Quote:
Originally Posted by djcxxx
I came away with the (not surprising really) conclusion that audio equipment can never fully and consistently replicate the experience of live instruments. There maybe fleeting glimpses of illusion from an audio system, and cognitive dissonance is a powerful influence on the human mind, but after 50 years in this hobby, for me the goal (TAS) remains as elusive as ever.
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I have been to many a live music event where, in comparison, my home audio system delivered a better sonic performance, but still have enjoyed the live music more and at a much deeper level. Live music performance is a shared social experience; while for most of us listening to recorded music is not. Audio is largely a solitary obsession: we usually listen alone. How interested in audio is your wife/significant other? Or your regular friends? Your kids? Your Uncle? When we attend a live music event as part of an audience, we usually identify with the crowd and feel a satisfying sense of shared tastes and possibly other values, too. It is gratifying and self-affirming. At a live music event our attention wanders between listening to the music and the visual presentation of the musicians and audience. A large part of the fun of live music is simply watching what the performers are actually doing on stage. You don’t have these social and visual elements while sitting in a listening room in front of the speakers (even with our pencil necked, pocket protector audio buddy). Without social and visual competition for your attention, you have more cognitive resources available to think hypercritically about the sound quality coming from the rig. Consequently, it is easy to work yourself up into an unhappy state about soundstage, or dynamics, or transparency, or into any of the many other forms of gear related audio-angst. The only way to combat this, other than keeping a mixed dish full of Prozac and Valium on the table next to your sweet spot, is to listen to recorded music as a “model”, knowing that it will never be a perfect recreation of a past musical reality. Two speakers will never reproduce the acoustic sound field of a symphony orchestra playing in a concert hall or a jazz combo jamming in a small bar room. I think the quest to “recreate the music event” is a hopeless and frustrating enterprise, not to mention financially ruinous. You must be willing to enjoy recorded music in the same sense that obsessed model airplane builders or model railroaders enjoy their own form of the “miniaturists disease”. They know that their fetish objects are not “real” airplanes or locomotives – these often wonderfully built toys cannot fly with passengers on board or pull freight across the country. But nevertheless, the model airplane and toy train nuts admire their replicas for what they are: finely crafted facsimiles which possess beauty of form and function in their own right. This seems to be the only way to approach recorded music without becoming perpetually dissatisfied: accept recorded music for what it is and see its beauty in miniature. It can still have great beauty in its own right. You can always make the model a bit better, maybe even make it “way cool”, but it will never fly to Montreal or pull that train of boxcars.