Musicians?

I have been a professional musician for over thirty years. I started playing a musical instrument (accordion) at age five; the clarinet, saxophone and flute followed. I went to music conservatory while working weekends in local bar bands. I later moved to NYC, and have been working in just about every facet of the the music scene there for twenty five years; primarily Lincoln Center orchestras and Broadway. I have been an audiophile since the first time I heard a junior high school friend's grandmother's mono, tube based Philco console, and realized there was something else out there besides the usual screechy solid state stuff of the time. It wasn't until years later that I could afford decent equipment.

For me it's vinyl, tubes and electrostats that do it. I have two different high end systems. One is Meitner ss driving Paragon Regents, but it's the Manley tubes driving Stax F-81's that have the magic. In both cases it is a VPI TNT/ET2/Vandenhul setup or Ah!Tjoeb 4000 as source. IMO, the most important element in a system is it's sense of aliveness; wether it can do a good job of delineating micro dynamics. If it can't differentiate between ppp and pp, and do it in a continuous (analog) way, without it sounding choppy or jerky, then no amount of clarity, or frequency extension will make up for that. Musical expression is noty about ultimate frequency extension or "accuracy" (whatever that is).The second most important trait in a good system for me is tonal density. A lot of systems present what, to me, sound like fairly accurate OUTLINES of musical instruments and voices without nearly enough of the incredible complexity of tonal color that live instruments and voices have in real life. Not enough of the meat. It is tonal density that gives music it's palpabilty. For me a good vinyl setup does this, along with far more realistic rendering of dynamics (micro).

I would like to offer a different perspective on the issue of musicians and their stereo systems. I often read comments about how musicians have "inferior" systems. Unfortunately, the comments are sometimes not a simple statement of an observation (however mistaken), but are accompanied by a somewhat judgmental attitude. Here are some hopefully more instructive observations:

-I have many colleagues with high-end sound systems. The musicians' community is a very small one, but as a percentage of that community, the number with high-end systems is far, far greater than the percentage of people with high end systmes in the general population. So can we please put that myth to rest once and for all?

-A big part of being an audiophile is the tweakyness of it all. There are certain personality types (I include myself), that enjoy the quest for perfection in a certain endeavor. The finetuning, the setup, or simply the satisfaction of knowing that we are discriminating or astute in a certain way. Nothing wrong with that; we all choose our poison. It takes an incredible amount of time and dedication to finetune, setup, and to "be astute" as a musician. It is very easy for non-musicians to romanticize what it means to be a successful musician, while forgetting that a lot of it is dedication to the routine of practice, repetition, and necessary obsession with equipment. There are only so many hours in the day. Sometimes one can't do both.

-This observation is not meant to come accross as judgmental in any way: No sound system can convey the satisfaction and thrill of playing in a great orchestra, or a smoking jazz or rock band. It can do it to varying degrees, but to a musician, a sound system will always fall woefully short. That's not to say that it can't sound great, and provide much more satisfaction than an inferior system, but the "fix" will never be as satisfying. Musicians get their fix at work all the time.

Best to all.

Learsfool, thanks for the kind words. I too like horns driven by tubes. The sense of immediacy is amazing. The way that the music jumps out of the speakers is very satisfying. I have always struggled with the incredibly low efficiency of my Stax F-81's, and put up with it only because of their fantastic midrange tonal density (very natural), and ability to let the music move the way it should. They don't play very loud at all, however, and there are times when healthy volume is needed. That's where the Paragons come in.

Perhaps this is a subject for another thread, but do you find it frustrating, as I do, how infrequently references to the sound of live music is part of the commentary on audio equipment?

Tvad, I could not agree with you more. It is true that "one size does not fit all in this hobby". Hobby being the operative word. No point begrudging someone who wants his system to sound a certain way, even if that means it will have little resemblance to live music. After all, anyone who can't enjoy a great performance on a table radio, is missing the point, IMO.

Having said that, I think there is a great deal to be gained from applying certain standards to this hobby. Two in particular: that the end result should strive to sound as close as possible to live music, or that the end result should sound as close as possible to what the producer heard in the control room. The only time that I have a problem is when hobbyists start saying things like "component X is more accurate than component Z", or "component A blows away component B". I have to ask: compared to what?. And how did you arrive at this conclusion? Often times it becomes pretty obvious that there is no basis for those proclamations.

It has been said countless times that because every hall, or club, or studio, sounds different; and that because it is usually impossible to know with certainty what the producer or engineer had in mind when a recording was made, that comparisons to live music are irrelevant. I disagree. I think most hobbyists focus on tonal issues. These are the easiest to hear and pin point as problems. I contend that there are qualities to the sound of a live performance, even when amplified excessively or simply poorly, that come through "loud and clear", and familiarity with these can be very useful in evaluating a hi-fi component. These qualities usually have to do with the area of dynamics. The sound has a sense of directness, of speed, of connection to the performer that is immediately recognizable. It doesn't matter wether it's unamplified acoustic music, or electronic rock or jazz. Even if the sound has been distorted tonally by processing or too much amplification, that speed will be there to a greater degree than what one hears come out of our systems after all the amplification, eq, conversion, mixing, etc. that the sound suffers in the process of getting from the microphone to when it comes out of our speakers.