After reading many of the recent posts around here, I thought that it was time to start my own thread regarding the issue of science vs. art. Please feel free to write whatever you wish in regards to this topic.

Music, for my of us, is an emotional experience. It is one that we hope to replicate within the confines of a room with equipment that we purchase in an attempt to make beloved classics, new favorites, and just anything we have a strong desire to hear come to life before our ears.

You can't measure this experience. You can have graphs and diagrams, calibrate here, diagnostic tests there, you can strive the best you can to "perfect" your setup however you wish, but the emotional pull that sends you into a new dimension is one that cannot be quantified.

It is this feeling, this emotion, this artistic expression that we yearn to have with each recording we hear, with each time we rest there and ask to be taken to those moments again.

Science helps us achieve certain realities and while some may look at the mathematical aspects that are even applied within artworks such as white space, lines, texture, symmetry, it is the emotion that keeps us staring at a Matisse painting or a Michelangelo sculpture. Like the Great Pyramids of Giza there was a scientific method of construction, yet there is an artistic expression that cannot be measured in blocks.

We are lovers of this hobby, the hobby of music, the hobby of sound, the hobby that sometimes marries the movement of pictures to that sound and brings forth an even newer dimension, a newer fascination. Often though, just the music alone can evoke the most powerful images that no screen or HDTV could possibly capture.

We are passionate creatures here, we love our "stuff", we love our mancaves, our asylums, our refuge and musical sanctuaries. But aren't we forgetting that with that passion and conviction comes the very essence of beauty and art married together in a place that sometimes only we understand, not others. It's for our ears only. For us to appreciate, value, cherish, nurture. Yet we want others to feel and hear and enjoy those things that bring smiles to our faces, tears to our eyes, warmth to our hearts.

Let's not forget that this hobby is to be shared, to be loved together in the same harmonies that we relish on some beautiful album we have tucked away.

A speaker is a speaker...no more, no less. It's not how many dB's or Hertz or whatever that matter, it's the emotional experience that it brings forth, paired with other equipment in a type of synergistic way that we strive to perfect, we want to be moved by the sound. It cannot be calculated, it cannot be quantified, it just is. It's something we dream of and aspire to. It's those moments that make this hobby unique and aspiring.

Thoughts?