic of music, and doesn't have glaring areas of deficiencies that would make it difficult for me to avoid the upgrade bug. The dogmatic objectivists, I assume, would simply say that I grew tired of tinkering and finally decided just to enjoy listening and ignore the equipment.

But it doesn't seem that way to me. It took me a long time (as I said through trial and error) to find the right combination of components, cables, speaker placement and room acoustics (all of which seem to me in my subjective experience to be major factors in assembling a good system) that produce what I always believed should be possible with a high end system. Given the hundreds (good gosh, probably even thousands) of hours I have spent switching things in and out of my system and tinkering in an effort to achieve my primary goals of "neutrality" and dynamics, it is very difficult for me to conclude that all the little and not-so-little differences that I perceived throughout this process were just due to expectations or some placebo effect. I have said before that my subjective experiences of differences between cables or components seem as real to me as my daily perceptions of my kitchen table.

Yet, with all of this, when I start looking at the technical side of audio to find explanations for what I have experienced, I see mainly chaos and mean-spirited debates, that never seem to advance beyond the same old rhetoric and name calling that is hurled back and forth. So I was hoping this forum might provide a little more orderly and scholarly way of approaching all of this.

And when I say “all of this” I don’t mean just cables. There are all kinds of interesting debates that go on in audio that get bogged down with abusive behavior and personal vendettas. Currently, the battle between supporters of SACD and DVD-A seems to me to be one of those battles. Hopefully, a fresh, dispassionate, technical examination of that subject might occur here.

In addition, one thing I don’t see discussed a lot, that I think would be interesting, is what people think the next significant technological breakthroughs in audio will be (or should be).

So, in any event, those are just my ramblings on an early Sunday morning out here in Phoenix. Thanks for listening if you made it this far.

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