The eternal quandary

Detlof--wise words indeed!

When you think about it, even before you add that last anti-vibration device to the system, we're already listening to music reproduced at a level that is superior to what 99% of listeners are hearing from their boom-boxes, car radios, etc.

But--and this goes out to Markphd--would the *pure* music-lover be on this site in the first place? Don't they have to have at least a little of the "audiophile" in them? Does this have to do with the fact that so many practising musicians have such notoriously deficient equipment in their own homes?

BTW, the "offending" disc that occasioned this thread, was:

Jean-Fery REBEL, Violin Sonatas

Andrew Manze, violin; Richard Egarr, harpsichord, Jaap ter Linden, viola da gamba

Harmonia Mundi 907221.

Andrew Manze, IMHO, is an excellent baroque violinist...

I wish more CD booklets would include photos of the performers during the recording (this one doesn't, like so many others...)

Thanks, Newbee, for the reassurance--I'm sure you're right. The problem is aggravated somewhat because beyond getting the basics right (timbre, etc.) I do enjoy a good dimensional soundstage with good imaging within it.

Lately I've been noticing some major differences in the "apparent" acoustic (the hall acoustic as reproduced in/by the recording). The John Eliot Gardner Planets on DG (with Percy Grainger's Warriors) was another recent major disappointment. Swimmy and very diffuse again. All the more noticeable when played consecutively with some older analog Elgar recordings--cavernous acoustic, narrower, set well back from the place of the speakers, better localization of the various divisions (1st violins, 2nd violins, etc.) of the string section.

Jimjoyce--I'm afraid that I'm going to have to respectfully disagree.

As one moves up from boom-box to mid-level system, I would think the sound should steadily improve. But there has to be a point, an "elbow", somewhere on this line where, as the resolving power of the system continues to increase, it will start to show up all the particularities and peculiarities of each recording.

An analogy: put a polished pebble under a microscope at lower levels of magnification and it will look good, but as magnification increases, at a certain level you'll start to see roughness and pitmarks not visible to the naked eye.

As far as classical recordings are concerned, I would think many musicians would be more preoccupied with the performance (phrasing, dynamics, intonation, pace, etc. etc.) than with how well the recording happens to reproduce the acoustic of the space that the recording was made in.

Noticing what can sometimes be a large variation from recording to recording is surely a sign of the resolving capacity of the system, as labels, recording engineers and mixing engineers all have different philosophies, which they implement with greater or lesser success with each record.

Mike--I totally agree, but as you say, it's a mental trick that may be easier for some of us than others. Even if one starts out a session in mental mode #2, something can happen that jolts you out of it. That's the experience that started this thread. You may just want to enjoy the music, but when you put on a particular recording (especially one that you don't know), something may happen sonically, good, bad or just strange, that attracts your attention sufficiently to knock you from #2 to #1. And that's when the second-guessing may begin...

John Atkinson and others have demonstrated that a high percentage of "popular" recordings issued nowadays are highly compressed. This is the work of the mixing/mastering engineer, and this is how that person wanted them to sound and to be released. But they're not very good sounding on "our" equipment, compared to the boomboxes and car radios that they were designed to be played on.

There's an ontological argument to be made here too. Most (though not all) pop and rock discs only exist in one version. They are what they are (rose is a rose is a rose), whatever the sound.

Most classical recordings offer different versions of the same composition. It think it was Gordon Holt who came up with the annoying and paradoxical "principle" (Holt's law) that the better the performance the worse the sound, and the related if subsidiary principle of the better the sound, the more trivial the composition being recorded.

There are other factors involved here. The early years of digital recording are known for "digititis"--that terrible, mid-treble glare that makes solo violin unlistenable and your ears bleed. Was that intentional? Did the recording engineer care? What were they hearing on their studio monitors? The inability to listen to large swathes of recent classical recordings is what got me,somewhat reluctantly, into SETs, which made the unlistenable listenable again.

Where is the "accuracy" in all this? What are the norms of accuracy? I certainly agree with Mike that if a disc sounds bad on three or four different systems, it's surely the disc's fault.

From an epistemological point of view, the whole field of audio reproduction is fraught with a myriad of problems. Actually, it's a miracle that we can agree about anything! From the recording venue, the position of the microphones in the hall, the brand, model, number and mix of microphones, the different arrays, the cables, the recording medium, the engineer, all the way on through to the manufacturing of the CD that you're going to feed into your machine, there are just so many variables involved!

So what to do? Obviously, as many people remark, returning to the concert hall to refresh one's auditory memory as to what live sound actually sounds like (to you, on that date, in that hall--more subjectivity and variability) is important, as it is also to establish a kind of benchmark for what one hears at home.

But I think consensus is important too. Bertrand Russell might have you wondering if that coffee table sitting there on the carpet in front of you is "really" real, if it's really even there at all, but we get around this epistemological stumbling block by agreeing to accept that it probably is there, and therefore also we tend to walk around it (even if it isn't "really" there) so we don't get knocked on the shins.

If three or four like-minded friends agree that your system sounds good, then it probably does. (Reluctantly, I had to put that "like-minded" in because there is such subjectivity and variability out there too as to what "good" sounds like. Different ears; different criteria.) But here we have a minimum of consensus.

Likewise, if six or seven recordings of small classical chamber groups sound good on a given system, and one other recording doesn't, then I'm prepared to believe that there's some kind of problem with the recording somewhere in the recording chain, and that it's not the system's fault. (I'm talking about a level playing field here: for the purposes of argument let's stick with 17C sonatas with continuo and not drag Shostakovich into the mix...)

How does that, er, sound?