Disturbing "Sonic Trend" showing up on SOTA audio

"In short, you need to be as passionate in your listening as a Musician is in their playing.

That's a very good way to put it.

As a musician and (somewhat) audiophile, I bought myself a pair of pretty nice omni-directional condenser mics J. Gordon Holt had recommended, and plugged them directly into my Revox A-77 reel-to-reel, in the simple spaced-omni configuration. I recorded some live music (a band I was playing in at the time, with upright piano, tenor and baritone saxes, vocals, drumset, and electric bass and guitar) and some studio sessions, as well as speaking voices (my then two year old son's especially) and other natural sound sources. I monitored all the recording on Sennheiser headphones, and still use the tapes for assessing the sound quality of reproducing gear. You might be amazed at how much more lifelike self-made amateur recordings can sound than commercial releases---so much more transparent and immediate, sounding almost like a direct-to-disc LP in comparison!

****"In short, you need to be as passionate in your listening as a
Musician is in their playing.****

Great comment and I couldn't agree more! But, how exactly is it relevant?

I think that in it is the key to some of the disagreement about the live music
standard and the reason why it's so important. A musician's passion is
mostly expressed in ways that are seldom discussed by audiophiles: the
extremely subtle phrasing nuances and color changes; the feeling and
sense of aliveness that great music making conjures up. Those are the
things that are most difficult to record and reproduce; the magic. Not
frequency response related things nor imaging information which are what
are usually mentioned and talked about. The listener who seldom hears live
music is not equipped to judge how good a job any given component does
at passing along the "passion" information. Some pieces do a
great job of it; while some can sound very high-end in the areas of
tonality and imaging and still not pass along the magic. That's the art
(passion) in audio design.

@Bdp24 - your comments are not surprising at all to me. Your priority as a musician is to get as "real" a sound as possible. This is simply not the priority of the vast majority of recording engineers. Also, you were using just a couple of mikes with analog tape. Engineers never do this with digital recording nowadays, even if they know better- they would be fired by people who don't know any better, unfortunately.

@ Newbee - I must admit that I am very confused about where you are calling "ear-bleeding" seats?? This is not a term I have ever encountered before - usually the term "nose-bleed" is used for the highest balcony, but I don't think that is what you are referring to here. Are you referring to the closest seats? Davies Hall in SF never sounded particularly good, and I have heard that the last remodel didn't help much either. MTT definitely loves his louds, that is for sure, LOL!

@Schubert - my understanding of the audiophile term "imaging" is to pinpoint exactly where instruments are located in the "soundstage." Contrary to what you seem to be implying, unless I am misunderstanding you, it should be much easier to do this listening to live music in a concert hall, and I don't mean because you can see the instruments - you should be able to tell, if you close your eyes, where individual sections are on the stage even in a very large orchestra - if not, you would have no hope to ever do so on a recording, assuming it was a recording where this would be audible. With modern digital recording and mixing, though, this is almost impossible to tell anymore - everything is blandly washed together, usually with absolutely no attempt to recreate what the hall actually sounds like. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the way audiophiles use the term "imaging" though - correct me if I am wrong, guys. But here is an example of how I interpret that term. There is an Oscar Peterson record put out by Pablo entitled Peterson 6 at Montreux. This is a very well recorded album, with fantastic "imaging" - you can indeed pinpoint exactly where each individual performer is on the stage, and the "soundstage" of the recording replicates very faithfully the actual live sound - to me, you can't have "imaging" if you don't have a decent "soundstage" in the first place - which, again, is almost non-existent in current recording. This is my understanding, anyway, of what audiophiles mean by these terms. Please correct me if you guys think my use of these terms is different from how most audiophiles use them.

The purpose of your playback equipment is to accurately convey what the recording engineer hears from his studio monitors. Modern equipment is far superior in this regard. The distortions of old equipment lend live classical recordings an added sense of ambiance, which is why some listeners prefer the older equipment.