Rob,

You've pretty well nailed your colours to the mast regarding your Art of Sound. Folks who know exactly what they want are less likely to waste money on upgrades only to be dissatisfied with them very soon after.

Marco,

I'm still not comfortable with these undefined notions of realism and accuracy. We still need to pin down exactly what aspects of a given recording and how it is reproduced can make it sound real in an absolute sense to absolutely everybody. My suspicions are that this is impossible. Hi-fi technology and its implementation have a long way to go before playback of recorded music is ever indistinguishable to the live event.

Yes we can step closer to subjective notions of realism and accuracy in certain aspects but in an absolute sense they are unattainable goals.

Defining your own notion of realism/accuracy that you can happily live with and enjoy is basically defining your own Art of Sound. For you then to define your Art of Sound as being realism or accuracy would thus be tautological.