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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: If I were a High-End Audio Tsar...
Post Subject: Recomposition as creativityPosted by Romy the Cat on: 1/21/2025
 Romy the Cat wrote:
 Real World Audio wrote:

Actually, as the human ear is non-linear, then linearity matching for either amp or speaker is irrelevant to how the brain interprets it. Clearly, we need a different approach to understanding information-storage and transmission that has high relevance to the human hearing and human brain processed, and less fixed onto computational paradigms that have relevance to little more than ensuring manufacturing tolerances. As we are barely understanding the basis on how human brain processes sound, the "right" way to record and play back music for human consumption is still in its infancy. In my experience, overly sticking to lowest analyzed distortion figures results in a representation that focuses our attention more on the defects produced in the recording and playback process, and does not let our imagination run wild with the music. Natural music ignites creativity. What I consider good playback does the same. Bad live events suppress creativity (even when they sound "perfect"), and absolute sound playbacks also act as creativity suppression mechanisms. Even for material that was recorded in a way that would normally allow vivid spurts of creativity, become hallow and brittle - with more details for sure, like 1 to10 upscaled size plastic food. Looks huge and super-detailed, even the half-blind can see it clearly - but you can't eat it. I think Romy does not have an issue with the detail level, he has issue with whether the reproduction is edible or inert. I agree with Romy, absolute sound tends to equal lack of music. It is the celebration of technology, not the celebration of life and art.

Courtesy to https://www.youtube.com/@realworldaudio

Thank you very much for your reply. I am stealing from you your quote that natural music ignites creativity. I never formulated in this way and I always advocated that natural music ignite recomposition. Or natural music create artistic endeavors in other form in art. You put it in much more genetic and perfect way: creativity. I think the key here i where I am comfortable is the adjective natural. Certainly the result very produced with our playbacks are not natural music, but a reproduce surrogate. And we generally in audio, are trying, irrelevantly foolishly in my view, to make reproduce music to sound like live music. I feel it is a gross fellowship, fallacy in the efforts and the fallacy in objectives. Playback system should not produce the sounds that match the sounds of the original music. This is where I greatly deviate from majority of audio practitioners. I feel that playback supposed to produce "something" that should impact a listener in a listening room, witch will ignite creativity in the listener. The protocol of interaction between orchestra and the stage and listener and a person in a listening room in my view are different. The simplistic imitation of a sounds by playback is not correct because playback has its own expressive mechanisms. I do not presume that I know them, I might accidentally stumble upon of some of them which work better on worse but we still have no unified theory of audio reproduction. Ironically, the more accepted by high-end industry, the more celebrated names, as the most self pompes fools produce more important audio equipment. 

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