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Interesting video: The Audiophile's Philosophy

Wes

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it's a great word but at variance with the meaninglessness here due to its fixed denotation
 

Blaspheme

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Partly.

I have unsuccessfully argued here in the past that the fidelity/transparency ideal is doomed and I'm grateful that he easily dismissed that nonsense.
I haven't seen your discussion previously, but I'd agree.

It's in the last 3 minutes, from about 18:00 on that it gets interesting. The punchline, that it all leads up to, is:

The transmission theory of music, the one which aims at a neutral, transparent conveyance of the original reality, sees each element in this sequence atomically, connected contingently, but on a model premised on continuity elements in sequences have heuristic reality only. They are more profitably understood as interdependent and co-constitutive.

Do you have any idea what this means? I do not.
I laughed when that part came up. Phew!

But I assumed it referred to the paradigm of faithful transmission of the live (ie past) event. I don't understand "connected contingently" in this context (although the quote is dismissing that). I'm also unsure how heuristics come in (what are we learning for ourselves?). I'd agree with "interdependent and co-constructive" because that's how I see the elements in a an audio production/reproduction system.

Also, the quote from Adorno, "Mediation is in the object itself, not something between the object and that to which it is brought." Uh duh! What kind of dunce would think otherwise. When you listen to a Glenn Gould, or Beatles, or Queen studio recording, what sort of object do you imagine you are listening to? Academic philosophy often seems to be a game of stating what we all know using words that seem clever. (The Malcolm Gladwell effect.)
I agree with some posts above that the faithful transmission paradigm is a bit of a straw man. But it is often invoked—and invoked seriously/literally—so I guess a comprehensive discussion would need to address it.

I generally listen to studio-produced music, often made entirely of synthetic sounds. There's no original event per se. So for me realistic reproduction of the live past event is rarely a consideration and the recording is self-evidently an object itself. People who routinely listen to reproductions of live events may see it differently (I think the recording is an object itself in that case too, but not everyone will agree).

The professor claims that taking ontology seriously in this context is key. I disagree. I can't think of a domain in which ontology is less relevant.
But ontology is always fun. You are free to disagree with me here. :)

Edit: I assume by ontology he means the set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them, not the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being (shamelessly cribbing from my dictionary here). The latter isn't hugely relevant (unless we start asking "what is music?") the former more so.

And I am amazed that he avoids the moral dimension. If you pay attention, even here on ASR, you'll see people saying that such and such should be sued or criminally prosecuted for selling some magick for lots of money. It fascinates me that ASR participants care so much about the consumer rights of wealthy people with expensive hobbies being swindled out of a few dollars while (choose your serious injustice) is happening in the real world.
Obsession with underlying moral dimensions appears to me to be a very US thing. I put it down to history/culture: the US was largely settled by fringe religions escaping the dominant churches. It's hard to have a discussion with many from the US while traversing terrain seeded with morality landmines. I was glad he didn't go there. But I agree it's a part of the ethos at ASR (which I don't share). He certainly could have addressed it, but it is somewhat orthogonal to his line of argument. I enjoy the fact that there are many Europeans here who don't obsess over that stuff (ie minor moral issues, not major).

And I can't imagine evening approaching this topic as a hard-nosed American philosopher without first defining terms: wtf is music?
You wanted less wordiness? That wouldn't be the way. :)

Sorry. He kinda pissed me off when he at the end asked for comments and then closed youtube comments.
Fair enough.
 
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Wes

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I thought ontology was about quarks.
 

Wes

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maybe if the teeth went bad for eating quarks
 

Pennyless Audiophile

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What is the point of modifying everything away from the original recording and towards individual taste?
For me enjoyment, it is a form of interacting and understanding art that goes beyond passive consumption. It generally doesn't hinder or change the author's message but it helps me understanding and enjoying it. In the same way to understand a film I might stop and re-watch some scenes or, to understand a painting, I may want to draw over (a copy, obviously) it. I realize it is not for everyone, but nothing is forbidden as long as you don't cause damage to anyone else or the work of art itself.
 

