Katharina, Frogman, thankyou! You've tought me something. I realise now, that hi-fi as a hobby has indeed to be strictly separated from the experience of actively listening to music. It's quite obvious to me, that tweaking my system, placing speakers, considering the pro and cons of equipment, the hobby part in fact, is a means to an end and no more than that. The end would be the musical experience. Without a knowledge of the real gestalt of music through listening to live music in its many forms as often as possible, how will I ever be able to know in which direction to tweak my system to? Memory is closely linked with emotionality and if I am deeply moved by a live performance say of the Alban Berg Quartet playing Schubert's "Death and the Maiden", there will be an engram in me of how a string quartet sounds with all its tonal, dynamic and rythmic nuances. The more live musical performances "get to me", the more an inner, probably unconscious knowledge will be built up through the years, about how a system should sound. So building a system and later tweaking it, is in a way a "remembering", a reemerging of the music's gestalt, which has been dormant in me, until the system begins to "remind" me. Once that has been achieved, I can tweak actively, to get say the sound of the cello, the viola and the violins, their rythms, phrasings, interplay and dynamics from ppp to fff plus their spacing of course as close to the gestalt's engram as is humanly possible. I might not be able to do without "audiophile" software of high recording quality at this stage to get closer to my goal. Here anyway, I will rather be listening to the system not to to the music. Once I'm through with that however, I will be able to do exactly what Katharina has told us about: Enjoy a more than mediocre recording of high musical quality and be moved by it, because even then the system lets some of the gestalt of the performance come through. Maybe the benchmark for the "musicality" of a system lies just here ! Thanks again and regards,
Musicality" in a system? What IS that ?
I thought I would venture to bring a question in, the interest in which unites us all. What has happened, when we describe a system as "musical"? Is it just a subjective and passing state of mind, which fills us with joy as we listen and if so, what does it need for us to get there? System tweaking perhaps or rahter "ego tweaking" like good company, a good wine, a good cigar etc? Both perhaps? Or could there be objective criteria, which have to met for a system to attain this often elusive and volatile quality? I am convinced that there are...but to your mind, what are they?
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- 58 posts total
- 58 posts total