He's been dead fourteen years and his perspectives trouble you?
I'd formed/held those same opinions, years before his first article.
It was good to finally see them in print.
Does anyone know where this J. Gordon Holt comes from?
Interviewer: “Do you see any signs of future vitality in high-end audio?”
JGH: “Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.
Remember those loudspeaker shoot-outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasions when various reviewers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least-favorite) model? That was all the proof needed that [blind] testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio.“
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"Seeking to reproduce the sound of real instruments in a real space . . . might be possible to achieve with chamber music (string quartets, etc.) but many people listen to jazz and rock." |
I do believe (and JGH would agree) that "seeking to reproduce the sound of real instruments in a real space is an admirable goal," Note, this says "real space" and not your space. Multichannel reproduction can achieve a reasonable simulation of that goal to a degree that stereo cannot and recent developments in "immersive audio" advance that in ways that JGH would have appreciated.
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For myself, trying to recreate the live sound of whatever I’m listening to is exactly what I’m trying to do. I really enjoy systems that can sound live as opposed to highly detailed, overly etched “hifi” that like many high end speakers do. If you read Holt’s reviews from the 60’s of the large speakers of the day, Altecs, EV, Bozak, he described them as 1st row, 10th row, mid venue etc. This clearly was his standard of reference also. I have a big room, very nice horn loaded speakers & a good, powerful tube amp. When I play Eva Cassidy’s Nightbird ( recorded live at a small club), you could easily believe you’re at the show. It’s loud, very dynamic, clear, full of body & a ton of fun!! Even the talking in between a few songs & the audience clapping sounds right on. Unfortunately, w/ today’s heavily digitized & digitally powered line arrays at every rock or blues concert, the sound is really hard & often annoying. This is why for myself, it’s even more important than ever to have a system capable of reproducing sound realistically. For example, I recently went to a Tedeski Trucks Band show in Boston. They’re a great band but the sound was all over the place & I had primo seats. When only a few instruments played, the sound was quite good but when the full group played, it became unclear & lost most of the group’s exquisite nuances. My system, for the most part, with some of the same dongs, sounds better.
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I don't want my music to sound like the real thing - I'd get thrown out of my apartment very quickly and all those amps wouldn't fit anyway. Besides, what does the real thing sound like? Does an acoustic guitar played outside in the woods sound like the same acoustic guitar played in a shower stall? They're both the 'real thing'. The 'real thing' is the recording/source, not the performance. |
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