Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site


In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: There is nothing subjective in music reproduction.
Post Subject: Leave subjectivism where it belongsPosted by Romy the Cat on: 3/21/2006

 Thorsten wrote:
While what you present is an admirable thought experiment, I can assure you that the premise you posit:

"people who are familiar with the way how life music impacts them will painlessly adjust that EQ and will end up with very much identically final outcome"

is absolutely and conclusively untrue. It is even untrue for a more or less ideal head-related recording made from a normal listening position in the hall and played back via excellent Koss or Stax ESL Headphones.

Some of the worst offenders in "bending the response" will in fact be people who regulary attend ive music BUT who regulary sit in places very much different from that where the recording was made.

In short, your posited premise is untrue, completely and absolutely so, even with what one might term near  ideal recordings.

Using the much less ideal recordings made for speaker stereophony and equalised and adjusted to the Conductors, Producers and Mastering Engineers taste all bets are off. Surprisingly conductors often seem to have as often as not no idea what the orchestra and instruments really sound like, even from the podum, judging by the kind of EQ application they often insist(ed) upon (Karajan was often a major offender).

So Roman, I think you need to realise that there is no "objective", "rational" or "absolute" truth in reproducing music AT THE MOMENT, there is merely a wide landscape of hugely disparate approaches that converge somewhere in the middle of the playing field, but very few people are in the middle of the playing field, many have indeed wandered off to the extemes where life is more interresting.
T,

There is no "objective", "rational" or "absolute" truth in the initial interpretation of musical content, sonic rendering of this interpretation or understanding of the musical content but it is unquestionably there is an absolute truth in the REPRODUCTION efforts of those rendering. When DG did their “Originals” they did not think a lot and put in the studio the team who by “hearing” brought many different DG recordings to the common denominator of “how it should be”. I believe that they did phenomenal job.

The point is: do not confuse music and reproductions. In audio we juts reproduce Sound and it is not necessary to dive into the jangles of subjectivism. When you sit in orchestra with your musical instrument your job is juts to render scope and there is not subjectivism how you need to so it. Leave the subjectivism to the conductor…

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site