Plus and Minus
keesue The fidelity of home playback versus live music. After much bantering about, it became, ’How can you tell?" If you didn’t hear it live or you don’t listen to live music, how can you say your playback system is true to live?Trying to recreate "live sound" is elusive. The best you can hope for is to get close to the master tape. If you make your own recordings - and it amazes me how few audiophiles are willing to do that - you’ll know for yourself how close you are. Funny hobby we have. The monkey bone should guide us ...Huh? Is a "monkey bone" some sort of voodoo prop, such as eye of newt or wool of bat? I’d suggest that for audiophiles, reason should prevail. That’s worked well for me for many years, and not just for audio matters. |
Both of the first issues have to do with the reason you buy stuff. For personal enjoyment. We can in fact compare live music to a system and try to recreate that experience, but... I usually don’t want to. I want it to sound good to me. Same with tweaks. We also run into the lack of visual experience in our systems. Lacking the eyesight of the performance we may seek to compensate for it with exaggerated imaging cues, Like Kurosawa adding smoke to a live volcano so the sense of heat transfers better off the film. Personally, I do not care what your guiding light is, so long as it’s your taste and your wallet that are involved and no one else. I’ve become universally disillusioned with the notion that high-end = exorbitant prices. I don’t buy gear to brag to my friends of the weight of my system or the multiple 8 gauge power lines I had drawn from a personal nuclear reactor to power my system. This is especially true with speakers. The list of speakers over $10K I have listened to which I felt were worth it are perhaps 3 brands. Under this amount though, I've heard lots of speakers I could recommend. Best, Erik |
Erik, if you could, would you. if you could and had all the means, would you buy the absolute best you could buy? OR Does any of that play into it? I know you like quality sound, have you gotten where you won’t be changing things. Done that’s it? I sure was for 16 plus years...Very close again, but I’m pretty happy with my selections... I kept the cost WAY down, except for a few blunders, a cable drop...for one..True "Monkey Bone" experience. Regards |
Recreating live music is a fantasy. What we do instead is, everything has its own sound character. Its not necessary to match exactly the live sound to create the impression of the actual instruments. The system is merely the last link in the whole chain of recording, mastering, duplicating, and finally playing back. Its technically impossible for the last link in the chain to produce something that was never there to begin with. It was lost in the very beginning at the microphone. i agree w miller completely on this one, as he says above using live music as a standard for one’s hifi is utterly ridiculous, given where we are listening do you have any idea what a live drum set, a trumpet , a tenor sax, a double bass or concert grand piano will sound like in your 17x22 living room played at performance level? you would cover your ears, RUN OUT OF THE ROOM it would be so loud - if you stayed in the room and listened for long you would have hearing damage get real boys and girls what we are dealing is a massively scaled down, miniaturized characterization for homebound consumption this NOT recreating reality - that notion should be given a rest, to put it kindly |
