GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: How would you handle it?

Post Subject: Living with a musicianPosted by drdna on: 6/2/2013

My wife is a musician. She plays the trumpet in a small symphony orchestra,in a traditional brass band, and numerous small gigs around town. She has a lovely CD out and drove the first "tone-deaf" engineer insane while making it. Ultimately she was unhappy with the sound and went to another studio that was amazing for the low watt tubes systems, gold wiring, and horn speakers. It came out quite well. But I digress.

Anyway, the question was whether to expose someone who is a music lover to the horror of audio. While every case is different, it sounds like she may not really care. This was the case for my wife. I explained everything I was doing in my system and why and so forth. I switched out different recordings and different pressings of records for her. She could absolutely tell precisely the changes made. Her level of audio discernment was incredibly refined. She always knew when some change had been made or even if the electricity was a bit off that day. Her sense of aural perception is pretty amazing, maybe in part because she is a musician. But for the most part, it doesn't bother her. Her threshold for what is acceptable audio-wise is "not too picky." She can tell, but she is fine listening on any old CD player. What is much more important to her is the composition and performance of the pieces.

I remember one time we were listening to a live performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7. We got to the 2nd movement, which is one of my favorites, and I was happily enjoying it when I saw her cringing. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me: that second trumpet player over there, the horn is not warmed up properly and so he is having to scoop all the notes to keep in tune. It is driving me crazy!

So, she had added on a whole other layer of complexity. I might be obsessed with the audio, but she has her own things she obsesses about, too! While I could understand her concerns, it did not change me from enjoying the piece. Likewise, she can easily understand my audio concerns, but it doesn't stop her from enjoying the performance. Because of this mutual sharing, we have more respect for each other and we enjoy different layers of music in different ways, complementarily. This is what led to her asking me to step in and help her find a new studio and new engineer to finish her CD. Oh, it came back around anyway. How about that.

So, I do not think it would be a bad thing, necessarily. Of course, everyone is different.

Adrian

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