Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

I was thinking about the obvious disparity between the “sound of live music” and the times of special involvement with Music that I’ve experienced over the years, and for decades I have been turning these notions around like puzzle pieces, trying to fit them together. Probably everyone has experienced an electronically reproduced sound that was so “realistic” that the response to it was very “immediate”/visceral, what the late JG Holt called the “jump factor”. On the “other side” are the times when we just get caught up and fully “involved” in a song or a given musical piece that “objectively” sounds like crap, and not at all “realistic”.  Are these “two aspects” of Music playback exclusive of one another? Is there a “sonic minimum” that can bring It across, and, if so, what is it? Turning this question around, since we know we can “get involved” with minimal sound, “how much system” does it take to spoil our chances of involvement? Can a system be “too big”? It certainly seems like at some point the sense of the system can be a spoiler. Staying with Romy’s example of Sakuma, it appears one can do “repeatable It” with the “right combination” of ingredients, from system to music sources. In this case, I referred to this approach – generally speaking – as the “simple message” method. I did a version of this for many years, gearing my system to get “a good balance” with Music as evolved as orchestral jazz. Big orchestral  and chorale Music was and has been another matter, however, at least for me. I’m not saying Big can’t be done “simply”; but even Audio Note “loses traction” as the compositions and the performances get “bigger”, and so far it’s seemed to me one has to go big to get big. And good luck with small when you go big! Yes, we might need more than “two vectors” to understand this, and I do not mean by this to drag the listener back into this little part of the discussion.>>

Paul S

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site