We have NOT gone over the the Dark Side

I have been talking about streaming music here a bit lately. While bored waiting for CES to get here, I surfed around a bit and came across an article on Audiostream.

Audiostream,com is Stereophile’s new spinoff computer audio zine.

Some of the perspective there on this stuff got me to thinking that you all might think we’ve gone to the Dark Side.

Nope.

Not us.

Not ever.

Not to pick on anyone in particular, but lets look at this article on the Musical Fidelity V-DAC II.

He does a excellent job describing the Musical Fidelity family sound and hints at their version-itus. But the overall context of the review reveals even more about how we are are experiencing yet another…

Worse is Better - Don’t You Clueless People Out There Get It?

… event in high fidelity audio.

Kool Aid Flavor #1 - If you don’t get it then you must be old or stupid

Now, about the AARP crack in the article… and that young people being are comfortable with ripping, no wait burning, no wait… downloading? streaming? digital music? computer audio? online music?

Heaven help me but I agree with Sam Tellig - “There’s so much uncertainty and confusion surrounding computer audio and high-resolution downloads.”

First, I think young people, the under 23 crowd, think all this junk is for middle aged geeks who have a lot of extra time on their hands. The desktop is seen as old school and not seen as an entertaining piece of hardware.

Second, if one tries and follows where the big money is going, what is being invested in, it is not,… well, it IS really confusing.

Kool Aid Flavor #2 - There is no confusion

First, there is Amazon and Apple and Google investing in their cloud services - which are, in this context, essentially, places to store music and videos and photos on a website somewhere. This is all because they figure this is currently the best way to monetize music and videos [they can make money off of subscription services (my prediction as the winner of the end game) - but not nearly as much. I mean, otherwise, how are they going to sell you the same pieces of music, over and over again… DSOTM say, about every 3 years we have to buy a newer better one right? ].

But you have all these blogs talking about ripping your CDs and saving them in some format or another across hopefully striped terrabyte drives on some noisy PC and playing it back using clumsy itunes or some such software. Seems like a big disconnect to me. Besides ripping being illegal [another stupid law written by corporate lobbyists, I agree, but…] and the RIAA and unscrupulous lawyers happy to use these laws to extort the most harmless of people, this is just a Transitional Technology - people making some money as we all make the transition from physical media to online media.

But on the hardware side, there is real confusion, IMHO. You have Google TV and Android TV versus Apple TV versus Smart TV versus the now ancient iPod and several thousand it seems boxes that sit on your network and pump music from place to place.

There IS a lot of confusion here because nothing is winning [although I heard that 9 million people have now permanently dropped cable and moved 100% online - aka cutting-the-cord - to netflix et. al…. so people WANT a solution now, they are diving in even without one], The idea being that music is online and coming back to the family living room from a long hiatus - and if 99.99% of people are going to be listening to music in their HT then that is the hardware source we maybe should be looking at making high-fidelity hardware work with.

Kool Aid Flavor #3 - The cheapest of the new sounds better than the most expensive of the old

Remember those $200 CD players back in 83 and 84? How they were better by far than any turntable? Well, they’re… back…. [here is where the horrified scream needs to be forcibly suppressed so as not to freak out Neli].

You really going to let yourself be fooled again?

Here is the quote [and I see this kind of thing said EVERYWHERE by the computer audio crowd, not just on this site] “That’s because I can enjoy a bargain as much as the next guy and the idea that you can buy a device for $349, connect it to your computer on one end and your hi-fi on the other and play music that’ll make your CD player weep with envy is cause for celebration. ”

[OK. Hard to hold back that scream huh?].

Be interesting to put up an $200 Oppo DVD/CD player [the cheapest player that is widely recommended] against this combination of several thousands $$$ [check audiogon if you do not believe. Well, when they get a category for this, anyway, until then search CD players and these show up] computer audio system with $349 external DAC. Interesting also to see which wins on the typical - usually bright sounding - solid-state system most computer audio people have and an ultra hifi system and see if the Oppo weeps or, perhaps, kicks ass. I think it would be close, but it would be a fun shootout, huh?

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In conclusion, We are Not Drinking no Darn Kool Aid.

