darrenyeats;240285 Wrote: > As a card-carrying subjectivist for many years may I make a few > comments. >
Interesting comment. I think just about all of us started off as "subjectivists". After all, when you're new to something, you naturally trust the "expertise" of those more heavily involved. You may read some magazines, or go into a hifi store and talk to a salesman, and even though you expect a little bit of hyperbole and advertising, you certainly don't expect nearly everything you read or are told to be false. (Even now I remain deeply shocked by that.) So instead you start forming an impression of what you -should- hear, based on what you're told, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you don't hear the "right" thing, you listen harder until you do. Once you've convinced yourself, you may become a passionate advocate for audiophilia in general, and particularly for whichever style of component happened to strike you as the best or most interesting (this is the emperor-has-no-clothes phenomenon). Then, as more time passes, you may start to notice a few cracks in the facade. Why is it that no one can agree on anything concrete? Why is everyone always upgrading and tweaking? What gives with the fringes, where things get gradually more and more loony to the point of putting photos in the freezer? How is it possible that each component has a different sound - shouldn't there be a neutral sound they all approach? Why can't anyone hear any of these differences blind? Shouldn't one be more suspicious of claims made by a luxury industry driven by advertising? It's a superb lesson in human nature, and it's much more broad than just audiophilia. The capacity for self-delusion - most importantly your own - can never be underestimated. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=39815 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
