Just to make it clear, I really do not care for absolute accuracy which is unachievable in audio to begin with. For many obvious reasons, starting at the microphone and working its way back through the mixing, mastering and the playback from your speakers as the sound leaves your speaker, interacts with your acoustic space, bounces off the walls, excites your eardrums and fires off the electrical impulses through the neural network, while the brain evokes memories of what a Cello sounds like as to recognize the source, the type of sound, its purpose, meaning and significance. Is it a Cello or a tiger in the bush ready to pounce... The brain has to take all those electrical impulses and create an illusion of listening to music at that moment in time and space.
How or why we arrived at the importance of sound quality in this hobby only the original audiophile can say. Whoever that was...
Very few audiophiles would mistake a bad sound for great sound but also very few audiophiles would recognize a Steinway from a Baldwin from a Fazioli from a Bosendorf. Instead they would say what a "great piano recording".
A concert pianist would probably say that Bosendorf is in need of a slight tune...
So sound and music while related are perhaps different things to different ears.
I am not a musician nor do I have pitch perfect ears. I simply enjoy good sound and trying to get enough experience of listening to music to the point where I perhaps would still not be able to tell a Steinway from a Bosendorf but at least know/recognize a famous composer and the movement, a Jazz composition, etc... when I hear it over my high end system.
Would this be a fair assessment?