As we explore various approaches and solutions for incorporating online music into our casual, or exploratory, focused, or ultimate music experiences we will do the following:

1. We WILLfocus on fidelity fidelity fidelity

2. We will NOT lie and tell you it is Better than what it is not better than [ *sheesh* ]

3. We will NOT say people are stupid if they do not see how obvious all this non-obvious stuff is

4. We will NOT throw away the good of the past [but we do expect to see a lot of very cheap CDs at yard sales in a few years. Can’t wait. ] but we will NOT hang on unnecessarily to past assumptions that are no longer as important [ultra flat screens now allow video to be brought into the high-end audio listening room, similarly the tablet/smartphone now allows more interactivity with our music in the listening room, etc.]

Reading an old post from 2006:

Where No Low Powered Amps Have Gone Before

Although being a little old-love-letter-embarrassed about some of my ecstatically enthusiastic exclamations… there was this:

But this is not about how the speaker or system sounds.

It is not.

This is about how the sounds affects the listener.

In the end why should I care about the sound, beyond a certain minimum standard, any more than I care about the minute construction details of the chair I sit in, or the the type of weaving and glue the carpet underneath my feat uses? What we CARE about REALLY is how comfortable the chair is; about how pleasant the carpet is to look at and feel underneath our feet.

What if all reviews and all show reports paid attention to nothing except how the sounds …made …them …feel.

I bet the Stereophile list of Class A components would look a lot different than they do now.

Ah, the old days of Stereophile recommended lists and innocent youth:-) [They are so far down into mid-fi these days that they just are not relevant from our perspective].

So, having this discussion, this argument, with both Peter Qvortrup, and on this blog with Joe Roberts, about their perspective that the ultimate is the ‘absolute sound’ and how anything else is, essentially, worthless candy that is just a passing fashion….

I see their points, and do not necessarily disagree with them if one is trying to make a LOGICAL choice about what their system should sound like… but I keep coming back to the above sentiment. I may not care, and my feet and toes do not care, if the carpet under my feet is a Persian carpet from one of the oldest families and a very valuable antique. Authenticity is not always the highest priority. Sometimes it is softness, and attractiveness, and smell and cost and numerous other things that are independent from authenticity.

Sure, if authenticity has all the features you are looking for, and you can afford it, then you are in the best of all worlds, and you just have to do some investigation and find the most authentic instance of whatever it is you are interested in, whether it be Persian carpets, Winterthur Queen Anne chairs, or home audio reproduction.

But if you are looking for that gestalt, that symbiosis with the Now, that unnameable something, then perhaps some more introspection is required and deeper evaluation of just what it is that our particular souls are looking for.

Which is, of course, the problem with using ‘how do you feel?’ methodology - it relies on us being introspective, and being introspective is difficult. It also relies on us being extremely honest with ourselves- and that is nearly impossible for any of us. It is easier to rely on one’s ‘betters’ to tell us what to buy and what to think. And then move on.

Facts… unfiltered and unprejudiced facts… are great and I am not suggesting anarchy [ala TAS].

But if you can understand ‘how you feel’ about something with minimum contamination from all the hordes telling you what you feel, then I believe THIS is the way to determine the true worth of something that is much art as science.

[This is a fun movie clip, but in truth, I find the newer Star Treks juvenile, shallow and self-indulgent, including much of what is at the end of this clip (after Spock’s mother appears). But I LOVE the original series, written by the who’s who of sci fi authors and inspiring several generations at NASA et. al. … and little ole me. ]

How.. do… we… feel?

Not an easy question. In fact quite difficult, for all of us.

Funny, I like PQ’s Audio Note gear precisely BECAUSE of the ways they can make me feel. [to wit, it makes me feel good or ecstatic, and does not make me feel bored or irritated]. That some of this gear is as close to authentic we can get with current technology, approaching the ‘absolute sound’, well… that’s just great too.

[Remember, the goal of this blog is to try to optimize the pursuit of the Ultimate Music Experiences. One method to pursue these experiences is to spend $$$ and setting up the Best System Ever - and 1/2 of the posts here on the blog are about the not so easy task of configuring and setting up these kinds of systems. The other 1/2 is how we can find some other kinds of methods that maybe do not rely so much on spending so much time and $$$… i.e. how we can be a little smarter about all this]

This post will try to apply the model of the previous posts, where we treat music as a ‘key piece’ that allows us to perceive the world in a much clearer manner, to try to, hopefully come up with ways to both more predictably generate those ‘Right Song’ phenomena and drug-like music experiences.

