Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site
In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: The Absolute Sound of Audio Idiocy.
Post Subject: The "Spin"Posted by Paul S on: 8/8/2008
Of course the All-Important Idea of Consciousness is not and never will be a commodity, which pretty much guarantees that we will read precious little about it in consumer-oriented magazines like TAS, etc. And, naturally, their consumer-oriented approach also means that what they do write is likely to be marketing-speak rather than profound abstract thinking. Taking it a "logical" step farther, they constantly re-hash any and all ideas, good and bad, simply in order to "test the market" for them, with Absolutely no consideration for the Idea other than trying to gauge the "market" in terms of units sold. And, of course, their own notions of the Absolute Sound are no exception.
Still, regardless of where HP/TAS ended up, and moving on from TAS's version, I think there is merit in the idea of keeping the "complete" sound of music in mind (eg., the Absolute Tone) as one develops a sound system, given, of course, one also has some rational ideas about Music. After all, we don't want the whole thing to sound like a kazoo, right? As it happens, it was Stereophile founder (and recording engineer) J. Gordon Holt who always insisted that the system should "accurately" render everything on the recording, and he went on from there to talk about how best to record. HP differed in that he +/- abstracted the idea of live acoustic music as +/- an aural pivot/litmus test for the entire "chain", and he then wrote endlessly on the expanded version of this root concept. Meanwhile, JGH wanted to fix the responsibility for the "end product" (ie, the music) with the engineers.
But our own paths are not so simple, because in the Real World there are wild variations in sound from one end of the "sound chain" to the other, and there is No Way we are ever going to be able to do anything but interpret a musical event via hi-fi. No question that this is the case; the only question is "How" (with critically important sub-sets of "what" and "why").
I get the L. Freud reference, but in many ways one might as well mention S. Freud in the same context. Sure, I get the drift, but I happen to think Jung is more fun, and I think L. Freud's ideas are extreme enough to be both good and bad examples at the same time of the "Spin" one invariably puts on (re)produced sound, let alone music. I like L. Freud, but I don't want nothing but his work all over my house.
Why doesn't anyone ever equate the total effect of video in terms of actual verisimilitude? Maybe because most people lean 90% to visual, so it's just plain harder to fool many people with video? In any case, I think it is obvious to most people that a video is "not the same" as what it "represents".
Carrying over the same truism to audio, this does make the idea of "the open window on the sound" a bit of a laugher.
Best regards,
Paul SRerurn to Romy the Cat's Site