[1] I do find that averaging other people's opinions will provide a useful indicator of what I might like. A key limitation here is that, while most people may say that X product sounds good - to the extent that there's no point looking for something better - we can't truly appreciate how much better Y sounds until we hear Y.
[2] The closest I've come to reproducing music is hearing a jazz trio on a good system in a moderate-sized room; the experience can be similar to a live jazz trio. But generally I agree that we're just using equipment to create a musical experience, and it may be counterproductive to pay a lot of attention to the 'fidelity' of that experience.
[3] We can even invert this: some music was recorded and mixed directly for sound systems, and it would be difficult to reproduce a similar experience live.
1. For me, it varies and I judge it on a case by case basis. Averaging a bunch of audiophile impressions/assertions on say an audiophile USB or power cable doesn't provide me with any useful indicator at all but I appreciate that for most consumers that's the only information readily available besides the manufacturer's/retailer's marketing material, so what else can you do?
2. This raises a couple of issues:
Firstly, over the past few decades the audiophile world has developed a substantial vocabulary of terms to describe numerous aspects of what they perceive. The problem is that some/many of those terms are already in use (by musicians, music/sound engineers or science) and have somewhat or substantially different meanings. This can (and frequently does!) cause severe breakdowns in communications, even more so as audiophile terms are typically based on "music reproduction" and are therefore vague, whereas the rest of the audio world is reproducing an electric current and the terms used are therefore often precise. This leads many audiophiles to believe that we are being overly pedantic just to put them down and leads us to believe that audiophiles are just being vague because they don't really have any idea what they're talking about, a vicious circle that invariably ends in a lot of bad blood. I mention all this because the term "fidelity" is not only an example of this, it's arguably one of, if not the best example. Originally and still today (outside of audiophilia), "fidelity" is not a subjective term, it's a purely objective/measurable property. How closely does the signal coming out of a piece of audio equipment match the signal that went in? If the match is very close then the fidelity is high. Unfortunately, this term has been deliberately abused by the audiophile world, for exactly the reason I mentioned in my last post. Fidelity is usually very or fairly easy to measure which leaves the manufacturers of audiophile equipment nowhere to go, the solution is to redefine "fidelity" and turn it into a subjective term of "music reproduction". I'm not exactly sure what the term "fidelity" means to audiophiles, I'm not sure that audiophiles themselves can precisely define it, which of course is the intention. As far as I can tell, high "fidelity" to an audiophile is some combination of the cost price of the "Hi-fi" equipment, how others (typically reviewers and the company selling it) label it and what subjectively sounds better. It's entirely possible therefore (and not uncommon) that a piece of equipment can be called hi-fi or even summit-fi to the complete satisfaction of audiophiles but actually be relatively low fidelity according to the original actual meaning of the term. I've said all this because I completely agree with your statement regarding fidelity, provided we use the audiophile meaning of the term but if we use the original definition, then fidelity is just about the only thing we should "pay a lot of attention to"!
Secondly, if you think about it, when we go to a live gig there are all kinds of factors at play which together create the "experience": The preparation of going to a gig, the resultant excitement, expectation and anticipation, both our own and what feel/sense from the rest of the audience. Then of course there's what we see; the concert venue, the artists themselves, the stage lighting, movement and the audience movement and response. All these factors plus others, such as smell for example and of course the sound, combine consciously and sub-consciously to create "the experience". With an audio recording we obviously can't record any of this at all, except of course the sound. We cannot get away from the ultimate basic fact that ALL we can record is an electric current (amplitude and frequency) and therefore ALL an audio reproduction system can reproduce is amplitude and frequency, we cannot record nor reproduce a musical experience. However, that does not necessarily mean a particular listener cannot have a musical experience when listening to an audio reproduction. That amplitude and frequency information might be enough to trigger the memory of the actual event and allow the listener to re-live it or, if the listener wasn't at the actual live event, that amplitude and frequency information might be enough to fool the listener's brain into filling in some of the blanks (the factors which cannot be recorded or reproduced) and lead to the perception/illusion of a real "musical experience". In either case though, that musical experience only exists in the listener's brain, either as a memory or as a generated illusion, not in the recording or reproduction! For this reason, a recording which might sound like a real musical experience to you personally, might not sound like a real musical experience to someone else, it all depends on the individual listener's brain. (perception). In the audiophile world, where all perception is real, there is no illusion and all the information is stored in the recording and can be reproduced, if you don't perceive that illusion or memory it's either because your hearing isn't as good as theirs or your reproduction equipment can't adequately reproduce it!
3. Exactly! The audiophile belief explained above falls to pieces as soon as we look at how music is actually created and how our electric current is generated and manipulated. In the case of music creation, we have many centuries of exploration and experimentation into how the tools of composition, orchestration, etc., can be used to manipulate audience responses and create an "experience". In the case of recording and mixing (generating and manipulating an electric current), I would go further than you have stated and say: Virtually ALL music is recorded and mixed directly for sound systems and it is impossible to reproduce a similar experience live! Obviously we have the issue with "experience" again but even if we ignore it, by say replacing the word "experience" with "sound waves", still this statement is true. In some cases, acoustic music genres such as most classical music for example, it depends on what you mean by "similar". Somewhat similar, similar enough to fool some people, sure, that's possible. If we're talking about non-acoustic music genres though (pop, rock, etc.), it became difficult even by the late 1950's, by around the 1970's was already impossible for much music and by the 1980's was impossible for virtually all music. In virtually all cases from around the mid 1960's onwards, the musical performance listeners think they are hearing never existed, which makes a complete nonsense of audiophile claims of realism, transparency, natural, etc. There are two solutions to this live reproduction impossibility problem: 1. You don't actually reproduce the music live, you simply play the audience the recording and the artists mime or you play some of the track from a recording and some of the artists mime (or are not even there), in effect similar to karaoki. Or 2. You stretch the meaning of the word "similar" to such a point that it's really not so similar. In fact some artists embrace this lack of similarity and create a deliberately different "reproduction", often referred to as an "acoustic set" or sometimes "Un-plugged". With some more modern genres this impossibility is actually an accepted, intrinsic part of the genre. With EDM (electronic dance music) and it's sub-genres for example, the audience is simply played recordings. The only thing that's "live" is a DJ manipulating those recordings and even then, at least some (occasionally even all) of that manipulation is often recorded prior to the "performance" and simply replayed to the audience.
What amazes me is that it almost seems like I'm revealing some unuttered secrets here, unveiling the Wizard of OZ, even to the point that many audiophiles would vociferously argue that I'm obviously lying, don't know what I'm talking about or just trolling. But, I haven't revealed a single thing which hasn't already been in the public domain and widely available for decades!! There are countless Youtube instructional vids covering almost every aspect of how music and recordings are created and before that, going back as far as the late 1970's, there have been widely available magazines which detail all aspects of recording, even tricks and tips from the best in the business: "Mix" magazine, "Sound on Sound", "Future Music", "Electronic Musician", "Tape Op" and various others with large circulations, available globally. If audiophiles really are obsessed with music and/or recordings, how come, with so much information which has been so widely available for so long, can they be so ignorant about it all? So ignorant in fact that many will believe even the most ridiculous, made-up nonsense about it? I really don't get it, at all!
G