Relief - Relieving Cognitive Disconnects

At any given time, we have a number of problems on our plate, several things which are irritating us, or making us feel tired, or feel stupid.

It is these things that the ‘Right Song’ addresses and relieves.

There are also a number of songs that are not the ‘Right Song’ but will have patterns, pieces of the puzzle, that will help alleviate the cognitive disconnects we are having with the World.

In fact, almost every song has *some* patterns we may be able to use, or perhaps patterns that reinforce what we already know, so its ALL good

Pleasure/Appreciation/Expansion - Connecting to The Good Stuff

There are deeper issues in life than the things we worry and fret about on a day to day basis - beyond the bad, evil and incompetent running amok out there [love that word, amok] . YMMV but there is also life, beauty, eternity, spirit, truth, etc.

For me, as an example, rich, rich tones evoke the bright purple of a tulip, or the perfume of a rose, or the velvety softness of a rose petal. Pure, PURE tones remind me of straight lines and wonderfully calming symmetries and brand new chrome plating.

What if some of the aspects of music, then, the qualities of the sound, that predispose us to let the puzzle pieces in the music represent the deeper issues in life, commonly experienced issues that we are ALL more or less hard-wired to want to understand more fully.

These qualities [let’s call them AWESOMENESS, because they invoke a sense of awe which is important to get beyond the mundane interpretations of the patterns in the music. Well, YOU think of a better name then ] could be anything from excellent musicianship to high quality harmonics, to wonderful decay, to perfect micro-dynamics to… [macro dynamics?] These qualities just open to door to us appreciating the way the patterns and internal relationships of the music to itself represent similar things we see when we seek deeper truths in the world out there.

We still need the patterns in the music along with the quality[s], we still need the music to be complex enough, and rendered well enough, to have this ‘meat’ on the ‘bones’ - the bones being something like great harmonics, or great dynamics, or great detail, etc. The ‘meat’ [patterns/puzzle pieces] cannot have too much distortion, or be so fuzzy, or be so atonal, or bright, or all the other things that most hifi systems do incorrectly - because if they are their ‘message’ will be lost in the noise..

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If this model is accurate [and it does match experience, where sometimes just one excellent component in a system of otherwise just ordinary but competent components can sound quite drug-like], then, we could expect to be able to build drug-like systems by having the system:

1) render AT LEAST ONE high-quality aspect to add some Awesomeness; micro-dynamics or tone for example [micro-dynamics is great, as is harmonic resolution (beyond just excellent tone), because they serve both as Awesomeness AND they can also contain complex patterns in and of themselves] to communicate to the brain that this is something awesome, something on the order of the beauty of a rose, and

2) be able to render music with a some amount of complexity. Complexity is somewhat difficult to define here. Being able to render classical music is the obvious prime example, but an excellent singer, on a system that can render the complexities in their voice [so many emotions!] i.e. its ability to render extreme harmonic resolution, can also do just fine.

Bet we can all think of systems that have 1) and not 2), or vis-a-versa. How about systems that have neither? I frequently waver between preferring systems dominated by 1) or 2) or having 1) and 2) completely balanced. How does one define ‘completely balanced’? Ultimate systems will have both, of course, and have MANY aspects providing lots of Awesomeness and the challenges become trying to get the system, which can render any amount of complexity, to reveal more and more of the deep inner complexities/patterns in the source music [i.e. lower and lower noise floors and better and better source media].

This post will illustrate one metaphor, an oversimplified model, of how music kind of helps the world make more sense by reflecting its patterns back at us in a different form… a musical form.

Here we are representing the world as a puzzle [ain’t it tho], and the brain trying to ‘piece it together’ but how we still have gaps between our understanding (the pieces around the listener’s head) and the puzzle of the world itself. Music here is providing some of the solutions to this puzzle.

