Thursday 29 May 2014

Enjoying ones music

Every so often on one site I frequent there remains a lingering thought that a substantial number of its more active users appear obsessed with the pursuit of high fidelity to the point they are no longer enjoying the music.
It's hardly an original observation as Flanders and Swann wrote the great musical satirical piece "A Song of Reproduction" very much around that in the early 1960's  where the tinkering around buildings ones own 'rig' and habitual bashing of commercial equipment was all the range.
In my experience   many people fail to get as good a sound as possible from modest equipment simply because they have not invested the time to set it up properly, using good quality leads, determining the best spot and support for their loudspeakers that move the air within the room used and so on.
Those steps that need not cost much, saving many an audio fan from spending a never ending amount on upgrading when often they've not heard all their existing equipment is capable of.
One often feels like saying, go treat yourself to a new great recording be it on record, cd or high quality download instead of spending hundreds of pounds on what turn out to be sideways changes in hardware.
One thing you soon learn with good equipment regardless of price is, recordings vary wildly in terms of their own quality to which the best good equipment can do is not make reproducing them any worse than they really are and where available, look for the best sounding recordings of your favourite artists and music. 
Unfortunately much new popular music is made much louder with less difference between the softest and loudest passages and some classical recordings have had whole passages seriously edited to perfection losing any real sense of a conductor's own character showing in how a note is performed compared to recordings in the analogue (generally pre-1980's) era so much so that many musicians seek out these older recordings because they sound more like performances with their own character.
In many ways what is sad is it's  that while the wanting to hear music well reproduced that gets people into better sound, they get locked into obsessing over hardware and their specifications so they feel obliged to spend more time thinking about that than simply playing a recording and enjoying it.
When I'm happy with my equipment, as a rule I stick with it until either I become less satisfied or it needs replacing.

No comments: