Warm & Fuzzy

In a sideways continuation of last night's post, I'll return to analogue in the audio domain: I've mentioned before how I prefer the sound of old-school analogue recordings, warts and all, over the clinical presentation of digital formats. This has more to it than nostalgia or pigheadedness, and is more nuanced than the geeky-hifi-clinical-accuracy-crowd might have it. Music, and for that matter speech, and their reproduction are complex psycho-acoustic phenomena wrapped up in the enigma of human perception. The fact is, there's no such thing as a hifi recording that everyone could or would agree upon for 'accuracy', and anyway, the term was coined in the days when people only talked about recordings of live acoustic material, which was mostly orchestral: in fact I'd go so far as to say that the 'hifi' trend and its subsequent market rollercoaster of an industry was built upon that very narrow basis.

Therein lies the fundamental untruth of the hifi myth. Anyone who has experienced a full symphony orchestra at full tilt live in a concert hall knows full-well that no domestic sound system, of any scale or expense, will ever come remotely close to the fury and the majesty of that experience, let alone its capacity for subtle nuance. But that doesn't stop the enjoyment of the music itself, reproduced by whatever means, so long as it is not horribly distorted. I think of my uncle Sam listening to the scratchy 78's of his copy of Puccini's La Bohème: all he heard was the beauty of the opera and its performance - Gigli in the tenor rôle - not some attempt to 'big up' the audio in a vain attempt to reproduce the ambience of a major opera house. The music transcended the medium, and it has been thus ever since. If all you hear are the shortcomings of the medium, you ain't listening to the music. There's far, far more to this discussion than this, but I'll leave it at that for another day as my curry and naan are nearly done. Talk to you later...