October 2024

High-End Audio Sound? Audiophile Music? Both? What?
Some basic questions about our hobby.
Article By Roger Skoff

I first wrote about how music and sound interrelate to  enhance each other years ago within my 2018 article Coming At It From Both Directions ). At that time, I looked at it – even after more than half a century as a music lover and audiophile – more from point of view of an audiophile drawn to great music and cultural expansion by a love of great sound than as a music lover carried inexorably in the other direction by a search for greater involvement in and enjoyment of one of humanity's greatest arts. Now, like Joni Mitchell, I'm seeing things from both sides. Here are my latest thoughts on the subject.

They say that the difference between audiophiles and music lovers is that music lovers buy a system to listen to their music and audiophiles (I and my friends call ourselves "Hi-Fi Crazies") buy music to listen to their system.

Actually, I don't think it's anywhere near that simple.

Consider a "music lover" who believes he has no interest in hi-fi whatsoever listening to a favorite song through the speaker on a shirt pocket transistor radio. He may think that he's listening to the music, but what's he actually hearing? Just the bare bones of the music, at the very most. For one thing, the sound's not in stereo, so none of the music's spatial information – its real-world context – is coming through, not even the simple "right and left" stuff giving a clue as to where the instruments or performers are located relative to the recording studio and to each other. The sound is all just one single homogeneous mass.

And that mass isn't even all there: The radio's built-in speaker can't possibly be very large (probably not much more than two inches [5cm] in diameter), so it's not going to be able to reproduce any of the music's lower frequencies. That means that any kind of bass information – even upper mid-bass –will simply not be there, and the listener will be denied at least most of the rhythm background of what he's trying to listen to.

Even the frequencies that are there will have their timbre and harmonic structures so garbled that, even if you hear and enjoy the musical theme, you may not be able to tell what kind of instrument is playing it. About the only thing about a song that can't be changed by the way it's being played is its words, and even those may be indistinguishable if the playback sound is bad enough. (Even good systems can lose the words, sometimes – consider the background talk on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album; since it first came out, whether that can be understood or not has been an ongoing challenge to system performance.)

The whole issue of transistor radio sound quality is moot, of course; nobody would ever really consider a pocket radio for serious listening. Doing that would be like eating at a Denny's or a fast food chain instead of a gourmet restaurant – it'll fill your belly and you won't get sick from it, but it's just fuel for the body and not what most people would regard as a joy to the soul or a treat for the senses.

And that's what music is intended to be.

Whatever kind of music you listen to, it's, first above all, sound – a collection of metered sounds and silences, forming a rhythmic base for a tonal or word structure that's capable of both expressing and exciting the full range of human emotion. Whether it's a single voice or instrument or something like the Mahler Symphony No. 8 ("The Symphony Of A thousand"), written for massed choruses, multiple orchestras, multiple soloists, a pipe organ, and a partridge in a pear tree, it's all sound – and to miss any part of the sound is to miss part of the music.

Have you ever found yourself tapping your toes, snapping your fingers, nodding your head, or even being moved to dance or sing along with a piece of music? Of course you have – we all have,We're moved and thrilled by music, not just intellectually, but at a deeper level and it's not just the result of what notes are being sung or played, but by the entire context of the musical performance. The very same piece of music, played by the same people, can have very different effects on us, depending on how we are hearing it and in what circumstances.

Just to cite two obvious examples, consider the sound of a marching band (an early favorite subject for stereo recording) Certainly Stars and Stripes forever, a Sousa classic is thrilling in itself, but to hear it in its natural venue and hear and feel the sound moving past your listening position is a part of the music that can't just be expressed in notes alone. It's the same thing with a concert of any kind: Even from a less than great seat, the venue is part of the music and you get a feeling for and an aspect of the music not possible any other way. 

And then, of course, there are things like Handel's Concerto a Due Chori or The Cuckoo and the Nightingale for two pipe organs, where the spatial layout of the performers and instruments is actually part of the music.

The closer you can get to the actual sound of the music, including not only all of its notes, its tonality, its dynamics, and its physical context, the more likely you are to be involved with it, "turned on" by it, and to feel a sense of participation in the musical process. That's where a good stereo sound system comes in and why even a "music lover" who may think he has little concern for great sonics still needs one: It's not just to be able to play a record or to hear a tune, but to become emotionally, physically, or even spiritually involved with the music.

And for the audiophile who really will listen to anything as long as it's in great sound and allows him to take pride in or show off his system, that good sound is the bait to lure him into a broader musical experience and thus derive not only more sonic, but more musical satisfaction from his system.

Do you think I'm wrong or kidding? Don't you want to know what The Cuckoo and the Nightingale sounds like? Hunt down a copy and...

Enjoy the music!

 

Roger Skoff