I very much disagree. Do not look at the results but at the intentions of the motivations. There is no discrepancy between intentions and expressive means. Yes, it is true the results are not always what intended but if one read from the results what the “master” intended to say (not necessary said due to multiple reasons) then everything is very much not accidental. That is why I rarely listen what a playback installation does (it would be nice but there are very few that can handle it) but rather what the system builder was trying to say by means of his playback (of course if s/he did has any noble intentions, that mostly is not the case).

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

I think your soup analogy is a great one that many people will be able to grok: their soup may have the best oregano in the world, hand cultivated and pampered daily by sweet little old monks in a secret monestary in the wilds of Italy, but if there is also way too much salt in the soup, well then - that soup is going to be awful.

That’s one level.

Another is cause and effect, which I spoke about at length in the above post: the near impossibility of predicting the effect given a cause, and the extreme difficulty of determining the cause given the effect. Not that cause and effect should be ignored - like politicians do - but that people might want to watch out for it being trvialized for the sake of making a ’sale’.

Then there is intentionalism - with which you close your post.

I hesitate to draw a on-to-one correspondance between the intention of a ‘master’ and their handiwork - very few people in the world can create in reality something that corresponds exactly, or even close, to their orignal goals - to what they intended to build. There are very few ‘masters’ who even think about what they want to build before they start building - preferring the ‘muse’ approach instead, popularized by various artists and authors.

But we, all of us, can look at the defacto result of the ‘master’s handiwork, which, whatever their intentions, exists here with us which we can, so to speak, kick the tires of and see that, whether or not it was their intention or just accidental (and there are many levels of micro intention and accident, both conscious and unconscious, at each aspect of product creation - for example ‘product reliability’ - which are mixed together in yet another kind of ’soup’) - they have created a masterpiece or monstrosity or, most common, yet another paper-weight.

So all we can say for sure is that what goes out the door is by the ‘master’s consent, and, regardless of what they ‘intented’ to inflict on humanity, they are in fact inflicting what they are shipping - and from this perspective there is no question about what their intention is, it is right there in front of us.

Thanks for your post,
Mike.

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

I am still at the beginning of codifying our principles and objectives a little bit better than just the somewhat less than perfectly descriptive ‘you know it when you hear it’. But that’s why we start with “Use the ears, Luke!”

Our speaker adventures seemed to make a stop at each of the various tourist attractions:

The Vandersteens were good speakers
The Dunlavys were impressive
The Extremas could make one cry
The Campaniles delivered the event to us and did all the above
The Triolons create a mind meld between you and the Music Spirits ….(oh, and do all the above, and do it better than any other speaker we have heard, but this has become a moot point, to me anyway)

The Bose radio in my Audi S8 also communicates the spirit of music… once…in…a…long…while. Just not on demand. And not with such soul wrenching depth and breadth.

Now it is our job to work backwards, and to classify the other, less costly elements of the audio universe in these terms and see just how far we can push them - now that we know exactly where we are going.