Back to hifi. As we all know, lofi stereos cannot reproduce the complex passages in music; when they try it all comes out muddled and sounds like noise and it less than worthless, it is annoying.Lofi can only reproduce the most simple of melodies and least complex music [and even so, it does not do this very well].

HiFi music systems can reproduce all kinds of music, including that with a lot of complexity, which supplies the brain with lots and lots of patterns, puzzle pieces, with which to create possible interpretations of what is going on around us in the world.

A simple, somewhat contrived example, would be a situation where you might be having difficulties working with a 4-member team, some friction between expectations versus results, say - and after listing to Beethoven’s 5th, da-da-da-DUM, your brain kicks in a you realize that 3 of the team members are quite similar, but the 4th is quite different, and needs to be treated differently, with different expectations and handling on your part [I TOLD you it was contrived ].

Notice that we are completely ignoring the content of the lyrics here. “You can’t always get what you want” is indeed useful in understanding the way the world works [albeit we learn this, in my generation anyway, when we were very young from our parents on a daily basis]. But these posts are talking about how music affects us, not how the spoken word affects us.

This theory can be tested, I think, by, say, playing a number of songs for people who love baseball, with some of the songs having patterns that are similar to the patterns in baseball (lots of 3s… 3 outs, 4s… 4 bases… 9s…. nine bases, etc) and see if they prefer [are more comfortable,naturally familiar with] the songs with the baseball patterns compared the songs without these patterns.

Conversely, if one is writing a song for people who love baseball, perhaps using these patterns, and several of the more complex patterns found in baseball, might be quite advantageous [more complex patterns would including the fairly regular rhythms of, say, the swish of the pitch, the crack of the bat - or that of the ball hitting the glove. The response of the crowd rising/falling in the background, etc.].

We will now look at The Right Song and how it is able to affect us so deeply from a more abstract viewpoint.

We talked some time ago about how the patterns of notes in music [especially classical] mimics the patterns in reality and how listening to music can somewhat subliminally show us patterns that are occurring in our life - some of which we may not be all that aware of - helping us experience life more deeply and sometimes even helping us solve problems by revealing patterns that make the subtle relationships between the things we are dealing with more clear.

Patterns [I think of them as weighted undirected graphs mapped into a 2D projection, because I am more comfortable with 2D than 3D. YMMV.], in this context can mean professional relationships between you and your co-workers, between the various priorities in your life, between your kids multitudinous kinds of ’success’ in life and their overall well-being, … it can be just about anything. Perhaps you might think of these patterns as fractals [fractals have been matched to many patterns that organic life presents to us].

Back to The Right Song, and cutting to the chase, one can think of the patterns in the Right Song matching some kind of matching need for this pattern in the mind so that when the two come together, it is quite pleasurable. I think of this as two, very complex puzzle pieces, one being the Song and one being your current state of mind, and they fit together more or less perfectly. Or I think of it as two molecules, thinking back to high school chemistry, with one missing a few electrons [the brain] and one with a few extra electrons [the Song] and they come together to form a 3rd molecule [a happy brain].

In these two senses, the Right Song ‘completes me’ [back to Jerry Maguire again? And, no, I haven’t watched that movie for a year so this is NOT a Jerry Maguire inspired post. Or at least I do not THINK it is. Better go listen to some classical music… ].

One reason hifi works so well in making us feel good is that many more complex patterns are made audible in a given piece of music compared to what lofi reveals. With more patterns there is many more opportunities for the music to ‘fit’ the ‘holes’ the brain is producing.

We now another perspective on Druglike music:

Some high quality audio is just able to stimulate the brain in some areas and relax it enough in others enough that we experience wonderfully expansive states of mind.

The perfect song is a piece of music we are receptive to Right Now. It will have The Most Impact on us at this time.

But we also carry around with us medium term and long term patterns of receptivity [the sizes and shapes of the puzzle pieces of our mind], making us especially susceptible to enjoying certain songs and certain types of music.

So we can stimulate our minds to special states with high-quality hifi music, or we stimulate our minds with the Right Songs. Or we can do both - and at the same time.

Open questions are

A) how to determine what your Right Song is at this moment. More generally, is there a way to determine what your Right Music is at any given moment?

