karatestu wrote: ↑Thu Dec 07, 2017 12:08 pm
....I am with Steve with this one. I could not give a toss about where I am going (or how I am getting there) with my journey to achieve increased pleasure from recorded music - as long as that is what happens, increased enjoyment....
Yes, to me that is what is important. After a lot of years doing this and 11 years of building my own gear, I have to conclude that you can design for hi-fi attributes and not get anything like enjoyable results. There is obviously "something else" going on that needs to be dealt with if you want enjoyable listening and boredom/fatigue not to set in.
I started this thread because of my fairly recent discovery of all things NVA and semi Omni speakers. My levels of pleasure when listening to music have gone off the scale at every little addition or tweak to my system (some of it DIY). I now understand what it is all about after years of being in the wilderness with product I thought I was happy with.
The NVA thing is interesting, because in my case, it gave me such a wake-up call about the ablity or not of my own designs to produce a musically involving performance.
When I designed my "Groovy Pink SET" low power, direct heated, single-ended triode amplifier it was going to have to be held to a very high standard, far higher than anything else I'd ever built if it was to get even so much as a look in. The NVA A20 provided an impeccable frame of reference for my own eforts to be measured against.
The semi-omni approach to speakers is a hard one to get right and there were a number of problems I had to overcome to get to where I am now, but I can say with confidence, that at no time was the music compromised, even when the speakers were not quite there. As they developed, more of the music came out.
The musical quality of these speakers did cause some pretty serious problems and outright xconfrontation, for me, as there I was singing their musical praises and there was a hardcore cabal, completely underwhelmed and complaining of missing or faulty hi-fi attributes and dismissing them as elevator music.
In the end, I got them right as you did with yours by looking for feel, soul, and their ability keep me listening into the wee small hours.
For me, subjectively, the system now "accurately" conveys, feel, soul, emotion. BUT....that's not everyone's definition of accuracy and so we go round and round and round.
Pirsig's fictional Phaedrus went insane grappling with the definition of Quality. Accuracy in the context of hi-fi, is probably one of those words Phaedrus would have gone equally insane over.
Somebody’s telling me the latest scandals.
Somebody’s stepping on my plastic sandals. Joe Jackson (1979)