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In Reply to: RE: I took it. Thanks to your post, I actually went out and bought a newstand copy posted by regmac on January 30, 2008 at 16:33:39
I think I get it.
There is a subtext in the Fremer piece (and in Art Dudley's lament in his column in the same issue, which is otherwise irrelevant to my post here) that you found off-putting, but didn't mention. The reason I know that, is that I found it off-putting, too; and your politics and mine aren't that far apart.
The subtext is the political one -- the use of the term "swift-boating." And the reason that I found it off-putting was that, assuming, arguendo the truth of the Democrats' original gripe (that is that the "swift boat veterans for truth" was a completely baseless attack on Sen. Kerry's "war hero" status) the metaphor is inapt in the context in which Fremer uses it. These two guys are not "attacking" high-end audio (which is your point).
They're just not supporting sound quality -- and they ought to be. Just as an oenophile would probably be horrified if a noted wine critic drank his vintage out of paper or styrofoam cups, Fremer finds that idea that classical music critics are saying lossy compressed digital audio is "good enough" to be reprehensibe. But the reason these music critics ought to be supporting better sound quality is not simply that they should support conoisseurship in a related field (a contestable proposition), but that the world's best music -- music that people have found worthy of their time and attention for generations -- suffers the most from crappy reproduction. There is a qualitative difference between hearing a symphony live in a good hall and hearing it reproduced on an MP3 in a "personal stereo" that does not exist between hearing a rock concert live and reproduced the same way. Sure, the live rock concert is deafeningly, viscerally loud; but it's not qualitatively different than the way it sounds on an MP3. A characteristic of orchestral classical music is its scale, which is part of its attractiveness. That the scale is diminished in any reproduction is a commonplace; but lossy compressed reproduction through the equivalent of a table radio removes all of the scale of the music.
So, for these music critics -- who make their living off of "serious music" -- to overlook those differences is unfortunate because the first time most people these days encounter serious music is outside the concert hall, in playback of a recording. And what it would be nice for these critics to say is, "If you want to know what the excitement of serious music is; if you want to know why it merits your undivided attention, it helps to have it reasonably well reproduced." Then, a novice whose experience with serious music doesn't "grab him" may at least put it down to poor reproduction and be willing to try "the real thing" (attending a concert) nonetheless.
Now, to my final point. In their own way, the boys at Stereophile are doing the hobby a disservice as well, with their implicit assumption -- reflected in the use of terms like "swift boating" -- that everyone with any sense of taste or potential to appreciate the subtleties of expensive audio is a liberal Democrat (and the converse of that statement, that anyone who isn't a Democrat is a functionally deaf, beer-swilling, boombox-toting philistine). Unless they've got concrete proof of this proposition (based on a population sample that doesn't believe that the country ends at the Hudson River until you reach San Francisco Bay), they're alienating some group of actual or potential supporters of high end audio.
So, ironically, Fremer is as guilty of swift-boating (his term) high-end audio as the two people he writes about in his column; and he's not the only regular writer in S'phile who does so.
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