Often consumerism is considered to be the replacement of religion in
these modern days we live in, and it strikes me that audio might be the
quintessence of this. Some thoughts:
- There is a large element of dogmatism and belief to audio. It is
hard to prove many differences that people claim to hear. Do you take
people at their word, that they can tell the difference? Do you
worship the great god Wadia?
- There is the possibility of self-delusion. You convince yourself
that you can hear the difference, as you've just paid £2k for a mains
cable. You convince yourself there's a god, as you don't want life to
be meaningless. You convince yourself there's not a god, as you don't
want to do what he says.
- You feel a bit special if you know what transparency is / have a
personal relationship with god, so it gives you a warm feeling inside.
It would be interesting if the people who have a religious belief are
more sceptical, as their belief requirements are fulfilled by their
religion, or if they are just more credulous generally. Similarly, it
would be interesting to see if the non-religious types are just
sceptical (i.e. also sceptical of audio snake oil) or whether they have
used audio to fill the 'belief gap'.
My own position is that I am not religious, but I am very open to the
vagaries of tweaking: I think there's loads that is really very
difficult to define. I don't really hold with A-B testing, preferring
rather to consider a product on its own merits as far as possible ('I
love my god' rather than 'my god's better than yours'?!). I think
that, since it's actually rather difficult to prove that anything does
not exist, it's generally better to give it the benefit of the doubt
until you've tried it yourself. I recognise the inconsistency in that
I apply this last statement to audio only!
Therefore I am in the latter non-religious camp, if anything, of 'audio
in place of religion', and not a 'it's all nonsense if you can't prove
it'.
I'd welcome any other thoughts, but please don't troll this by bashing
any particular religions, or indeed any particular people for their
religious beliefs. Of course, criticising people's audio belief's what
it's all about, so that's just fine ;)
--
adamslim
SB3 and Shanling CDT-100, Rotel RT-990BX, Esoteric Audio Research 859,
Living Voice Auditorium IIs, Nordost cables
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View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=29972
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