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In Reply to: RE: Went the other route ... posted by petertg on February 12, 2008 at 06:38:58
Yes but beyond an emotional-aesthetic appeal, why should minimalist reproduction necessarily be better? Why, in such a complex arena as digital sampling and reproduction, should simpler be the ideal?
I'm a musician myself (B.Mus from a 400 year old university, my initial musical career was as a student of early music, organ scholar, continuo player and accompanist; later after quitting professional music-making I used to play bass in big bands (from score: I never got the hang of making basslines up) and later still guitar in a folk-jazz fusion outfit. I still play some Bach most days on the piano).
I don't think I have 'engineer's ears' (whatever those are! I have engineer mates who hear more nuances than I can), and the Chord DAC64 (for all its 'voicing and processing') works well for me, where non-OS 'minimalist' DACS didn't come up to the mark in presenting music the way I like it.
Listening to recorded and live music will always be different experiences: microphones, working in a specific, often quite artificial acoustic, followed by the whole capture and reproduction aparatus, must inevitably change the sound, irrevocably. You can never faithfully reproduce the live music experience.
What you can do is attempt to optimally present recorded music, with all modern tools at our disposal. Within the limits of that challenge, different people prefer to emphasise different things. It's all trade-offs.
My favourite recordings remain a couple of direct-cut to vinyl Beethoven quartet discs I bought a long time ago in the early 80s, recorded on a simple, single pair of microphones with no outriggers and no processing in the way. But it's still a recording, a representation, not the real thing! The minimalism appeals, but it's the sound that counts (and the sound is very good indeed).
By comparison, even the simplest non-OS, non filtered dac is still dealing with music that's sliced, diced and messed around with to a far greater extent. I'm not convinced there is a 'simple' solution to optimising digital sound though, like I said, I do understand the emotional appeal.
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