Which is better, live performance or on your system?

Hi all,

What prompted me to start this thread is that I was in San Miguel de Allende (Mexico) for a week and had the opportunity to listen to the Toyko String Quartet perform for two nights. One program was great and the other interesting. What became apparent immediately was that the highs were getting lost in the front third of the ceiling and that the bass was just missing. So, what came through in the 19th row(the rear) was low mids and mids. It was freeky. I enjoyed being out and at a performance and was grateful for the chance to hear anything played well.

And, I really was curious how it would sound at home. I happen to have all the Beethoven and Haydn String Quartets and the Brahms String Sextet in G major, so I played them. My wife, told me that it was much better sound; clearer, more detailed and fuller here at home!

Frankly, the problem is the halls accoustics. But, wow! It's clear that well recorded, excellently played, detailed music here at the fort is my benchmark for live concerts in the future.

Bill E.

Reproduced music will never sound like life music. Reproduced music simply cannot produce the SCALE of life music.

I recently (back in February) saw Eighth Blackbird, a group of five talentend young proponents of contemporary concert music, play in a hall that was simply too large for a chamber group. The concert was very exciting, and the group was both musically and visually stimulating. However, since were a small group playing in a large hall, they had to be miked. The amplification of the group reduced the aural aspect of the concert to the level of a concert via a poor PA system. Sonically, my two-channel system could beat any such event hands-down. The eighty-year-old couple snoring away behind me didn't help, either.

k

I think it depends on the type of music. I jump at the chance to go to Lincoln Center to hear the NY philharmonic
but I am also a big jazz fan and the last venue I attended at the Beacon Theatre left me wondering if I would get hearing damage it was so loud. My claim is this: for classical I jump at the chance to catch a concert but for jazz my ears are more comfortable at home.

It blows my mind that someone would actually compare their stereo to a live classical performance and use their audio system as the benchmark. In my opinion, this is where the hobby starts to go to people's heads. Get out and go and listen to more live music to adjust your ears to what an orchestra actually sounds like. Are you sure that what you were hearing was actually what it was supposed to sound like and you are so used to listening to reproduced music that you think that it sounded wrong? The majority of acoustic recordings are plenty skewed and that they are just poor representations of the original performance to begin with (especially multi-mic atrocities like Deutsche Grammaphone recordings).