Romy the Cat wrote:

rowuk wrote: When communicating on line, we need mutual understanding for the things that we want to discuss (the audio press has done little to help here). I can explain my views of accuracy and musicality, both have nothing to do with gear however. Musicality is something that a musician does with his/her play. I think that this word is misplaced in the audio world. Accuracy is also a function of definition. Geometrically, it is impossible to have accurate playback. There is no recreation of the original space - regardless of the effort and money invested. Pitch and timbre coulds have degrees of accuracy, but what was the original, what microphone, how close was the microphone to the instrument, what EQ or compression was used? As there is no way of knowing, I feel that we must replace the word "accurate" with the word "plausible". With these reservations, someone could talk to me about my "sound" or my "opinion". It is ridiculous how much I disagree with the above. I am absolutely fine with the notion that it is impossible to have accurate playback, but, in my view, you, Robin, attribute accuracy to live music. I do not. Accuracy is not live music. Demanding that playback reproduction be, in any way or form, a reflection of live events is an absolute abomination of audio objectives, and this is what I have been opposing for over 25 years.   Music is just one of the forms of consciousness that impacts us. If your doctor sticks a syringe in your ass, do we need to care about the syringe or about the medicine that it contains? The whole fucking audio industry has invented a mechanism of worshipping and adulating disposable plastic syringes, arguing about how one syringe (audio) is different from the “true” syringes (music). This is the most boring and idiotic objective, in my view. The only accuracy that exists is the accuracy of the medicine in audio syringes versus music syringes. The form, shape, or any other property of syringes are wonderful observations to make, and you can publish a lot of publications to corroborate them, but it is all irrelevant bullshit that simple-minded audio morons consume as some kind of “wisdom.”   Can a syringe impact the quality of the medicine it carries? Ironically, yes—but not in the way audio people think. They are trained to believe that there is a direct relation between syringe quality and the performance of the medicine, and this works fine for anyone at the first level of meta-cognition. As soon as a person begins to question the value of their own understanding, knowledge, and perception, the whole charade of sophisticated syringes collapses.     What I am trying to say is that music itself is not privileged. It is one of many carriers through which consciousness is altered, informed, or provoked. Sound, language, image, chemical agents, silence, memory, meditation, and imagination all operate on the same substrate. Consciousness does not discriminate based on delivery medium. It consumes content, not containers. It does not ask how the signal arrived; it only registers what arrived. The moment a person begins to question their own perception—its limits, its conditioning, its expectations—the mythology collapses. The elaborate hierarchy of “better” syringes reveals itself as a house of cards: impressive in construction, empty in foundation. What remains is the only question that ever mattered: what, exactly, is being delivered to consciousness, and why?   At that point, playback ceases to be a fetish and becomes what it always should have been—a tool. Not a shrine. Not a competition. Not a moral ladder. A tool for exploring how consciousness responds to structured stimuli. Everything else is noise, in my view.  rowuk wrote: When our system becomes a tool to explore our minds reaction to stimuli… When our system becomes a tool for exploring the mind’s reaction to stimuli, it ceases to be a hierarchy of syringes or musical experiences and becomes a hierarchy of consciousness. Consciousness does not give a flying fuck about whether information arrives through audio, music, literature, conversation, psilocybin, meditation, intellectual inquiry, or anything else. Consciousness consumes content, not delivery systems. It is indifferent to whether that content comes via a syringe, a song, a poem, a painting, a play, or simple reflection during active imagination.