3D and music
When I began listening more carefully to my music, I noticed that sound quality affects the experience. Sound quality is a relatively individual concept, but some changes in reproduction will sound like improvements to most people. We recognise the clarity resulting from lower distortion at the same volume as quality. An extended frequency response too. Greater dynamics through less compression, again resulting from lower distortion at higher levels, also counts. An audible difference depends both on its size and on the listener’s perceptual abilities. A trained listener, an audiophile, is likely to notice smaller differences than someone randomly chosen whose interest in music is limited to a pleasant background for a nap.
As I mentioned before, when I started listening more carefully in the later years of primary school, I noticed that the stereo in the living room sounded much better than the radio-cassette player beside my bed. I recognised that what made it better was the clarity and power, energy and emotion conveyed by music through that system.
Prompted by this discovery, I began reading the few articles about audio electronics available to me. At the time I could find them only in SAM, Avto magazine and the magazines in the British consulate’s reading room. That was where I first learned that I was a lover of good sound — an audiophile.
I also learned that all audiophiles sought the Holy Grail of hi-fi: recreating an imaginary yet entirely convincing three-dimensional sound image of a musical event captured on a record.
I devoured reviews of equipment with unfamiliar, exotic names. I learned that the best equipment, then called ‘esoteric’ rather than ‘high-end’, supposedly made it easy to count orchestral rows, measure a singer’s distance from the microphone and orchestra, calculate the concert hall’s floor area and generally understand every spatial relationship between musicians and the room where the recording was made.
I too began searching for the holographic world of reproduced music. As my systems improved, recorded spaces grew larger. At the same time my record, and later CD, collection began separating into two groups: a large one containing music I loved and enjoyed, and a smaller one of audiophile recordings and test records. Despite the system’s now above-average sound quality, I noticed that non-audiophile acquaintances never commented on space, musicians’ positions or the 3D effect that so fascinated me and most magazine reviewers. I also noticed that this effect was not particularly important to me when listening to music I loved. With various audiophile recordings, something like compulsory reading, it was the only thing that helped me concentrate on the music, or rather the sound. Nor did I care where musicians stood or sat when hearing them live. Gradually, by reconsidering my musical and sonic interests, I established priorities for a music-reproduction system.
Today, after many years with hi-fi and music, I can freely say that recreating space is not a particularly important factor in my assessment of a system’s sound quality.
Dynamics and tonal balance come first for me. Have you noticed how, walking past a window from which music emerges, you can usually tell without difficulty whether it is recorded or live? Hearing music around a corner while walking through town, you will probably know immediately whether musicians are playing live. In these situations, dynamics and the energy of sound and music unerringly distinguish reproduction from a live performance.
Honestly, I have often closed my eyes at concerts to experience the ‘true image’ of the soundstage, but have never managed to count the orchestra’s rows. Spatially, what I hear is more like a wall of sound pulsing with musical energy. I am far more fascinated by the orchestra’s power or the natural fullness and warmth of a trumpet at a volume that would shatter my windows at home. Or the delicate decay of a cymbal shimmering throughout the hall. Those are the things I expect from my system.
My expectations have not yet been met completely. But choosing components according to these values has given me more enjoyment of music at home than ever before. I no longer listen to those boring audiophile records and CDs either.
DrZ Laboratorij