The focus and air lie

hi thomp9015:

your statement about the sociology of enjoying music is without merit. no one can get inside another's brain and heart, and generalizing to cultures , at best, is highly conjectural and without any shred of evidence.

the statement is divisive and does not advance communication between humans.

it is best to confine oneself to behavior and words and not try to interpret what we do not see.

What this discussion demonstrates is that there are a lot of ways to appreciate music and what is listened to in music depends on the listener. Resolving every detail will require different system specs than hearing the artists interpretation of a piece but lack of those resolving aspects will not prevent one from appreciating that interpretation. System accuracy is a high priority for some. Others prefer to listen to systems that themselves change the music and thus participate in the creation of art - hence the popularity of tube amps ( that statement is not intended as a negative judgment as to tube amps, but merely to be taken at face value).

First row balcony - this sounds like a reasonable choice in a tall but not too deep hall with 1500-2500 seats listening to 19th Century compositions. Tchaikovsky in Carnegie, for example. In Fisher Hall the balcony is mushy, but then the whole hall sounds like steamy oatmeal. Even in narrow but deep Boston the balcony has less articulation than my preferred seats which are usually 10th row center.

I mainly go to smaller venues because of the intimacy and clarity. I also prefer Baroque sized orchestras - five to twenty five players. Try Jordan Hall during the Boston Early Music Festival, chamber music in Weill Auditorium or Zankel Hall. The latter does not have a mediocre seat in the house. Just leave if they use speakers - halls that have reverberation designed for acoustic music sound awful with reinforcement.

This is how I like recordings too - definition and subtle detail in reproduction. Pinpoint imaging? No! That is an exaggeration of any live situation and always has bad trade-offs.

I adore crispness in the direct sound, spatial accuracy and proper roll-off in the echoes (air absorbs high frequencies) from a good impulse response - is that a quantifiable attribute that resembles "focus and air"?

I seek sonic intimacy as defined by Beranek but I have yet to hear anything resembling "warm" or "fat" that was not a distorted impediment between myself and the musicians. Most tube amps sound veiled or muddy, as do most halls. This euphonia is the lie to me.

"That's a shame because a hifi system should be able to trasmit music soul even on bad recording.
In 2008 this is a very rare quality."

Maybe our technology these days is just too resolving and revealing and we don't like what we hear as much as a result.

Maybe we should do what television producers do to deal with flaws in human appearance on HD TV: put more make-up on our performers, ie degrade recording quality on purpose in order to add more "soul".

Maybe this also has something to do with the seeming popularity of tubes and vinyl with audio buffs these days.

"Walk outside your house at 3am and listen to the birds chirping. One is three feet away and the other is thirty feet away. Ten more are in between. How do you tell they are separated? What is between them? How many terms does it take? "

I like this test scenario for air very much!

Is there a test recording out there that does anything like this?