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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: My Audio Philosophy
Post Subject: Musicians' responses to musicPosted by montesquieu on: 10/20/2019
Musicians do respond differently to music than non-musicians. Brain scans have shown that different parts of the brain light up when their 'genre' of music or something close to it, or otherwise something easily comprehensible, is played to them, compared to the brains of non-musicians - they cannot avoid hearing things analytically, practically, functionally.
As an organist and choirmaster myself (amateur/semi-pro nowadays but professionally trained and with a background in both scholarship and performance) I can really relate to this - for example it's impossible in lots of cases NOT to 'know' the key something is in (from a variety of cues, including I suspect timbral association), or to imagine a bass line as a written line. Baroque and renaissance music (especially keyboard music) I live and breathe (I have both a harpsichord and a piano at home, play every day), and I've also done quite a bit with Lieder and classical/early Romantic piano (though I'd be the first to admit piano technique isn't my strong point).
When listening to this music of course there is emotional impact but I'm also listening for a huge amount of other things. By contrast when I listen to jazz whether live or recorded I know I listen differently, of course you can't help but try to make sense of structure but I feel the emotional impact can be more direct as the chord structures and changes are too complex for me to follow. I've deliberately not studied or attempted to play jazz for this reason, to keep it in a separate mental/emotional/physical category.
When it comes to reproduction though, I don't think this plays out in any particular way. When I was at boarding school in the UK in the 1970s, I was introduced to hifi by my maths teacher, who had Quad ESLs, Quad II amps and some kind of Sony turntable, though most of his listening was on Sony cassette tape a lot of it recorded from a Leak valve tuner. That was an education, not just in musical repertory but in reproduction as well. So I had a head start on many musicians and bought my first set of Tannoys in the mid 80s with what was my first full-time pay cheque (as a journalist but that's another story - though I had been earning for quite some time previously as a music teacher and performer).
I agree that many musicians don't have much of a clue about hifi, and very few indeed would consider spending the sort of money or attention I've lavished on my system. This I believe is down to my first paragraph - how musicians listen differently. They aren't listening for 'hifi' attributes of soundstage, or accurate timbre, or 'fine detail' at all. Most of what they listen to happens in their heads, so they can easily fill in any deficiencies with their imagination. I 'suffer' from this myself when asked to critique people's systems - often if it's music I like my mind goes to the music, not the reproduction. In fact my system has largely been built around my wife's ears, which are magnificent. (We met at a Schumann Lieder recital). She is much, much faster than me in hearing problems, in hearing improvements, and in guiding what needs to be done. She is usually right (occasionally I have to slow her down as she can come to snap judgments before things have warmed up or run in) and it's very very seldom we disagree on what a piece of kit is or isn't doing. She isn't a musician but has been a concert-goer all her life.
Philosophically, I see my hifi system as an emotional delivery mechanism, but one that can also deliver the analytical information necessary for me to understand what I'm hearing. That sounds simple, but if the rhythm isn't right, if there room ambience is missing, if there is distortion, emotional delivery can break down. I've worked empirically to find out what works. Idler turntables over belt or DD. Low compliance cartridges and heavy tonearms. Vinyl over everything. Non-oversampling, redbook DAC. Tannoy dual concentric speakers. Nothing over-etched or over-detailed. Single ended and triode were possible. Limited local feedback. Minimise the gain stages, only use what power is necessary.
The result is attending Munich High End and finding only a few people doing anything worth listening to - Thomas Mayer perhaps, the Audio Note room (a minibus ride away), Reinhard Thoress's room .. there is some interesting stuff but so much of it is big multi-driver shiny speakers (your Wilsons and the like) driven by boring, giant solid state amps and with utterly awful streaming systems on the front end.
I don't have any truck with systemisation, yes Peter Qvortrop has done well making his vast product range comprehensible from a marketing perspective with his 'levels' where you pay more each time, and yes you do get more of this and that as you go up the line, but the notion that there's a 'level 1' or 'level 2' system (as opposed to a component given a marketing label and a price point) I simply reject. Synergies are there for exploration, yes there are combinations you should in principle avoid - such as a flea power amp and an 86db speaker - but to an extent almost everything in my world is suck it and see.
Incidentally I don't know anything about the wider Iranian music scene but I have had the privilege of hearing Mahan Esfahani several times at the Wigmore Hall in London, one of the finest harpsichordists currently performing. (We are regular Pinnock followers too especially his smaller-scale events, music clubs and the like - we heard him not so long ago in an 18th century house in Hampstead playing Handel on Handel's own Ruckers harpsichord, which was already a famous and venerable instrument when he bought it, in front of 40 people). Esfahani studied with the wonderful Zusana Ruzickova and while their styles are very different something of her passion can be seen in how he plays. But then many Iranians I have met have been wonderfully passionate people. I guess it all goes back to Hafez, Shirazi, Khayyam ...
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