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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: The “Inverted High End Audio” ™
Post Subject: Language and soundPosted by Paul S on: 10/16/2006
One big thing for Gordon Holt was to create a standardized language to be used to describe what we hear.  If you think about it, this task is made very difficult by the fact that there are really very few aural-centric modifiers; rather most descriptive terms we use are visual.  It is well known that Holt was a poor businessman, and as he slipped ever further into debt, others lent financial support along with their own ideas about everything, including their own words to be used to describe what they themselves were hearing.  At one point many years ago I wrote several resentful letters to then newly-hired Editor John Atkinson about just this problem: that no one could understand anymore what the hell they were talking about.  He was very nice, and he even seemed to finally understand me; but he of course opined that I was making a mountain out of a molehill.

I think the original idea was to use language to compare and contrast live music with reproduced music, and of course this is where Pearson's idea of the "Absolute Sound" came from.

But, just as you say, came the usual, perhaps inevitable, involution of language for which there is no known/shared context or meaning.  And from there it was only a matter of time until the most clever among them took charge and began to re-define all terms to suggest some sort of leisure product, and your "window" became a vacation destination instead of an invisible barrier.

Paul S

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