Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

I don’t know what other people respond to as “music”, but I certainly regard sound itself as very important, indeed, and my own sense is that sound itself is usually most of what I am futzing with when I futz with my system.  Basically, I trust myself to be able to use sound as a tool to home in on music with my hi-fi.  Regardless of my serious jokes about drifting and piling inanity to Babble-on, I still try to tune my system to sound like I want it to.  While I can’t help but distinguish between live music and hi-fi, I also aim to capture/re-create with my hi-fi as much as I can of what moves me about live performances, including fair sonic verisimilitude.  No, I can’t get Beethoven’s 9th just right, but then I don’t presently aim to.  Call me a quitter, but I just mostly gave up quite a few years ago.  It’s just too freaking BIG.  Still, with respect to your point, Romy, I do at times get something very much akin to musical awareness even from Beethoven’s 9th, sonic disparities notwithstanding.  And in answer to the post just prior to this one, I do not get an analogous art fix from looking at, say, prints of Pollocks’ paintings, compared to looking at the originals.  I am thinking right now about “texture” and a sort of “perspective” implied by “texture”, not to mention “gesture”, and I think this applies broadly to music, as well.  By this I mean to say that I “believe” I have actually gotten some of these things “right” in the rote sense with my sound system.

I am always amused when people mention musicians in the context of audio, especially when “musicians” are introduced as though a musician somehow naturally has better hi-fi discernment or a better handle on sound reproduction.  Although I’m sure that others’ experiences will vary, I can count on one hand the musicians I’ve known who gave a fig about hi-fi, and of those only one ever bothered to try to assemble a “special” system.  He went out shopping, asked questions, listened and spent some real money on it.  Eventually he (apparently) put together the system he was looking/listening for, and IMO it sucked (although it would get pretty loud).

So who knows what a musician is thinking about with respect to live versus Memorex?  Those I talk to generally seem pretty far removed from sound per se, except as it relates to something very specific, like a particular instrument or a certain tonic value, etc.  Otherwise, they seem mostly interested in performance, per se -  how so-and-so performs a particular piece, or exactly what so-and-so did/does in fairly rote terms.  While I’ve gotten some remarkable insights into music from listening to musicians talk about music, I have also pretty much had them let the air out of what I thought were some great performances.  I would not be surprised to find out that Richter did not bother to further distinguish what to him warranted no further distinction.

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site