Above, you see some recently added albums on my Roon server. I thought it might be fun to focus this week on the music instead of hardware and discuss a little more on this so-called "absolute sound" (the concept, not the name of the Harry Pearson-founded magazine) some audiophiles are supposedly going for (touched on this somewhat years ago).
I don't know if Pearson described his concept of the "absolute sound" with much greater depth beyond the oft-quoted, vague quality of "the sound of actual acoustic instruments playing in a real space" which may or may not be hard to achieve these days depending on one's threshold of what sounds "real". Let me know if you've come across any other articles on this that defines the concept with greater detail. To be honest, I don't think I've met any audiophiles who still believe that there is a single "absolute" subjective sound we should all be striving for, but it's good to be clear about it and maybe lay it to rest.
When it comes to music, I have rather eclectic tastes. As I mentioned last time, I've been checking out some electronica, hence the amane ＋ 曇った空 (Kumottasora) album 彷徨 (Wandering) (DR7, 2017) off BandCamp on the list. You can have a listen to track 2 "~ Discontinuity ~" on YouTube. It's an atmospheric piece of work that's very much at home in the Blade Runner universe I can play in the background without getting distracted; in fact, excellent background music when doing medical charting on the computer - the bane of the medical professional's existence these days. ;-)
To the right, we see a couple versions of David Chesky's The Great European Songbook (DR13, 2022). As you can see, I've labelled the cover image for easy identification; we have both a "Headphone Mix" and "Speaker Mix".