Gorgonzola

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...
The truth is fairly simple and is certainly achievable, and worth striving to attain. And that is, to reproduce with fidelity the actual recorded music production that was made by the musicians in concert with the sound engineering and recording team. The experience that they had in the mastering suite is a work of technical art wrapped around a piece of musical performance art, and they made that sonic experience and not any other sonic experience, and striving to hear what they heard, and reproduce what they produced, is worthwhile and worth doing.
...

Didn't somebody here say that the mediation was an end in itself? I think this is never more clear that in the case of music recording. Sound engineers seem to take their artistic role too seriously at times judging by the number of crappy recordings. Do your really want steely, ear-piercing violins? Do I really want to listen to, say, chamber music on stage with the musicians? Personally I prefer a couple of rows back among the audience.

For another thing, "live" performances in front of live audiences are rarely recorded these day anyway. Engineers have told me that it is too difficult and that studio recordings yield a better result. Placement of musicians and microphones end up scarcely resembling the live performance norms.

Audiophiles often say that their objective is to achieve a sound like the "live" performance. Their objective is defeated from the get-go by the recording and mastering processes. Never mind that they prefer equipment that adds distortion to the output.
 

Newman

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I can’t figure out if you are agreeing with me, or if you didn’t grasp my point at all.
 
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thefsb

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As soon as I encounter anybody making a rather obvious statement that the pursuit of the original musical performance experience is futile and unobtainable, and then they use that as their excuse for pursuing sheer hedonism with no regard to any kind of accuracy, I identify that as a strawman argument. Furthermore I question whether they are making this mistake deliberately, or whether they are genuinely accidentally misunderstanding the point of sound reproduction.

The truth is fairly simple and is certainly achievable, and worth striving to attain. And that is, to reproduce with fidelity the actual recorded music production that was made by the musicians in concert with the sound engineering and recording team. The experience that they had in the mastering suite is a work of technical art wrapped around a piece of musical performance art, and they made that sonic experience and not any other sonic experience, and striving to hear what they heard, and reproduce what they produced, is worthwhile and worth doing.
That reduces the scope of the transparency principle to fidelity in reproducing what the mastering engineers heard rather than fidelity to the musical performance. This makes it easier to defend as a simple principle to guide optimization of your consumer choices in the playback system. It seems attainable. I believe this inference still falls apart on close analysis. But it appears to satisfy a lot of people.

I have a different guiding principle that leads me to choose neutral (linear, broadly uncolored, noiseless) playback equipment. It is pragmatic and accommodates the complexities of musical subjectivity. It avoids attempting an engineering decomposition of the processes of enjoying recorded music. In essence the principle is: I have no practical alternative given my priorities and constrains.

I have a very wide range of music in my collection. I need equipment that works well for all of it.

I don't like audio gear and am not interested in it as object of subjective pleasure. It is not my hobby. I want it to do its job and get out of the way of my musical pleasure. I prefer gear that I can hide. I've no interest in spending my time talking about loudspeakers, amps, etc.

I allow for the possibility that certain coloration or non-linearity might, for a given recording and for a given subjective context (mood, other activities, social situation, etc.), improve the experience. But I have no reason to believe that there is a distortion or coloration or that is suitable for all the music I need the system to play in all the subjective contexts. Indeed, everything I know from music production and recording suggests the opposite. A good recording engineer carefully chooses equipment and configurations according to the music and the performers, and the aesthetic and commercial goals of the project.

Therefore things like class A tube amps aren't useful to me. That whole collection of arguments along the lines of "my bad measuring amp sounds better to me" (granting the plausibility for argument's sake) are no use to me. There is no practical way for me to choose the device. Given the galaxy of possible distortions and coloration's and that I don't want to spend my life auditioning equipment, I see no way to do it.

Although it is easier and much quicker, I also don't want to use programmable signal processors to enhance the pleasure of listening because I don't have the time or urge to do so. I know that I might be able to improve certain recordings, for example by mitigating distracting technical defects. But it's far too laborious since it all depends on the recording and the subjective listening context.

