In article , KH
wrote:
On 7/30/2013 3:52 PM, Audio_Empire wrote:
snip
First of all. If you don't ever listen to real, live, amplified music,
I assume you meant "un-amplified"?
Pop music was almost never mentioned
and jazz only rarely. Now it's completely reversed. Every review I
read tells me how The Who, or Cat Stevens, or Rod Stewart' latest
album (along with a myriad of more recent groups and soloists that I
have never heard of at all)
This would appear to say volumes about your knowledge of pop music.
I know enough * more than I want to. And if you are saying that I am
wrong here, then I believe it says more about your knowledge of music
and reproduction than it does about mine.
If the music doesn't exist in real space, then
the accuracy of the playback totally becomes a matter personal tastes
and as a means of communicating opinions from one group of people to
another, it's arbitrary, and clearly NOT useful.
Personal tastes, irrespective of listening tastes, are arbitrary, and
NOT useful to others relative to what they may like or find "accurate".
The results obtained from such a test have
absolutely no bearing on how the paving machine will perform when
paving roads with hot asphalt! Likewise a speaker review (for
instance) using studio recorded pop music bears little or no relation
to how that speaker system might perform with REAL, live acoustical
music and anybody who thinks that it does, is deluded.
It bears directly on how a system will sound with the referenced system
- in the opinion of the reviewer. How is that less useful than a review
of how a speaker system sounds with music that the reader couldn't care
less about, and won't be listening too?
Because he will at least know that the reviewer is basing his opinion on
the quality of reproduction of a known absolute. A string section is a
string section, but an electric guitar can be made (and often is) to
sound like anything the musician and engineer want it to sound like.
I.E., It's not a REAL acoustic instrument that can be experienced with
nothing between the player and the listener but real space.
Frustrating!
They are entertainment, IMO, and nothing more, no matter what the
musical selections are.
Again, we're not talking about the entertainment qualities of the music.
That IS, and should be, a matter of personal taste. We are talking about
judging the reproductive qualities of electro-mechanical devices
designed to play music accurately. If one doesn't know what the music is
SUPPOSED to sound like, how can one judge the accuracy of playback? We
know what a violin is supposed to sound like. we know what a solo
acoustic guitar is supposed to sound like, and we know what a
technologically unaltered human voice sounds like. These things can be
used * to a greater or lesser extent, to judge the reproductive accuracy
of a playback system. Not just some some arbitrary "it sounds good", but
it's ACCURACY. Wholly artificial non-acoustic studio music has none of
these qualities. Anyone who says that they know what "Dark Side of the
Moon" is SUPPOSED to sound like, unless they were there in the studio
when the album was recorded, is either deluding himself, or lying. There
is no third alternative. Now, one may LIKE what they hear when they play
"Dark Side of the Moon" on a particular stereo system, but they have no
way of knowing to any degree of certitude whether that pleasing playback
is accurate to the original performance and that's my point. If all you
are interested in is that the music is recognizable as being Pink Floyd,
fine. But don't tell me that makes any piece of stereo gear accurate
just because it does that. There is more to it than that and I maintain
that one cannot make any determination beyond "it sounds good to me"
using music that has no REAL SOUND without a studio and a cadre of
engineer and producers between the performers and the listeners.
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