Lets look that the bottom-line, and that is the human mind and its great need to have some kind of control over things.
In audio some 30 years ago and more, they had all kinds of things to play with. The turntable was most likely the favorite audio play toy. You could change the audio cartridge, play with the balancing of the audio cartridge, to get those right grams of force. Play with the anti-skate adjustment. Adjusting the pitch of the cartridge, find the right pad to absorb unwanted vibrations on the turntable. Boy, what a good play toy the turntable is and or was.
I think that a lot of the Woo-woo stuff coming out now is filling in the void of nothing for the audiophile to play with. True there was a lot of Woo-woo stuff back than, but the void is much bigger now because there so little one can do that someone can really change to get real results. You don't have to mess with the CD, amp, preamp, tuner, and the speakers. But some people just have to get into things, even when there is nothing wrong to fix in the first place.
This is a good point. Of course, you can trace it back farther than that. The guy tinkering with his turntable was in turn just a feeble imitation of an actual musician who must train, study, practice, and "tinker" with technique as well as, in most cases, with the musical instrument itself, in order to produce sound that is, according to the consensus of people with normal perception of tonality, adequate or better.
Most people who play the violin have little need for, or possibility of perceiving any benefit from, tweaks based on woo. It's hard enough to play the right notes at the right tempo, and almost everyone can easily tell whether you're playing the right notes at the right tempo or not. If the novice gets the idea that wearing the right crystals will improve his sound more than, say, more practice with fingering, his neighbors (if not his own ears) will quickly set him straight on that point. It takes quite a bit of effort just the get to the point where properly tuning the instrument -- about the most basic tweaking one can imagine, short of putting rosin on the bow -- can make much improvement in how the music sounds. Those who master that level can then worry about deeper musical qualities, such as expressing the desired emotional tone, calling for a nearly endless succession of more advanced techniques. Most people (not as many as before, but still a lot of people) will still be able to tell the difference. Those who master that much might then begin to benefit from, say, playing a Stradivarius or Amati, and some -- perhaps a small minority but a good violinist will have a large audience so a small minority is still many people -- some listeners will still, provably, be able to tell the difference. So much real effort goes into achieving and maintaining that level of mastery that there's little room for much woo to enter into it. (Luck charms, sure; even maestros don't have control over every aspect of their performance; the audience might be in a bad mood; a muscle twitch might sound a bad note; an accompanyist might be off tempo. But what violin maestro, given a choice between a perfectly tuned Amati and a student violin that's been carefully stored in properly oriented crystals to align its quantum karma, would choose to play the latter?)
The contempt for knowledge from books, experts, experienced teachers, etc. is a possible sustainable attitude only when the endeavor is efortless and its success or failure is irrelevant or not definable at all. Such as, operating a modern playback system for recorded audio.
Let's see, what was my own most recent use of "book learning?" Oh yeah, I'm rewiring several rooms of my house and I read some books on how to do it properly and consulted some professionals on some of the relevant specifics. I suppose hands-on experience would be a better way to learn the real cosmic truth about 120V alternating current, but unfortunately I can't afford to burn several houses down or electrocute myself several times to discover it for myself by trial and error. It appears that when the results actually matter, books, experts, and teachers matter too.
The bottom line is that no one, not even ES himself, cares whether his audio is perfect or not. (If he himself cared, then it would matter to him whether improvements were real or in his imagination, and he's said that it does not.) Given that starting point, there's nothing unreasonable about also not caring what books, experts, and teachers have to say about how to (and how not to) improve the performance of an audio system. Being an expert in subjective audio is like having an advanced degree in recess. No one bothers to confer or check the credentials, because no one cares, so one can claim anything and only a few skeptics -- people who actually care about the truth of the claims due to holding a particular philosophy concerning the nature of claims themselves -- will ever argue the issue.
If ES is ever called upon to do something requiring skill, for which actual success in the endeavor matters -- such as grow his own crops and survive on them, administer self-care to treat an injury or disease, play poker for money, or make love to a real woman -- then and only then might his attitude about books, experts, and teachers change.
Respectfully,
Myriad
