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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: More or less pleasure: wider implication
Post Subject: Just some directions...Posted by Romy the Cat on: 2/13/2020
 rowuk wrote:
I would maintain that much of the music available is intended for "informed audiences". This is true if we are listening to Stockhausen, Stravinsky - or mediocre concerts by amateurs or "semi professionals".
The level of our preparation makes it easier to sort the sonic events (live or recorded) when listening for the first time. With playback, the target changes once we start listening a second time. We know what is coming. With live, preparation can prepare our expectations.
I actually very much disagree with it. It might be that much of the music available is intended for "informed audiences" when we are taking about musical culture but it is very much not the case when we are taking about audio culture. The audio audiences might be comfortable to recognize the musical payload of the audio event but they are very little informed what purely audio infliction they are exposed during listening. I mean audio people think that they have control over audio language and expressive tools but in reality I insist that they most do not. Just an example. When an classically trained audio person hear sound that he feel is not correct then he can give with the precision of coupe dBs the deviation of response from amplitude flatness. The irony is that the amplitude deviation is although registerable but completely irrelevant for quality of listening. Practically no one classically trained audio person understand how to acknowledge phase deviations and it is the only thing that is important. The same way no one classically trained audio person understand how to make bass that would impersonate long LF decay  in listening room, it is not even recognized as objective in audio. However, all of it has very direct relation to our inner us react to sound and how our brain processes the heard sound. I do not want to sound that I know how all of it works. I just point out at some directions that you might explore yourself and to see if getting control of some of the less obvious audio expressive methods you will get closer to where you would like to be.  

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