B) Is there a way to put yourself into a receptive state for a particular song or music? [e.g. you are going to a Stones concert. Or a rendition of Nelson’s Mass. Or you just got a new Bjorn CD]

One potential solution to A) is, maybe, to rapidly play small snippets of songs [say 2 sec each?] and have the listener stop and listen to a song when they Think it is The One, or use some kind of biofeedback so that our brains automatically pick The Song. Software that supported this feature would have as a side-effect a new kind of ’sampling music’ where people would listen to only parts of [potentially] dozens of songs each minute they are listening. Obviously some kind of streaming or disk-based audio system would be required as the back end.

I was driving in the car a few days ago and heard a song [classical, but with a lot of trumpets and with a Latin flair] that I knew was not going a be a song that I liked… and I loved it.

At that moment.

I’ve had enough of these experiences like that to know that if I went home and looked this piece up on Amazon and played a few clips, or worse yet, bought the CD, I would not like it all that much.

I remember hearing Bolero in the car one day, loving it, and then looking up the particular piece and… could take it or leave it.

All this is to say, for sake of argument, that at any time during our lives, there is an optimal song we could/should be listening to. That we would just LOVE at the particular moment.

You see, usually we just say we like a particular piece of music, a song, a group of musicians, because on average, we enjoy listening to their work.

Maybe we have listened to them enough that we have experienced this ‘right song at the right time’ phenomena while listening to them, which is some very positive reinforcement that we have chosen the right ‘favorite thing’ to be listening to a lot.

OK. So here it is, 12:05pm the Wednesday before Christmas. What would be the optimal song for me to be listening to now?

Is there any way to actually determine what it is?

Jerry Maguire: it takes a few tries, but he finally finds his Right Song at the Right Time

At the time of the most recent experience in the car, I was kind of spacing out, kind of bored, the landscape, albeit strikingly beautiful snow-covered pines in the Rocky Mountains, was black and white and dark green and coming across my brain as forbidding and soporific. The music, on the other hand, was upbeat and kind of tongue-in-cheek and simple enough to render OK on the Bose stereo.

So, can we just examine our mood and narrow down our choices of what to listen to, thereby increasing our chances of being able to hear The Right Song?

Through experience and observation, I think one can narrow down the genre where the Right Song, on average, might be found in the following circumstances/mood (YMMV):

Drunk: George Thorogood, Elvis Costello and other bar-band music
Tipsy: Country Music, Everything!
Morning brews: Bluegrass
Morning hangover: New Age
Leisurely long-term boredom: Classical
Stoned: Reggae, Everything!
Hallucinogens: Grateful Dead
Sad: The Blues [weird, I know]
Happy: Any one of your all time favorite songs [see Jerry Maguire clip]
Angry: Heavy Metal, Rap
Energetic: Rock & Roll

Are their other ways to narrow down and quickly find the Right Song? If you have ever tried to do this, and who hasn’t, you soon realize that the very process of trying to find the right song, even listening to a few that are NOT the right song, affects us so much that the Right Song will no doubt have changed from what it was to something completely different.

When we complain about ‘there is nothing to listen to, with 5000 CDs here, and untold 100,000s of songs online, we are really saying: “I have no idea what my Right Song for this moment is, and not knowing SUCKS!”

The setting where we listen is important to the enjoyment and appreciation of the music. How important? I think more important than what people, on average, think it is. In fact, I think it is very important.

Even if you typically close your eyes while listening - lingering smells of that fish dinner you had 2 days ago, or a hard chair, or your neighbors arguing in he background about whether to watch Kung Fu Panda or Return 2 Madagascar [both are great] - will affect how we are hearing what we are listening to.

Feng Shui as currently practiced seems to avoid the consideration of sound systems, sound quality and, in fact, basic listening room functionality, in their designs. Or maybe it is just practiced by people hostile to audiophiles. [after looking up more information, it appears to be a somewhat unstructured and undisciplined practice - its greatest asset seeming to be that it actually brings some kind of human aesthetic, livability, into what had been exclusively economically-driven decision making. In fact, we may switch to calling this Livability just to side-step some of the Feng Shui hype]

So what we will do, over several posts, is to try and come up with our own Feng Shui for our listening rooms.

