Besides, there never was a pure, unalloyed, unbesmirched, virginal audio signal to begin with. The microphones' physical construction and selected position already grossly altered the sound's capture. And the cabling and preamps and mixers that followed further altered the signal. Then we added the remastering, the processing, and the conversion to playback media (ADC-to-DAC or RIAA equalization to playback inverse equalization) to the signal's aberrant course. What signal integrity that might have survived was finally run through the sound processor known as your system, playback deck, amplification, cabling, speakers, and room acoustics included. There absolutely nothing left of the piano or flute playing in a hall long ago that is untouched by this long chain. Still, some argue that we should regard the record or CD as absolutes in themselves and try to preserve that arbitrary purity from there on.
     But why? All CDs and records come sullied, so why should we pretend otherwise? Imagine that you visit a friend's house and while there you watch an old Marilyn Monroe movie. You complain that Marilyn has a decidedly green cast about her. Your friend assures that the picture is correct. "How so?" you ask. His reply is that he has measured the video signal coming out of his cable feed and the green cast is contained in the color burst information of the feed. Your friend adamantly refuses to alter the picture to bring Marilyn's skin back to something closer to human, for to do so would be untrue to the electrons that trace the cable's signal.
    Should you call the cable company to complain, they might reply that they have the actual film in their hands and it has a green cast about it due to aging, which they do not wish to correct, as they respect the absolute purity of the film. "Still, a green Marilyn Monroe?" you think to yourself. 
Before you think that I am going start arguing for an absolute skin tone, imagine that instead you had found Marilyn's skin a bit too pink and commented so. Your friend's reply is that he purposely adjusted the color so, as he prefers to see her that way. Is he wrong? If so, how can someone's preferences be wrong?

    And if so, is he absolutely wrong or relatively wrong? And if his preferences are wrong, is he, indeed, morally wrong for holding them? In fact, do his preferences even have to be logically consistent? For example, I once knew a woman who, when given the choice between cream and half-and-half for her tea, always choose cream; and when given a choice between half-and-half and milk, always choose half-and-half; but when given a choice between cream and milk, she choose milk. Was she wrong? If so, how?
     So I am saying that we should abandon all absolutes and logic? No, both absolutes and logic have place, but that place is not where they have been misplaced in audio practice. Consider this: is not the obsession with an imagined absolute sound, ultimately, at its core, philistine --as philistine as the meter-reader's obsession with 0.0003% distortion. For such an obsession with an absolute sound exalts sound over music, although the actual music is not the same as the sound. What? Doesn't sound equal music?
    When deaf, Beethoven not only created great music, but he also more profoundly and absolutely experienced that music than those who could hear his music only by sound waves. For sound is really only the usual medium by which the playing of instruments is brought to our ears, but the essential aspect of music is experienced in between our ears, just as poetry is not found in the splattering of ink on paper or electrons flowing through an amplifier or even in the flapping of a loudspeaker's cone.
    Thus, a more honest and informed absolute is found not in the electrons and the sound, but the music itself. Thus we should judge a sound not by some imaginarily perfect sound, but by how true it is to the music. Many of the usually disparaging audio attributes, such as "strident, brittle, and glaring," might be perfectly appropriate and true to a certain Shostakovich composition, just as "sweet, fluid, and warm" would be equally inappropriate and untrue. In this sense, all un-adjustable stereo systems are like broken watches: only occasionally are they accurate. Like the fixed-magnification telescope of the earlier example, what our systems need is a means of easy adjustment.

< PREVIOUS

NEXT >