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I have to admit that the live Zander’s Bruckner Fifth from the end of 2007 made me to re-think how I would like Macondo to sound. It is not that I recognized new Macondo’s “Hi-Fi problems”, whatever it has I am very comfortable with it, but I rather would like to have Macondo be able some “tricks” that Benjamin Zander did with Boston Philharmonic during his Bruckner Fifth.

It is hard to explain but it is a magic of a very different caliber. It has in a way something to do with state when sound exist and do not exist and at the same time it has something do with ability to look into sound, to look cognitive but at the same time exercise intellectuality at very different primordial and wild fashion.

Mind you that this “effect” that I am talking about is very seldom, if ever, a subject of live listening. Live listening works differently. If a performance is of a noble caliber then it introduces a large amplitude of listening experience. I do not know how with you but with me a VERY high level of live performance kind of blocks me out. It turns the lights off and fills me with some cathartic but not interpretable feelings. I might go home after a very high level of live performance and easily sleep for 24 hours or subconsciousnessly and pointlessly to walk around city for hours and hours, being able just to breathe but not to think. Here is where Audio come to picture….

Audio allows reinstating that rush of musical adrenalin but in manageable format, suitable for consumption at different levels.  In a way audio is like reading those books that many of us have.  I mean not any books but THOSE – the few selected book that we read for many years, knowing pages from them by hart but still discovering each 6 month a new and new layer or a new perception of the old layers. Audio is exactly like this - it captures the performing event, it might release the listening devils but it also (and here is where I adore Audio) it can slow down the “consumption ceremony” and convert the played performance from a 200 mg shot of vodka to a very surgical pealing a layer after layer from performing event, allowing actually to learn something semi-intellectually about the World and ourselfs in context of the given musically expressed sensations.

I always liked the way in which Macondo allow, if I wish, to peal music. It can take a layer after a layer, still holding the whole shape of musical onion untouched. Also Macondo always knows where is too dangers to go further in some cases - Macondo kind of warns where the pealing shell stop. I learned this trick from ML2.0 but ML2.0 had a fixed externally set point or as I called it “managed depth of the pealing field”.  Melquiades absolutely removed that “managed” limitation and let Macondo to fly free about it’s pealing judgment… That is in a way a diabolical fan to play a given powerful performance, reinterpreting it by the dynamic striping the demonstrated expressivity off and dressing up the play with own layers of understanding. Then the Benjamin Zander’s Bruckner Fifth with Boston Philharmonic came…

The Zander’s Bruckner 5 demonstrated a slightly different level of relationship between listening awareness, the core and the layers of perception. The “slow” essence of the Bruckner musicality certainly helped but also Zander’s demonstrated something absolutely unique in my view.  That performance has some kind of intellectual pocket within itself where mind can rest to be “cooked” for the coming events.  Zander’s in a way teases mind shaking it right and left and then holding it nowhere, letting it to marinade in own juice and…. he does it while playing the symphony!!! That is absolutely amazing feeling but Macondo does not handle it. It at this point I do not know why Macondo  slips on and I keep thinking about it for the last month.

When Zander stops  and the Bruckner whole sound collapses into a single point of absolute nothingness, into some kind proverbial vacuum, the vacuum that has only inner-reference to future but not to the past, when it happens  the  Macondo  (or my playback generally) continues to read some stupid and unnecessary Miranda Rights. That makes me absolutely annoyed. The inability of Macondo to care the “Zander’s bubble of vacuum” I think has something to do with specific harmonics at very- very low dynamic level. Macondo is driven by SET, the topology that order of magnitude more sophisticated in very low dynamic levels then anything else out there. Still, what Macondo/Melquiades do now is absolutely perfect in my view for sounds at low dynamic levels but apparently not for the absent of sounds. I do not know if it has anything to do with harmonics of noise or with the way in which Melquiades “process” the proverbial DC but am very much look forward to look into this.

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