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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: It takes balls to shop (never mind the nuts)
Post Subject: Selfdenial as Audio Tower of Babble?Posted by Romy the Cat on: 12/26/2006
 Paul S wrote:
So, here we are, adrift on the great big sea of audio tomfoolery, without a metaphorical paddle. If we can on the one hand hear any and every change in our systems, then this implies that everything is worth considering. If we are prone on the other hand to confuse what we do and don’t actually hear, then although everything may be worth considering, does it make any difference we can certainly identify as an “improvement”? All these rhetorical questions I offer up as my part in building the New Audio Tower of Babble, where any and all changes will be tried, codified and [com]piled until we ascend finally to the Sound Absolute.
Ironically the “New Audio Tower of Babble” has already existed but it is way outside of realms of audio. Are we hearing audio while we are listening audio? Sure we, so what? I attended plenty of live musical performances when musicians did not play anything else besides juts Sound… S, what is my point?

A few months ago I read Sviatoslav Richter’s dairies and autobiography. It was in Russian and I do not know if it ever was published in English. His autobiography was boring but his dairies were extremely interesting. What Richter did was not keeping the regular dairies as some people do but rather he was describing, year after year down with his German anal-retentiveness, his feelings after he experienced a musical performance. What was particularly interesting for the subject of the given illustration that Richter seldom differentiated in his feedback if they were recordings or live concerts…. Sometimes he did mention that the heard recording, sometime he did not. He named a performing piece and the performer, also the location and circumstances of the performance. Then he spoke about the performance and only somewhere in a middle of his comments it was possible to detect that he was talking about recording but not live concert….

Does our playback reproduce imitation of music or our awareness marks it as imitation? Sure the is a huge difference between live and reproduced sound but is any difference between live and reproduced Music?

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