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In Reply to: RE: What I LIKE about that Sawallisch/Philadelphia recording. . . posted by Chris from Lafayette on July 30, 2015 at 15:57:51
I am quite happy to let all audiophiles aim for whatever they want to aim for. But I do think "accuracy" and excellence have far less overlap than most audiophiles fully realize and/or would like to believe.
To further explore my point about the visuals. Take imaging. Most of us love it. Most of us love to be able to be transported to a sound space that is completely different than our listening room that has a great sense of width, depth and height. And we mostly love to hear the instruments in very distinct places in that sound stage. And we mostly love to hear them with a sense of body and sense of air around them.
Now let's consider something like a string quartet and how that literally images in a live performance. It really doesn't. We perceive imaging though because we see the musicians playing and we know what each individual instrument looks like and sounds like. So we get the McGurk effect and we see imaging that we fully perceive as hearing. Our eye/brain mechanism does most of the "imaging." Much of the emotional content of the performance comes through the physical playing that we see int he musician's performance too. We loose so much without those visuals. And I think a lot of inaccuracies help compensate for those losses and actually fool most listeners into thinking that they are actually more accurate (lower in added distortion)
IMO I like audiophile imaging and sound stage when listening to recordings. It helps compensate for what I loose by not seeing the musicians play. IMO a literally more accurate audio only rendition of the imaging one would hear in concert without the visuals and the knowledge of where the instruments are placed on the stage would be considered quite subjectively inferior and even less "realistic"
Follow Ups:
. . . if you're sitting close enough (and you're in the center), you'll hear the imaging in a live concert too, with or without the visuals. And of course, the microphones are where your ears could never be - which also helps. And I want an accurate sound from where those microphones are! ;-)
I do agree with you though that if you're out further in the hall, you are not going to get this kind of imaging, and if the microphones were that far out into the hall, we wouldn't hear very good imaging on the recording either - even if the recording were 100% accurate from that location! ;-)
But you will never get accurate sound from where the microphones are. There is always a mix done in post.
I think you might be surprised just how much imaging we think we hear live is actually what we see live. Are you familiar with the McGurk effect? It's freaky. What you see changes what you hear and knowing about it doesn't make it stop.
Even beyond the McGurk effect, the whole question of psychology when listening is rarely taken into account by listeners - and particularly by audio reviewers! I also loved the experiment they did with wine, where the results were that the more expensive the wine that the tasters thought they were drinking, the better they thought it tasted, even when it was really the cheapest swill! (Someone should alert the ethernet cable subjectivists to this phenomenon - LOL!)
To your first point, maybe we'll never get completely accurate sound. But, in general and IMHO, the closer we approach accuracy, the better - and that's a worthy goal even though there's an aesthetic component to our listening too. As JM likes to say, YMMV and FWIW.
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