Why on earth do speaker wires sound different?

[Richard Barrett]

I believe that I have always understood the points being made.

Of course there's always a lot of "I know what I like and I like what I know" around, and I guess what I'm saying is that I find this attitude in itself genuinely hard to understand, even though obviously it's common enough.

[Gordon]

Rather curiously this kind of issue crops up in the music drama Tannhäuser, which I saw last night. During the song contest Tannhäuser objects that some of the singers don't know what they are talking about, because they have never experienced some of the things they are describing, and that they are attaching unfounded moral value judgements. That at least was how I interpreted it.

The whole opera of Die Meistersinger centres on this!! Beckmesser is very sure of his view of the world is he not? Sachs is more circumspect [he is of course Wagner] by being willing to slacken tradition and allow departures from it. We know the result. There are ulterior motives at work too, both within the plot and also in Wagner himself.