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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: The Absolute Sound of Audio Idiocy.
Post Subject: As I see itPosted by Antonio J. on: 8/7/2008
Romy criticizes the absurdity of taking the "sound" of a live performance -of some serious music- as the rule against which to measure an audio system's performance. There's no way reproduced sound can be a perfect copy of natural sound.
However there're a completely different set of objectives you can aim using audio, which are different, and should be, for anyone of us. There're evolved objectives, which sit into a realm different than pure sonic performance, and there're basic, elemental objectives, that are the ones that most people looks at, but which are quite irrelevant to get to the evolved ones.

IMHO audio should aim to the evolved set of objectives, which raise from our own self-knowledge and also our interaction with the music at higher levels than sound. Keeping the audio thing at the level of reaching good sonic performance mimicking natural sounds, is not very evolved, nor trully satisfying for someone having deep interaction with the music.

Elaborating from your photograph example, the "common audio" approach would be having that picture made in a big format, with a very closed diaphragm, so you can see clearly defined every layer in depth, using the film brand that better captures natural colors, trying it to resolve every tiny detail and light nuance, and even using flash or auxiliar light sources to have everything resolved and captured. Would that get you closer to your feelings when you were exposed to the real view?... The evolved approach to that picture making, would be the one of using the necessary "tricks" if needed, to help you feeling right the same you felt when seeing the view, and if possible inducing new sentiments. This would need disregarding if there's perfect focus on every part of the picture, there're imperfect shadow definitions or you need to make an effort to actually see something that the picture just indirectly suggests.

Perhaps some people can have the deep emotions looking at the "perfect" picture, but the ones who had a profound interaction with the view, would experiment a deeper impression looking at their "personally tailored" one.

Rgrds

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