How can a system be judged with highly processed, non acoustic music?

The old J Gordon Holt mic story made me think some more. This whole listening/evaluating thing is incredibly complex. Nothing new, known about it since like forever. What's hard is trying to put into words what I've been doing this whole time.   

It comes down I think to pattern recognition. Everything has its own unique sonic signature or fundamental character, whatever you want to call it. Like, when you hear someone's voice, anyone you have heard before, you know who it is. Some of them, a wife or mother for example, you will know even coming to you far off in the distance, through a storm, over a cell phone, no problem. So we can recognize these things even when distorted all kinds of different ways.   

The way I see it, what we are doing when evaluating a system is not so much trying to say it sounds like it did originally. We can't ever really know what that was. Not exactly. We can't ever really know all the stuff that happened before it went down on tape. That is kind of like mom yelling in the storm, we can sort of tell the wind was blowing, rain, etc but we have to sort of put that aside. That part is nothing we can do anything about. The recording is what the recording is. All we can do is try and evaluate our end of it.  

So like I said hard to explain. But I think we are trying to listen for those patterns that are "true" to the whatever it was, and then do something very demanding. We have to somehow put aside all the many different aspects that came before our system, because we can do nothing about them. But then focus on the aspects that come after, because that is our system and that we can do something about.  

Learning to sort those out. One of the bigger keys to the kingdom.

It is a very good question mglik and one I have thought about a lot and first wrote about going back to the early 90’s. It is nowhere near easy with synth, but neither is it all that simple even with all minimalist recorded and classical acoustic instruments. Not even solo human voice. All these no matter how carefully recorded are altered and colored all kinds of ways by the recording venue itself. There really is no Rosetta Stone, no silver bullet, nothing we can grab hold of. Probably because there is nothing there to begin with, but that is another subject for another time.

Anyway, what I learned is yes you most certainly can judge and evaluate and build a high end system using highly processed non-acoustic music. It really is not any different than what it takes to do it with all acoustic minimally processed music. In both cases you simply have to slowly and gradually over time build up a knowledge base of how things sound through your system.

This is a seriously big challenge. Not least because it is completely at odds with the conventional wisdom and the prevailing advice parroted by so many of the importance of having a "reference" whatever. Reference recording. Reference speaker. Reference system. Whatever.

You want to to do it, seriously do it, let me give you the news: There is no reference! None! None at all! Nowhere! Best thing I can ever tell you, whatever you think is a reference, it is no more a reference than a meter, which is to say no reference at all.

All we can do is listen to a lot of different stuff, and the more the better, and try and look for patterns. We can’t say what is "bright" or "harsh" or "lush" or anything based on any one recording, other than relative to another, because we can never know for sure if it is indeed the recording. With records we cannot even know that much, because it may well indeed be the individual pressing copy and nothing to do with the recording! We must at all times keep an open mind.   

We talk for simplicity sake as if this weren't so. But if you want to take it seriously that is the first thing to understand, most of what we talk about is for simplicity sake. Got to keep straight what is, and what we pretend is for the sake of simplifying things down to the little bits we try and pretend to understand.   

You see what a phenomenally big challenge this is? And yet, when we do it right.... I spent the vast majority of my time listening to rock and hardly any classical or jazz. Never once in 30 years did anything, not one component or tweak, with the aim of making a sax or violin or string bass sound better. Not one time. All the great improvements I heard were with plain old U2 Tom Petty etc rock and roll. Yet lo and behold, now I put on Brubeck or Miles and oh my God does it sound right!

So it ain’t easy. But it can be done.