Let’s start by listing some of the things that can make listening to high-end audio not quite as pleasant as it might otherwise be [in no specific order, and some people are really affected by some of these, and some of us are not]:

System

1. Visual Cable Spaghetti [oh, we are SO bad at this]
2. Cables one has to walk over
3. Dust bunny build-up [:-)]
4. A cluttered equipment rack
5. Equipment on the rack with different colored faceplates
6. Equipment on the rack with different colored LEDs
7. Equipment on the rack with LEDs
8. Unattractive or overly large speakers

Seating

This is something I really care about and Neli not so much.

1. Seating too high or low
2. Seating too soft or hard
3. Seating reclined too far or with bad lumbar support
4. Seating with a reflective surface up near the ears
5. Seating that allows sunshine to get in the eyes
6. Seating that faces away from an awesome view of some kind

View

We wrote about this before. Ever-changing nature views [or solid colors] seem to be preferable so that a person does not get completely bored with what they are looking at. [Yes, some people just listen in the dark, which is another option].

1. A boring view
2. A view lacking some kind of symmetry
3. A view that reminds us of other things we have to be doing [e.g. mowing the grass]

Ambiance

Choose an overall ambiance and try and be consistent:

a. Lap of luxury,
b. Rustic,
c. Modern,
d. Homey,
e. Comfortable,
f. Historical,
g. Theme-based [for example, covering the walls in Grateful Dead posters, or LPs, or Native American art or…]

Positioning

It is my supposition that getting to the listening chair is not as important as it might be in other applications [i.e.offices, where the dynamics between the person behind the desk and visitors coming and going is of primary importance] . This is because, like home theaters, one, generally, spends 99% of their time in the listening/viewing chairs and not coming and going from the room - so having the chair with its back to the door is appropriate [Livable] as well as functional.

Next… example turnkey Audiophile Feng Shui setups.

Sometimes I hear a song on one of our systems here and I think “This song… THIS song makes it all worthwhile”.

Sometimes it is a song and sometimes it is an album.

Yesterday it was Dark Side of the Moon

It was on a somewhat modest system here these days: EMM Labs XDS1 into a EMM Labs PRE2 into the Audio Note Kegon amps on the Marten Coltrane Supreme speakers.

I attribute my overwhelming emotional response to the Kegons finally ’settling in’ on these speakers and, primarily, that it has been my personal unfounded but hard to shake sneaking suspicion that the EMM Labs players were, like, DESIGNED to play this one SACD really, really well, ever since I first heard it on their old red-label CDSD/DCC2 back-in-the-day.

A lot of the power that this particular album has, for me, is that I heard it so darn many times growing up [still growing up, I know… or is that out? or gray? or comfortably numb?] that I can flash back to those days of hearing it, if one can call it that, on all sorts of inferior equipment and how, OMG, if I had only heard it like THIS back then, if I had only known just how awesome these songs really ARE…!

But there are other songs/albums that - by themselves - make this all worthwhile - and other reasons for their power over me.

Several months ago [or has it been a year already? Time is going by at warp speed, and warp 9 at that], it was a bootleg, and coincidentally Pink Floyd again - of one of their Meddle [i.e. Echos] tours. This was on a much more expensive Audio Note UK front end: CDT-Five transport, Fifth Element DAC and M9 Phono preamp.

In this case it was just the ability to hear this rare concert from the late 60s, hear the musical innovation and exploration that Pink Floyd was doing back then that just about nobody has equaled [except Miles Davis, who was also exploring the underpinnings of music at the same time, for awhile - Pangaea, Agharta, etc.. Oh! and the Grateful Dead - Dark Star etc. Can’t think of anybody else.], and hear it in such a manner as to be overwhelmingly confident that I am getting very close to the full impact of actually Being There.

In both these cases there was both an emotional and intellectual underpinning, as well as a historical perspective and the knowing that it really can’t sound much better than this - that tipped me over the edge. …

… where I think: it really was worth spending lots of dollar signs $$$, to me, JUST to hear this whenever I want, JUST to have these intense feelings, the joy and the awe, in my life..

We have talked about drug-like sound, and striving to get to those euphoric musical states of mind. This is that.

But… it was one of those REALLY good trips [,man ].

I think we can see some of the problems with defining the Absolute Sound by comparing Music Reproduction with Photography.

