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(Richard D Pierce) wrote in message ...
Mkuller wrote:
Live music always sounds euphonic.

Really? What an extraordinary claim!

I once attended a harpsichord recital given by Igor Kipnis. It
included works by Bach, Couperin, Scarlatti, Handel and
Krzysztof Penderecki. All was fine, very pleasant sounding, very
sweet, until the Penderecki. Then it was most sour, most
unpleasant. Not euphonic in the least. Indeed, a RECORDING of
the concert would have been preferably, since I could have
simply skipped the Penderecki. That one piece made what would
have been an otherwise enjoyable concert most sour.

I attended a live Chieftains concert where the sound was utterly
dreadful.

I attended an organ recital where the entire reed chorus was
systematically about a eighth of a tone sharp. Not fun at all.

If "euphonia" is in the ears of the beholder, making a grand
seeping statement like "live music always sounds euphonic" means
that there IS accounting for taste, that live music must, by
your definition, always be esthetically and technically
flawless.

I must defend Penderecki lest you deprive yourself and others of
hearing a near masterpiece of his. I'm talking of St. Luke's Passion,
an early composition of his, a most moving and impressive work that
stands out (in my opinion etc. etc) amongst the "postmodern" music.
I don't know what you heard and I'll concede that none of his
,later compositions, spoke to me near as powerfully. I heard St.
Luke's on two LP. versions by Philips and RCA-Victrola. I preferred
the Philips.
On the unrelated topic of tone controls I agree that they are better
than nothing. The notion that fidelity to the particular microphone
setup and to the creation of an audio enginner surrounded by his
eletronic gear in his little room with his little monitor speaker is
what hi-fi is all about always struck me as ridiculous. Incidentally
you blame high-end for it- perhaps rightly , but off=hand it sounds
very much like the creation of audio engs. themselves. No matter.
My problem was that I never encountered tone controls that performed
well. The ones I knew boosted or suppressed wide ranges of
frequencies. I owned several Quad amps and didn't think their " tilt
controls" were all that much better.
I agree also that graphic equalisers were a failure. I had quite a few
and even the best ones like Orban had unmanageable, overlapping Qs and
could be "heard". Getting them out of the system was a defeat and a
relief all at the same time.
Being keen on fidelity not to the industrial product but to my
idea of live sound I eventually constructed my own parametric
equaliser based on the Double AmP. Bypass (DABP) filter design with a
lot of parametric bands, which I described in the Audio Amateur.
It was more to my taste than anything I had before but being an
inept technician I never managed to get rid of hum.
Finally Roger Sanders of "Inner Ear" put me onto Behringer digital
equaliser which I think at its present price is about the best buy in
electronics. It is silent, has extremely narrow Q, a pink noise
generator for automatic room equalisation (that can be adjusted to
taste) and I can not "hear" it in the system.
In an impossible listening room like mine it is a gift.
Ludovic Mirabel