Those questions cover a WHOLE bunch of territory, enough so that it would take me many hours of writing to explain and describe what my answers would be.
And you are perfectly free to ignore my posts etc., if what I present simply doesn’t work for you. :thumb
Because if it’s proof you are looking for all I can provide you with is data, ideas, comments, experiments to consider and try for yourself etc.
But proof is something that is only achievable by you, for yourself.
And might I add that it is “Plain old subjective impressions” that is at the heart of listening to music. When it comes down to enjoying music it is ALL based upon a subjective, personal, experience based metric of what is and isn’t ‘good’ (and a whole bunch more of our ‘specialized’ words).
IOW listening and enjoying music is a ‘real time’ event, one in which we pursue because it captures then grabs our full attention. And while we are engrossed and ‘sucked into’ the music, words can sometimes be held at bay for a more fully engaging experience.
Words, definitions, descriptions, facts, etc., result as a consequence of our experiencing our chosen real time event in an effort to try and convey to others what we hear. These attempts to put into words what is being experienced will forever play catch up, as we continue to try and describe WHAT we hear instead of THAT we hear something.
But to give you a condensed answer to what I hear as the heart of your questions, would be thus;
We as hobbyists are seeking just the right combination of components to meet our needs, wants, desires all based upon what we know and have previously experienced. And every once in a while we may get a chance to experience something beyond our expectations. When this happens we get to expand what we would like to achieve to include this new capability that we now know is possible and is desirable. We do this in our ongoing attempts to improve or explore new aspects of enjoyment, while listening to music.
We are the only ones who can do this, for ourselves, for the obvious reasons.
So trying to answer “What makes a component perform so differently in one system as opposed to another? How does this relate to the specs?” is something only you can determine for yourself, on your system.
Other folks (like myself) can offer up our observations of what we have learned along the way, for those who might find portions useful or helpful in learning more about, or perhaps just in trying to describe, what we hear.
And yes, I could tie in the specs of my amp, (it’s power bandwidth is 2Hz to 400KHz) with the sonic impact it has on my headphones in my system, but that will have little to no bearing on what you would experience, again for the obvious reasons.
But in offering up some observations and a small experiment, perhaps a bit of insight can be gained?
And lastly this is ALL subjective based, because that’s what listening to music is, a subjective experience.
JJ
