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RE: Let me get this out of my system...

Sometimes when I listen to "Sunday At The Village Vanguard" late at night in my listening room, with a good glass of wine in my hand, I can feel the ambiance of the room and . . . wonder if the reproduction of a performance gets much better than that.

Which is well put. However, it also serves to illustrate the fatuity of people with a background in "marketing" purporting to conduct "double blind" tests and claiming that their results are, in any sense of the term, "scientific".

I find the Straw Man argument irritating because it reflects intellectual sloppiness at best. Gordon Rankin's claim that there are audible differences between various file formats (despite identical content) has nothing to do with the fact that a good recording is perceived differently according to circumstance.

Other times, when I put on my headphones in the clear light of day, I understand that Scott LaFaro's bass is panned too to one side, that the microphones must have been too close to really record the ambiance of the room relative to that performance, that the room sounds may have even been captured by a separate mic, that the ambiance is an illusion and that it was my emotions, desire and expectations that translated that extra mic into the palpable space and contents of the Vanguard.

Any recording is fostering an illusion but one in which the listener is a willing participant - we spend serious money to persuade competent technicians, the best of whom have more than a touch of the artist themselves, to help us experience such illusions.

Perhaps one reason that the classic Evans recording sounds less than ideal on headphones is because the engineer (from memory, Rudy van Gelder) never intended it to be listened to in that way. In short, the illusion breaks down. That doesn't mean that it wasn't skillfully prepared, just that the conditions for fostering it are not adequate.

Do you not find, for example, that you perceive recordings of musicians you have heard live differently from those you are not directly familiar with? I know I do. I evoke a mental picture of their playing derived from my memory of their performance. Especially if the performance moved me, it enhances the "feel" of the recording.

I'm sure everyone else is much the same. Ditto for pieces of classical music I know from live performance. Listening to music is an active, not a passive, process - a complex mix of psycho-acoustics, memory, personality, cultural background etc etc. Music is perceived differently in company than on one’s own. And so on and so forth.

Simple, linear notions of what is going on when we listen to music do not (as here you correctly imply) work. Do not presume they be can used when it suits you in an argument (more correctly the argument as it's pretty well the only one you make) but discarded when they don't suit you.

Besides, regardless of what you think of Gordon Rankin's claim and noting in passing that he has done something you have not (designed well-regarded audio kit), I do not see what gives you the right to dismiss his points as "Voodoo Science".



Edits: 02/28/10 02/28/10

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