Hey, which of us DOESN'T want our rig to SOUND LIKE THE REAL THING???
Does anyone know where this J. Gordon Holt comes from?
Interviewer: “Do you see any signs of future vitality in high-end audio?”
JGH: “Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.
Remember those loudspeaker shoot-outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasions when various reviewers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least-favorite) model? That was all the proof needed that [blind] testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio.“
Showing 2 responses by clearthinker
@ghdprentice That's perceptive and I agree with you. Whilst misguided producers mess when they record acoustic sound in a space, most try to recapture the original event. Multiple miking of orchestral symphonies just creates an artificial mess. Did you hear the Zimerman/Rattle Beethoven concertos recorded on DG during the COVID? I have the LPs. Pretty well every instrument was individually miked and the signals taken back to a presumably enormous mixing desk where one imagines the producer flexing the sliders in an effort to outthink Beethoven. In doing so the 'original event' was expunged. By contrast, those who record orchestras with a simple stereo pair can produce a good reproduction of the live performance. By the same process almost all music involving electrically amplified instruments is artificially mixed so that even those who were in the studio cannot relate the recorded event to the original event. There can be no worthwhile objective of trying to reproduce the 'original' sound. This cannot be done and indeed the original sound cannot be identified. But I think we are agreed that accurate reproduction of a correctly recorded acoustic event is a worthwhile objective. More artificial 'events' and recordings just have to follow along. I can still enjoy such recordings but there is no 'real thing' with which to compare them, so I don't. |