How much “suspension of disbelief do you need?”


We (or most of us) believe that it’s very difficult if not impossible to hear an exact representation of the the sound of a live performance on a recording.
The question is how much do you have to delude yourself into thinking it’s the real thing your listening to, to satisfy yourself.
To some it has to to be as close as possible. But others can make allowances for defects in the sound in order to enjoy the presentation.

‘How much do you need?

 

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Showing 1 response by rolanda

Long ago I helped - well, stood around uselessly - at a recording of a choral concert in a chapel at an Oxford college.  We had a coincident pair of crossed ribbons(good ones) feeding directly a set of Quad ELS’s via Quad II amplifiers, all set up in the vestry separated from the chapel by a wooden door.  You could hear the choir entering the chapel and walking by the microphones, their footsteps well outside the speakers, quite uncanny.  Needless to say this was about as good a sound as you can get.

‘However if you cracked the door so you could hear the choir through the crack, and compare it with the sound through the speakers, it was night and day.  The live sound was alive, and the speaker sound might as well have been a pair of Cerwin-Vegas or JBL’s.

So no, Hifi is pretty much hopeless in recreating a real concert, no matter how expensive it is.  It can remind you of it at best.