Posted by Earl Geddes [ 69.209.185.66 ] on February 27, 2005 at 12:21:01:

In Reply to: measurements II posted by manualblock on February 05, 2005 at 11:11:02:

My 2 cents here:

My brother is a profesional musician and I once worked as a profession sound mixer. I now design loudspeakers and am technically trained. So I have a lot of experience with the two sides of this problem.

The musician creates art while the audio engineer reproduces art. The two things are completely different. The first is completely subjective and in the extreme the second is completly non-subjective.

That is not to say that subjective impression does not enter into audio design because it does, but in a completely different way than to a musical artist. In audio design the understanding of subjective impression helps us to know which tradeoffs are worth making and which aren't. But if there were no tradeoffs then subjectivity in audio design would be unnecessary.

In my experience, the reason that a subjective discussion about audio gets so confused, is because the discussion wanders back and forth between the musical side and the reproduction side. We talk about loudspeakers sounding good just like we talk about a concert sounding good, but they are not the same thing. The loudspeaker only sounds good if the performance sounded good - otherwise it sould sound bad, right? You see how confusing it gets almost immediately.

The only way to have a reasonable subjective discussion about audio is to use well defined terminology that is unambiguos, which is to say completely independent of the musical terminology. To intermix the terminologies invites an immediate argument due to the ambiguous nature of the terminology.

Thats exactly why musicians can discuss these things with complete understanding, because they are using a terminology that is defined in their domain and hence is totally unambiguous.

Hope this helps.

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