A Week Of Bad Logic Maybe it is the weather. But here is another article about audio and music that reaches a conclusion that isnt logical, though some form of the argument is quite common: So what does this all mean? Simple. If there can never be any real duplication of the sound of live music, then all there can ever really be for you to buy or enjoy is what you like and what pleases you. Now, of course, you are free in the case of music listening to adopt whatever philosophy you wish. But, if you are the kind of person who like to do things with his or her eyes open then you should understand why the words in quotation marks above arent necessarily true. Logically, Rogers argument is that if perfection is not possible, then the approximation of perfection is meaningless. To see, intuitively, why this isnt necessarily so, consider an athletic example involving the game of golf. We could imagine, because it is the case, that someone has a physics model of a golf club and a golf ball and air and the ground. From this model, we can derive the swing and resulting trajectory that results in hitting the ball closest to the hole. And perhaps we can build a robot that swings the club this way. Now we may further analyze the human body and the brain and say that no human will ever come close to swinging the club as well time after time. But this doesnt therefore mean that the goal of approximating the robot/physics swing is meaningless. A golfer whose swing comes closer to the robots will hit the ball closer to the hole. It doesnt matter that the human golfer is at 70% or 80%, not 100%, of the robots swing dynamics. The existence of an error in reproducing the physics model doesnt immediately mean that you should just swing as you like and as it pleases you. At least if you want to win or improve your score. Roger invokes the name of the late Harry Pearson in his introduction. His description of one of Harrys core innovations is rather distorted, though from experience we could say that Harrys argument was subtle and complex enough that we should expect confusion. So, to attempt clarification, here is what Harry said: 1. Our goal is to enjoy music when it is reproduced 2. A reasonable assumption is that music will be best enjoyed when it sounds most like the artists involved intended 2a. Harry seemed to limit the artists to the musicians playing the instruments, but perhaps this could also include the recording artisans. 3. When we (audio journalists) are trying to convey to consumers what equipment will serve them well, we need a standard for measurement that can be common between people (because understandable communication is a key task of the journalist) 4. the absolute sound or the sound of live unamplified music in a real space is a reasonable starting point for that standard because it is a reference that is available to most people and it is relevant to the goals (#1 and #2). 4a. There are many complexities (hall, listener position, location of musicians) in this approach. When the error between live and reproduced is big, this is a smaller problem. 4b. There is no logical reason to limit this to unamplified music, but practically it reduces the number of variations (a Stratocaster, for example, played through various amps and effects has a lot more possible sounds than a Stradivarius). 5. We further assume that equipment that, on average, sounds the most like the reference will, on average, reproduce music as closely as possible to what the artists intended and therefore will most often accomplish our goals (#1 and #2). On average is a key idea and is essential to understanding why Rogers logic is flawed -- he presumes a goal that is not the goal. 5a. Generally Harry assumed the recording folks were not systematically creating an error, so on average accurate equipment would reveal artists intentions. But see 2a. 6. We can objectively judge the accuracy of equipment by listening to it. This is best done with the human ear/brain, because it is the system consumers use for listening and it is a very sophisticated system. Listening must be done over long periods and a wide variety of (vetted) recordings, because we are talking about averages across inevitably imperfect recordings. 6a. Experienced listeners tend to do this work more accurately. Not because they have golden ears but because they have lots of data from which to understand what phenomena are possible and the experience describing the phenomena. They are in reality like the apocryphal eskimos describing snow. 7. When we have a relatively high error level between reproduced sound and what the artists intended, it is likely that different listeners may prioritize the seriousness of those errors differently. Therefore, the journalist should carefully describe those errors so that consumers can apply the journalists findings to their own values. 7a. Note that an important virtue of measuring via listening and descriptive language is that it empowers the listener to engage in the reviewers process and verify (or not) his results. Now this is a lot to think about. But the above isnt for consumers per se. For consumers, in the end Roger may be right for the wrong reasons. Without worrying to much about the above, music lovers will on average prefer equipment that approximates the absolute sound. If they just go with what they prefer, they will probably do fine. If they want to improve their results, some study and thinking can be beneficial. But it is best for the means not to become the end.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 20:23:23 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015