The notion that hifi’s ideal is to recreate a live event is among the silliest thoughts ever thunk.
Silly because you have to ignore nearly everything that makes a live performance what it is in order to believe that a curated capture of just an aspect of the sound can somehow make up for its inherently lossy nature.
Do you see that young girl’s smile in the opening photo? It was taken at a recent event at DeVore Fidelity HQ featuring compositions by Florence Price, George Walker, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Scott Joplin, Joseph Bologne and others as performed by Janey Choi & Lynn Bechtold, violins; Eddy Malave, viola; and Jennifer DeVore, cello. From where I was standing, that smile was an essential piece of my overall enjoyment, essential, that helped make that night so magical.
Many years ago I attended a hifi show where an exhibitor recorded a jazz trio playing live in their room and then played back the recording to show, I suppose, how close the recording came to the actual live event. And I remember thinking when they played back their copy—but the musicians are gone. Because one of the things I enjoy most about live music is watching the performers perform. Imagine going to a Rolling Stones concert and having Milli Vanilli come out and lip sync the Stones instead.
But even if we try to ignore the absence of performers and venue when using a recording of a live event to recreate a live event, I’ve never heard any system at any price—and I’ve heard my fair share of systems—come close to recreating the live experience even on a sound quality basis alone and part of the reason is a stereo creates a phantom image.
The first thing I ever wrote that appeared in the pages of Stereophile (c.2010) was an As Wee See It titled, “Why Music Matters Most”. Here’s a snippet:
When I say that “a work of art is a thing in itself,” the simplest way I know of explaining what I mean is this: The experience of looking at a painting of an apple is not the same kind of experience as looking at an apple. To start with, you can’t eat the former, and the latter isn’t flat. Similarly, the experience of a live acoustic event is not the same kind of experience as listening to a recording of such an event at home. Why then should we use the first to judge the quality of the second?
In other words, since listening to music on a hi-fi isn’t the same kind of experience as listening to live music, criticizing hi-fi’s inability to create a convincing illusion of a full orchestra or stadium-scale rock concert in my home makes as much sense as complaining about live music’s inability to let me hear Jimi Hendrix open for John Coltrane tonight.
From the same article:
Let’s redefine high fidelity as being faithful to the passion for and discovery of music. This means that the best hi-fi is the one that perpetually fans the flame of this passion.
Yea—I’ve essentially been saying the same thing for 15 years. All to say I don’t understand the appeal of attaching a single silly pseudo-objective sound quality standard to what is a much richer and deeply personal experience.
So I’ll end with a question—What do you call a person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people?