Both have something real they are trying to reproduce by technical means. Both involve some aspects of art and aspects of science.

I think it makes sense for this metaphor [or is it an analogy?] to compare a digital image file with a CD [essentially a digital music file].

Now lets consider Photoshop

You bring the image in and correct for any color issues that your camera has. You correct for inadequate lighting. You correct for lens aberrations because you were too close to, or at an angle to, your subject.

Then you can do some fancy layering filters to make the subject look more 3D. To make the colors more evident. To hide some of the grain in the original image….

You do all this because you KNOW what the subject [say it is a face] looks like. You know about flesh colors and that the head is a 3D thing. You want to bring out the [Einsteinian] sparkle in their eyes that you know is there. The affect their laugh lines have on people in real life, etc.

The point is two fold:

1. All this touching up is to make this technical artifact look more like the Real Thing. It flies in the face of ideological pundants that say “You MUST NOT Tinker With the Flaws in the Material”. Or “digital images just are going to look bad so don’t you do anything to make it look more real / better”.

Those pundants are silly, right? And so I think that the things people do to their high-end audio system are likewise OK if they bring out more of what reality is all about: 3D, rhythm, harmonics, etc.

2. The Real Thing is hard to define. Just how 3D is that face you saw last [imaging] ? Just how evident WERE those crinkles [dynamics] ? and those color blotches [harmonic color] ? And could you really see each hair on their head if you had the desire [and temerity to be OK with looking a little wacky while peering intently at someone’s hear follicles] to actually look at it and focus your attention trying to see each hair [detail and resolution].

So deciding whether something is the Absolute Sound or not is difficult if not impossible [another recent post on this topic posted about how all the room issues at any real Absolute Sound recitals making sure that no one has ever heard the Absolute Sound in all of history ] .

* Often, the Absolute Sound these days has become an ideological pursuit and has more to do with the technology and brands used and the means [looking at things like THD and progeny] by which sound is reproduced, whereas the Real Thing is a musical event, where being ‘like the Real Thing’ means that you create a musical event that is both musical(!) and in several important [to humans, not to some clunky measuring device] ways very closely resembles the Real Thing.

This attitude annoys me.
Many people believe “The better it sounds the less Real it is”.

Another say to say this: “The better a system is, the worse it sounds”.

That the ‘Absolute Sound’ produced by a audio reproduction systems [aka hifi] should usually sound aggressive and unpleasant and, conversely, if the music produced by a sound system is enjoyable and engaging - it must not be the Absolute Sound, it must not really be sounding like the real thing.

This sentiment has been a commonly held doctrine since solid-state mugged audio in the 60s, and wildly expounded and pontificated upon [albeit implicitly] since digital smashed into audio in the 80s.

It has two underlying extremely pessimistic assumptions:

1. that the current state of high-end audio reproduction is so poor, that if it actually attempts to be accurate, it will of course sound unpleasant most of the time, and

2. that the quality of the source material is so poor, that even were the reproduction to be flawless, the sound would not often be all that pleasant to listen to

There are many, many people who believe this, people in important positions in our industry, and they are a very vocal group. In a large sense, they are the ones who, after selling this idea to themselves to explain all the horrible sounding gear that passed for ‘the best’ for so many years - they then proceeded to sell it to everyone else.

This is not just “Krell on Wilson”, that was only a symptom. This is JV’s snidely comments about ‘As You Like It’ systems that actually [can you imagine?] sound good. This has even impacted JA and Mike Fremer, as one looks at their choice of systems over the years. [HP has been less infected, IMHO]

What does it do to an industry when the most prominent figures think that, by-and-large, the goal of the products produced by that industry should NOT be enjoyable? Maybe it does to that industry the same thing that, uh, has happened to ours?

Seriously, if we somehow just sent all the press, dealers and manufacturers who think this way to Tahiti for 5 years and only presented and sold systems that actually sounded good [and, I would argue, actually sounded like music], it would be [I hypothesize] the start of another Golden Age for our hobby.

[in the next post, we will talk about how it is perhaps the misshapen and gnarled misinterpretation of the Absolute Sound that has kept the industry in this cul-de-sac, sonically if not economically]