I'm sure you are qualified to produce recordings that are good by your standards, but with your attitude I would never hire you. Sorry!

  It doesn't really matter what's artistic and what's technical.. there is an original event and a final result, and that result can be judged by its accuracy to the original.   You are describing a process which ignores subjective accuracy. That's fine, but I certainly wouldn't trust you to...

  So you are saying that for accuracy the in-room response (gated out to how ms? you didn't answer me) is more important than the anechoic response? Are you neglecting the anechoic response entirely? What's your justification for these things in objective terms?

  I'm looking at the whole system. The miking influences the speaker configuration for greatest subjective accuracy.   I agree there are some people who treat the situation as you describe, but I don't trust them to be able to reproduce an original acoustic, musical event with subjective...

  You can only make this point because the example is so simple. Note that we could never make the objective statement about "color reproduction" or "shape reproduction" without investigating the situation. We would have to come to some understanding of how perception works for each person A...

  What is an "even sound field" in objective, measurable terms?   "Balanced frequency response from the main listening position"? You mean the in-room response including all reflections? What's the time window? Reflections out to how many ms? Is this more important than the portion of the...

  I will concede I have no evidence (I don't have a reference to this pianist study, it was an undergraduate research project), although I think it's wrong to compare musician timing errors to speaker group delay. It's not that one swamps the other. It doesn't matter if one is much larger. It...

  You keep talking about this "accurate playback system." So tell me, which speaker polar radiation pattern is accurate? Should the carpet on your listening room floor be 1" or 2" thick in order to provide accuracy? Which brand of diffusion panel on your back wall is the accurate one?

  I'm not a very good or well-trained musician, but as far as I can tell there is a fairly well-understood concept and language about rhythmic quality that musicians use to talk to each other. And I'm interested in audio chains that get rhythmic quality right.   Are qualities that musicians...

  Keep in mind that sound starts as a 3D wavefront and gets changed into one or more signals by a mic setup. Your standard undergrad textbook signals & systems theory doesn't apply until the wavefront becomes a signal. It then gets preserved and moved to a speaker where it becomes a wavefront...

  If that's your perspective, then you are not interested in the mic-to-speaker chain and how well it portrays the original event. That's fine, not everyone is interested in that.

I don't know why you don't understand the difference between rhythmic timing and rhythmic quality. But rhythmic quality is affected by hall ambience, and the mic-to-speaker chain affects the balance of hall ambience to direct sound.

I didn't say it was the same artist who performed. It's an independent observer. Not only is it a relevant question to accuracy, it's the primary question about accuracy.   Well, let me clarify. Not everyone is interested in reproducing an original acoustic event. Not everyone is looking at...

  I think there are a few corrections to your thinking.   First of all I didn't say "there an unlimited number of ways in which audio systems can differently reproduce the same recording." What I said, in essence, is that there are many choices in the entire chain, mic to speaker, for...

  It's fairly clear that cameras do a very good job of reproducing a face. Yes, get the lines/colors/shapes right and you have an accurate reproduction. I agree.   The problem with this point of view in audio, however, is that it's impractical. It doesn't apply to any actual audio system...

I'm not a particularly experienced musician -- a lot of amateur playing and a couple years in music school - and it's very clear to me, and the musicians who taught me, that timing is only one part of the overall effect of rhythm. Timing can be deliberately even or uneven, but you only get an...

  Your system is not perfect. I've already listed sources of distortion, the major one being that you aren't reproducing the 3D sound field that was present in the hall.   As long as your system is distorting the music, you are distorting the aesthetics. Distort the details and you distort...

You're not interested in characterizing instrument sounds? I've analyzed the evolving spectra of violins (using sound sample in a particular sample library, Vienna Orchestra) in order to synthesize a violin-like sound. It was a nice project. It revealed something about the importance of the...

  I would agree that it's not a good idea to lump people together--yes, everyone has different beliefs, so there is no single category of "objectivists." However, you've missed my point which is that many people have this paradigm which divides up "music making" and "music reproduction."...

An echo does mess with RHYTHMIC QUALITY. A musician chooses their tempo in part based on the quality of the hall reverb. If you make a recording and your recording alters the perceived balance of hall reverb to direct sound (something easy to do depending on mic placement and mic polar...

There's nothing vague about what I'm saying from the perspective of someone with musical training. It's interesting how such training alters one's perspective on the science. You see the assumptions in the science. It changes your idea of what a valid study is.   For example that New Yorker...

I don't have a survey, but let me address your reference to "objectivists who only look at measurements etc." I don't think anyone who owns an audio system doesn't enjoy it and listen to music. What I object to is this perspective in which phenomena are divided up.   I.e. relegating subjective...

  I skimmed your reference, and it's not relevant to rhythmic quality. It's about the perception of events as single or double. Nowhere does this paper support your claim that a listener won't notice timing errors in the tens of milliseconds. The question is not whether the event is single or...

I did point that out. I asked you what you think my "definition" is, and why it is useless. You stated my definition is useless without stating what you think it is, or why it's useless. I asked you to explain.

  First of all, the -60 dB decay of a piano is irrelevant to the fact it has a very distinct and sharply defined attack.   That's completely false, to say that a listener wouldn't notice timing that's altered by tens of milliseconds. I was a witness to an experiment back when I was a computer...