[reed.hannebaum]

Alan,

I have read several of your post and I find them well written, informative, and I agree with a lot of what you say. You tend to speak in generalities and site overall principles which is the best one can do when addressing the forum as a whole rather than an individual with a specific HT environment (I use environment in a broad sense; room, equipment, source material, personal taste).

However I do take some exception to what you just said. I don't believe partitioning HT advocates into the audio fidelity camp or the personal taste camp is a useful dichotomy. I would venture to say that the vast majority of us do what we do because we find this to be a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable hobby. As such, personal tastes and preferences take front stage in our endeavor. This is not to say that audio fidelity is ignored by any means. BFD and REW are excellent tools we gladly use to transcend our audio perceptions into the realm of graphs and numbers we use to detect, quantify, and correct the deficiencies of our listening environment. But at the end of the day, we adjust, tweak, and fiddle until it sounds right to our ears.

A good example of what I am trying to say is Wayne Pflughaupt’s excellent thread on House Curves. He contends, and I agree from my experience, that most people don’t like the sound of a flat FR curve, hence the need for a house curve. I am certainly no expert on psycho-acoustics so I don’t have an explanation for this. Of course the measure of audio fidelity is multi-dimensional, encompassing many time domain and frequency domain relationships (some contentiously debated). But I would think that most people would agree that an FR curve is one indicator of audio fidelity. But who among us would resist adjusting the F3 point on our subwoofer if we felt the need, simply because it would further violate FR linearity?

I didn’t mean for this to turn into such a long post but my point is that few if any of us would spend a week at Camp Audio Fidelity studying audio doctrinaire when all the Epicurean delights are at Camp Personal Taste.