So, since I want to finish building the system asap, and I want it to work for all the music and all the contexts, the only specification that seems remotely practical, is neutrality.
 
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thefsb

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I enjoyed reading your response @Blaspheme.

I agree with some posts above that the faithful transmission paradigm is a bit of a straw man. But it is often invoked—and invoked seriously/literally—so I guess a comprehensive discussion would need to address it.

I think so too. I doubt I'm the right person to explain but I think at root we have a category error.

No matter what you do, any acceptable statement of the goals of a playback system will be an assertion of an aesthetic truth. There is simply no way to derive or infer objective specifications of the performance of the playback systems from that. The methods of scientific objectivity are over here and discussion of the arts is over there.

For example, Newman stated above:

"The truth is fairly simple and is certainly achievable, and worth striving to attain. And that is, to reproduce with fidelity the actual recorded music production that was made by the musicians in concert with the sound engineering and recording team. The experience that they had in the mastering suite is a work of technical art wrapped around a piece of musical performance art, and they made that sonic experience and not any other sonic experience, and striving to hear what they heard, and reproduce what they produced, is worthwhile and worth doing."

This is an assertion of an aesthetic truth. It is entirely acceptable. But it wont work to elaborate the objective measures of performance from this one simple statement that exists in an entirely separate domain of thought.

And I think this category error explains why some debates go on and on without resolution.

An assertion like "Whatever sounds better [to me/us] is better [for my/our purposes]" is unassailable. It might seem less useful in specifying and choosing equipment than Newman's but it's not really. They are both useful and limited in roughly the same way.

But the separation of the aesthetic from the objective works both ways. The defiantly anti-measurement aesthetic pleasure seeker makes the same category error if she or he claims that measurements don't matter.

I think there are perfectly good reasons for the kind of measurements and judgements that Amir, for example, uses. They are pragmatic reasons. (Engineering is pragmatic.) But they are not simply stated and they are debatable. (Engineering choices are debatable.) They are contingent on constraints. They are complicated by the statistical nature of psycho-acoustics and the commercial markets. Much as one might want to formally relate all these choices and trade-offs to a simple statement of an aesthetic goal, it won't work.

Put it another way. Imagine you were a professional consultant that knew everything there is to know about audio, acoustics, perception, and you know all the products on the market and can use all the most sophisticated measurement devices and signal-processors. It's your job is to build systems for people. You have skill in asking questions about what clients want and wisdom in understanding what will satisfy them in short and long terms. Different clients wanting different things is obviously permissible. Assume they express themselves in aesthetic, not engineering terms. What's it like to do that consulting work? There isn't an algorithm to take the client's words and produce equipment and config specs. It's a craft that involves engineering and a lot of knowledge on one hand and psychology, personal and language skills on the other and a lot of experience and/or magic to bring them together with successful results.

It seems equivalent to being a recording engineer, mediating between separates domains of truth, the aesthetic and the objective/technical.

Connecting these domains is complex. Also interesting.

But ontology is always fun. You are free to disagree with me here. :)

The only discussion of ontology I have found useful is Marc Ribot's B-Flat Ontology.

Obsession with underlying moral dimensions appears to me to be a very US thing. I put it down to history/culture: the US was largely settled by fringe religions escaping the dominant churches. It's hard to have a discussion with many from the US while traversing terrain seeded with morality landmines. I was glad he didn't go there. But I agree it's a part of the ethos at ASR (which I don't share). He certainly could have addressed it, but it is somewhat orthogonal to his line of argument. I enjoy the fact that there are many Europeans here who don't obsess over that stuff (ie minor moral issues, not major).

I hadn't thought of the moralization w.r.t. overpriced p.o.s. audio gear in that larger context. I think you're right. America is in the grip of ever escalating moralization, judgements, deploring, denouncing, etc. It's interesting, quite worrying and very complicated. The historical reasons you mention are interesting and may be involved but I don't think they are sufficient to explain what's going on now. I think we need to understand the rewards of this behavior to those exhibiting it.
 
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