The focus and air lie

sorry, one last effort to make clear what seems obvious: as with all art, the appreciation of music, any music, must have AT LEAST as much to do with the person listening (and all that "a person" entails, which is so so SO much more, including variable, than whether one has or has not heard a given level of fidelity), than the instruments or other machines (re)producing the sound waves that make up the music. any effort to refute this diminishes art via reductionism, scientism, and determinism.

i should add that such efforts not only diminish art, but NOT coincidentally (because the two are inextricably bound together), they also diminish (via the same reductionism, etc.) what it means to be human.

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.