So, Defining our audio goals depends on:
Knowing ourselves and our musical choices/ preferences well.
Being aware that this could change over time.
It’s easier if the preferences in music work well within the attributes of a particular type of set up (as detailed by
@grindstone,
@sidvee and
@square_wave
If the musical preferences are across several generes and choices an option is to have multiple set ups that perform well and bring out the best in each genre or style of music.
Anything else?
Not trying to say tailor it by genre, but to accept known tradeoffs based on room & topology. It's a choice of "where to live". You make whatever you have fit as well as it can for your needs like anything else, but what I'm trying to include is the converse (obverse?).
All the quick examples are too simple to be useful, and I don't have time to think deeply and reductively edit a general response right now, so let's use me. I love basshorn-bass. Above almost all else. It makes me giggle like a little kid, sometimes. That takes (drumroll) basshorns, which are not small and they do not extend very low if they are to fit inside most homes tolerably. Further, they need "room" to do their thing best--and they need room corners to be their smallest and reach their lowest at the highest output. Implicitly in that preference for a kind of bass, a pile of baggage (size + room + room mode excitation + ...) is "built-in". They need the biggest room(s) in the house, basically, as a tenet. I accept that--that's the price. Right now, I don't live like I used to (moved) and don't listen to them much--short periods once or twice a week, tops, because my best room with the best corners (wall-construction-wise) is in the basement. On principle, that means, if I want to listen to music with that, I change that room so it's a good place to spend a lot of time and change my life. That was the plan on moving-day when boxes were coming and backs were sore. Still could, but haven't. Discord. Right now, I'm okay because I can get a "fix" when I want some
In my old life (over-absorbed by work to seriously unhealthy degree), I didn't care about anything but having 45 minutes or 1.5hrs at the end of the day from say 2AM on to get a libation and let some music wash the day away...to sink into a chair and let the music heal my head. In those years, I listened to a lot of jazz and drank a lot of scotch. The brushes and the standup (double-) bass had to be right--not to mention the brass. And there had to be dynamics, of course, w/o vibrating the windows bec the houses are 10 feet from each other and it's the wee hours. Khorn clones filled the bill perfectly for me in my life.
Say instead that I liked OB bass above all else--still needs room, still needs size, arguably needs a larger footprint and is every bit as finicky (or worse) than basshorns. Built-in placement and size tradeoffs.
So what genres are a problem for either of them (or alternatively what must be supplemented to "solve" the problem to become "all-around")? Well, a full bottom octave, for one--16-32Hz, say. Love dub/trance/EDI and really need/thrive on the bottom low freqs, etc? Need more/different stuff. Tough for both types unless one is OK with say 78dB sensitivity. Yes, these are all (too-) simple examples and don't completely address what you're talking about, so I apologize for writing on the fly. The point is, we eventually make a choice to either fix what might be missing (maybe updating our list if it was incorrect), or live with it.
The choice of what we prize higher than other things is what we accept (or don't accept and work on/change). Same test as any physical piece of anything--does using it please us or not? This'll be all new-agey-hooey-sounding, but it boils to our actions either being in accordance with our rankings or changing our rankings if the gear does what we wanted and we're displeased. Think about our own Vineeth--in the end, what he worked for was to get 2 sealed woofers + LF sub so that he felt bass on his chest the way he liked
It need not be formal, it's "hey--I'm missing this thing I had and I want that back".
I submit that we *all* have these things. This whole big circle is about fun. Between economics, physical room, or domestic negotiations, invariably there are limits. But if we keep it fun, it is. If it does what we say (to ourselves w/ our list) that it was what we wanted, we're can find "gear peace" and get back to the music.
Whatever presenation our system makes, it does not make others. It radiaties a certain way, and not other ways, and it outputs the levels it does. It's what it is. But if we've tried to "line it up" with what's important to us--our own preferences for presentations AND we know what we've traded (domestic harmony secured, etc), there can be peace with what you have and what it does (and it can stay fun).
Yeah, it'll move over time. Our hearing education (and body) changes...and sometimes our dwellings change. All that stuff is mostly out of our control, right?
My soapbox on this is to try to help separate the concepts of chasing gear for dopamine or chasing gear to achieve a goal. So much of the audio industry is functionally a cry that we are all missing-out unless we get this or that thing and that feeds whatever doubts we might have and it can team-up with the itch to chase gear. There's nothing at all wrong with chasing dopamine. Audio isn't monogamy so it we want multiple things, no reason not to. I'm trying to argue that it need not be the case that we need them (multiple systems) but rather, for each of us, it's readily achievable to be at peace with how we've attempted to address one system (and have it be able to play almost anything acceptably). My own 2c is that it's useful/helpful to always keep some old stuff over time to compare with whatever you have if it's possible, storage/space-wise, but that's its purpose--to keep us honest.
It's still about goosebumps and grins and it's individual. If you figure out what makes you happy, the recipe and grocery list become simpler. I wrote too many words for what it is--try to veer towards what makes you happy like the little kid in all of us and fear-not the exhortations of the audio press or technical glitterati. You're already finding all the right references for deeper inquiries. You'll make peace with the reading. You might already know entirely what you want--my (unfounded) guess is that the confidence will underpin that when you hear enough different things to form the tradeoffs better.
Look--I "get" it--there's gotta be more to this than that. IMO, no, there really isn't. It just takes a lot of listening and a long time to understand the possiblities of coherence and presentation size and blah blah--and their tradeoffs--to figure-out w/o doubt what it is we (by rank) like. It's just that the world has made it harder for each of us to hear things (fewer shows, almost non-existent retail salons, etc), so it's more work to "stretch" for all of us.
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