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RE: Slagle is the actual scientist here...

"The call for "objective verification" is one among many contingent, socially-santioned modes of substantiating truth. I like "divine inspiration" better myself."

Well, in that case all attempt at rational discussion is probably pointless.

The problem with your subjectist view of the world, it seems to me, is that words cease to have clear meanings, and claims or assertions are apparently no longer supposed to be endowed with any testable validity.

I don't see how making the assertion that "system A sounds more musical than system B" can serve any purpose unless it carries the meaning that the person making that assertion is able to distinguish between the tonal quality of system A and that of system B. The quality of musicality itself is a very abstract and subjective one, but the person's assertion that system A sounds more musical than system B is a very concrete one, which is capable of being subjected to scientific scrutiny. If rigorous double-blind testing confirms that the person is reliably able to distinguish between the sound from system A and the sound from system B, then the validity of the assertion is verified. If, on the other hand, the person turned out to be unable to distinguish between the sounds of the two systems in double-blind testing, then I don't see how the assertion can be considered to have any value, other than as a faith-based belief system for the individual concerned. The natural suspicion would be that the person was simply hearing what they wanted to hear, and that system A only sounded better to them if they knew it was system A they were listening to, because they wanted to believe that it sounded better.

You say "The problems of clinical blind testing for audio evaluation are numerous and profound." Can you elaborate on what these problems are? The kind of arguments I have seen advanced against it are reminiscent of the arguments used by spoon-benders and their like, who claim that the paranormal phenomena really do exist, but that they won't work under the spotlight of critical scrutiny.

Some people apparently feel a need to subscribe to a sort of nebulous, holistic, mystical view of things that are in reality much more down to earth and mundane. And some of the philsophers and "thinkers" are the worst of all. Paul Dirac, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, said "I feel that philosophy will never lead to important discoveries. It's just a way of talking about discoveries which have already been made." Steven Weinberg, one of the key contributors to the discovery of the standard model in particle physics, has written eloquently and scathingly of his opinion of the postmodern philosphers such as Derrida. It is the people such as Dirac and Weinberg who are the true intellectual giants, the people who actually make enduring and supremely valuable contributions to our understanding of the world, not the postmodern philosophers.

When it comes to audio equipment, I think the sense of mystic wonder and spirituality should be reserved for the enjoyment of the music itself, not for the purely mechanical devices that convey that music to the ears. The music doesn't become any the less marvelous just because the description of the amplifer can be reduced to a black box that produces a voltage Vout(t) as a result of an input signal Vin(t). The amplifier is fully characterised by how Vout(t) is related to Vin(t), in such things as gain, phase relationships, distortions, etc. These can all be measured to accuracies that exceed the ability of the human ear to discriminate them. That doesn't make the music any less wonderful.

Chris

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