I cannot thank you enough for this great article that could awake all those who thinks that the best quality of an audio system is to perfectly reproduce the "original" so called live event without ever adding some "colors" of his own...Which is 2 fictions packed together, if not a lie; reproduction being a too restrictive definition that has mislead us all till today...And not only ordinary people like me but even some professional it seems....
I learned myself in the last 2 years, with my continuous listenings experiments feed back sessions , with the creation of my own solutions to the 3 embeddings dimensions of ANY sound well designed component, mechanical, electrical and acoustical, that the only thing an audio system can do is recreating by itself a files or a cd which was never ever coming from some illusory truthfulness of a live event but only from a very artificially redesigned one in studio....
RECREATION then, not reproduction, is the right concept to summon if we want to qualify an audio system in ALL his real 4 dimensions....The information itself, digital and or analog, the noise electrical and mechanical, and the acoustic of the room....
This recreation will always take place in the mechanical dimension of your gear and room, in the electrical grid of your house and gear, and mostly in the acoustical atmosphere of your room...
The best possible recreation can NEVER be implemented ONLY by the virtue of the electronical well chosen design of the audio components mostly, BUT at last belong mainly to the way and method of the 3 embeddings controlled dimensions of any audio system, the acoustical one being perhaps the more important but the 2 others playing also important function....
This article is very instructive for all audio forums when someone call for truthful "reproduction" to the source...
There is no truthful source to an original live event to begin with... Only a good mixing mix of different choices that are far way from the live event already. And there is no reproduction ever, only a recreation by virtue of the gear quality but mostly from his rightful embeddings in the room first and last...
There is nothing commensurate between a real concert and the music coming from a specific system in YOUR specific room....
Then the digital/ analog debate is under the right light and under a new light.... No boat can win absolutely this war once and for all....
Musical TIMBRE is always a room evaluated CONCRETE event for the listener in his specific room, not something artificially reproduced from another source only, but something which you can, or cannot judge positively or negatively, but something which is recreated in YOUR room for YOUR ears, by the means of your rightful embeddings controls and acoustical treatment ....
I copy here the first paragraph of this remarkably simple and clear article from a pro recording sound engineer asking the right question:
One group argues such a reproduction system hast to be true to the source. Furthermore there is always a big claim that the result has to sound real – sometimes those people talk about “live sound”…. The other group is not so much interested in technical data, neutrality and equipment wich is “true to the source” – they want something which make them believe that what they hear trough their HiFi setup brings the music to live. It does not matter if the gear overstates some aspects to achieve this “believable” sound reproduction. Who is right????
