On Nov 29, 10:39 pm, Steven Sullivan wrote:
bob wrote:
Goodness me:
http://stereophile.com/asweseeit/1107awsi/
A few tidbits:
"Audio actually used to have a goal: perfect reproduction of the sound
of real music performed in a real space. That was found difficult to
achieve, and it was abandoned when most music lovers, who almost never
heard anything except amplified music anyway, forgot what "the real
thing" had sounded like."
"Since the only measure of sound quality is that the listener likes
it, that has pretty well put an end to audio advancement, because
different people rarely agree about sound quality."
On multichannel:
"With fidelity in stagnation, spatiality was the only area of
improvement left."
If reproduction of the sound of real music in real space is the goal,
'spatiality' is a REQUIREMENT Of fidelity. ANd much of the most forward
thinking research into the 'perfection' of audio is in this area now.
Exactly. Holt is provocative here, but not always coherent.
And then there's this choice bit:
"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."
Bravo J Gordon.
In context, he seems to be talking about blind side-by-side speaker
comparisons. Not necessarily ABX tests of amps.
A lengthier diatribe is apparently in the works.
I never saw Stereophile in its samizdat days, so Holt to me was just
an occasional byline, and I assumed he was just as cracked as the rest
of them. Maybe not.
Stereophile got loonier in the wake of 'The Absolute Sound', which
set the loony standard.
Well, it all grew out of the Golden Ear Myth, for which I think Holt
deserves a share of the blame. (See "real music in real space.")
I liked this bit of curmudgeonliness.
"JA:Judging by online forums and by the e-mail I receive, there are currently three areas of passion for audiophiles:
vinyl playback, headphone listening, and music servers. Are you surprised by this?
JGH: I find them all boring, but nothing surprises me any more. "
Music servers, yeah. But a guy who cares about "real music in real
space" ought to be intrigued by the relative virutes of speakers vs.
headphones. And vinyl? It may not be technically better than CD, but
it's definitely mroe interesting.
bob