Nietzsche and Runaway Audio Consumption

The gear cannot disapear, the room cannot disapear but they could be used optimally, anyway the gear and room disapear completely only with very few high audio grade recording and with the right gear in the right room, otherwise we create simply an habit to live with we have already...

The best system cannot make most average recording miraculously "audiophile recording one"....The gear here do not disapear BUT REVEAL all acoustic tags and cues from the original event and the choices which have been made by the recording engineer... ...

A good system, even at low cost like mine, could, when the system/room is acoustically well controlled , reveal all acoustical chosen trade -off from ALL recordings..Then this is not only the so well recorded albums which become interesting BUT ALL RECORDINGS by the way we perceive them now in a new revealing acoustic light so to speak... Then when the room acoustic is optimallly controlled we listen to all our recordings for the music and not for a "good sound" coming from very few audiophile recording of choice....People listen to their best recorded album mainly only because their gear/room CANNOT reveal the original takes of the recording engineer...

Acoustic settings is the greatest of all upgrade ....It makes all album not on par with one another on all counts for sure, but it makes all of them acoustically interesting and there is no more a wall between the sound and the music...

There is no corruption of music by love of sound... There is an unending unsatisfaction by ignorance of the way to embed optimally a system in his mechanichal, electrical and acoustical dimensions...Then the upgrading deceptive road is chosen...

If i am not right, why am i satisfied by my low cost system ? After years working with the SAME GEAR in these three working dimensions, with what some uninformed called "tweaks" and which i call embeddings controls methods, am I deaf?

Like see N. we are free to create our own source of joy by our own hand and with minimal skills and basic acoustic science...Music and sound become ONE.....

One thing though is true, we dont need an audio system to be glad with music , when i was 14 years old i was in ectasy with the first battery radio and bad plugs in ear....Then we must learn how to use the gear to go back to the essential : simplicity...Not ascetism...Simplicity...

Art is a human gesture if not it is an empty sums of objects ....

😊😊😁😁😁😁😁😊😊

And yet...I wonder. I can only speak for myself, of course, but too often my pleasure in listening comes not from the music itself, but from the reproduction of it. The proof of this is that I will often choose to listen to something that is well-recorded even if it is musically banal, and I privilege good recordings over good performances in most cases (although there are fortunately lots of good performances that are also well-recorded). Bottom line: I love the equipment, especially when it seems to "disappear"! This is a paradox.

Maybe, as sns suggests, this is due to some "corruption" of real passion for music by "the need for material goods." I’m also a musician (cello and guitar), and I know a lot of musicians; none of them—literally, none—are audiophiles. Why is that? And I’ve had profound experiences with music in very compromised acoustical situations. How can that be, if SQ is the be-all and end-all?

1. the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless.

    

   Is this not the essence of Neitzsche?

    

    

No, N is not nihilist. Rejects religion and morals, but replaced it with a convoluted and somewhat romantic notion of the "superman."

Not an armadillo.

N. is a thermometer of his era...Nobody trash the thermometer because it say that it is too cold outside...

The contradictions of his era he took them on himself , like a reverse image of Christ....He died from a poisonous logical equation: man is only an ape but he must become a god....It is impossible because time is finite and the universe is a finite atomistic eternal return engine...

Anybody thinking that is condemned to become ill and mad...N. understood the science of his time and all the hypocrisy of christianity....A deadly equation....

The lucididy of Dostoievsky is on par with N. but he was never the deceived  dupe of the science of his time... Russian are more stronger souls...

The deepest short novel of all time is : "the dream of a ridiculous man"

Nihilism

noun

1. the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless.

    

   Is this not the essence of Neitzsche?

    

    

twoleftears: very interesting suggestion. Benjamin was not in my mind when I wrote what I did, but I see your point.

For those not familiar with the famous Benjamin essay, it's certainly relevant. I won't pretend to do justice to its subtlety and complexity, but here's a gist. Benjamin writes: "Around 1900, technological reproduction not only had reached a standard that permitted it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes."

However, he goes on to insist that "In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place." He calls this "unique existence" of the original work, prior to its reproduction (for us, the "live performance"), the work's "aura," and further claims that this is what "underlies the concept of its authenticity." Thus, the problem posed by reproduced artworks (especially music): "The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological—and of course not only technological—reproduction...: what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter's aura."

Now, this suggests many interesting things, not least of which would be that the recording is its own "artwork" not to be compared disparagingly to some inaccessible "original." Thus, the aim of reproduced music is NOT, as it might seem, to re-create an impossible lost original performance, but rather, to provide an authentic experience of its own, an experience of a new kind of artwork: the collective product of composer, performers, AND engineers (recording engineers, the designers of microphones and amplifiers and speakers, etc. etc.). 

BUT: what is still supposedly missing is the "authenticity" of the uniqueness of the original. In the case of a painting, this is pretty obviously very important, at least for commercial reasons: an "authentic" Picasso original is worth vastly more than a "copy," however accurate the copy may be. 

Here's where I think Benjamin's argument is often misunderstood. He calls this lost "authenticity" the artwork's "aura." But "aura" is a loaded term! It suggests a kind of mystical quality possessed only by some fetishized object; it is NOT an aesthetic value in any straightforward sense. After all, the only aesthetic difference between a Picasso original and an exact technological reproduction indistinguishable from it would be the fetish value assigned to the historical facts associated with the original alone (the artist himself touched it, etc.). These are of interest to the investor, to the art historian, to the museum curator—but not necessarily to the art appreciator.

So, returning to music reproduction: if it were possible (and it very nearly is!) to reproduce in one's living room the acoustic experience of a live performance, what, really, is lost? The social facts of sharing the live performance with others, I suppose. But that's not a feature of the music itself. The fact that, in a live performance, someone might make a mistake—a little like a live Formula One race, where someone might crash and get killed, vs. watching the same race on TV after the fact. But again, these are not aesthetic values.

Admittedly, with larger ensembles, this kind of simulacral reproduction is progressively harder and harder to achieve: the acoustic of the Musikverein can't really be re-created in one's living room. But a chamber ensemble is within the range of possibility—not to mention solo instruments. 

Rather than Benjamin, the relevant thinker here would seem to be Beaudrillard. His notion of the "simulacrum," whereby a copy, being more familiar than the original from which it is derived, is actually more a cultural touchstone than the original it is "parasitic" upon, seems to me almost exactly the concept that is at issue. An example: most Americans are more familiar with Disneyland's Magic Castle than with Bavaria's Neuschwanstein, but Neuschwanstein is the original and the Disney "simulacrum" the copy. 

So here's the bottom line of these reflections. Listening the the Berlin Philharmonic—or, better because smaller, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra—in my living room is not a substitute for hearing the ensemble in person, but rather, the thing itself! As Benjamin put it above (modifying the grammar for the present circumstances), "technological reproduction has reached a standard that permits it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but thereby also capturing a place of its own among the artistic processes." Indeed, the spatial specificity of different voices on a good audio system in a good room is superior to what would be experienced live. The "effect" of the "authentic" performance has been "modified," all right, but in a positive way, in order to provide a "reproduction" that is actually superior to the "auratic" original! The only thing lost is fetish value! How cool is that?