[Arny Krueger]

"Andrew Haley" wrote in
message

Audio Empire wrote:

The term "live music" infers (1) real musicians,

What would an effective unreal musican be like?

A robot? ;-)

(2) playing un-amplified music (3) in real time (IOW, if you
go to a symphony orchestra concert, you have a good
chance of hearing the orchestra with NO amplification.
That's "live music"). And while the average rock concert
certainly meets criteria numbers one and three, it
misses out on the critical number two. All hard-rock
concerts are artificial.

You're saying, then, that the body of a string instrument
is not artificial, and neither is the sound board of a
piano, or the bell of a trumpet, or an organ pipe.

Other than the organ pipe, these are all mechanical amplifiers. AFAIK organ
pipes don't amplify, simply make big sound by being big.

But somehow, a guitar amplifier is.

Which begs the question of why we allow amplifiers to be components of hi fi
systems if they are inherently so unnatural.

This is a wholly arbitrary definition; it makes no sense.

The sense it makes lies in the history of the development of musical
instruments, not in the artificial distinction that you correctly question.

There's nothing special about purely acoustic amplifying devices.

In fact they have a lot of nasty inherent limitations, such as the law of
conservation of energy.

Many (all?) electric guitarists will tell you that their
Marshall (or whatever they use) is an essential part of
the instrument.

I look at musical instrument amplifiers as a replacement for or a
continuation of the base musical instrument. Ironically, most of the live
sound gigs I do lack musical instrument amplifiers. We use things that are
closer to hi fi amplifiers and speakers, and encapsulate the simulation of
the sounding board in purpose-built electronics.

Digital, can, OTOH, theoretically, be copied, serially,
an infinite number of times with no generation loss. In
reality, of course, the added noise with each generation
is THERE, it's just that the noise is analog and the
system is looking for ones and zeros. BUT, eventually,
it is conceivable that the background noise can get so
high that the digital intelligence cannot be read
through the noise.

This description seems to miss the point that we zero out the analog media
noise in every new digital generation. The generational noise is corrected
while it is still easily correctable so that it never builds hp.