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Boring music or boring hifi?

Art and Music-the concerns of the painter and musician have similarities but to recreate a painting to be indistinguishable from the original is merely true. The recreation of music involving an orchestra at its peak is rather different affair as it has a "code" to follow designed to be followed by the various players so we get to see and hear the events that take place to form the whole but its whats within that that makes it merely true or something to behold-Philip Guston remarked on the making of painting that it was an unfolding chain of baffling events. We don't see these events as they are buried beneath many layers of oil paint.
Hifi removes us further but still allows us to listen - just depends on how you want to do that in the knowledge that it is impossible but the nearer the better.

Si
 
darrylfunk said:
i'm not sure i get this 'get' thang....it's a bit like someone saying i like systems that 'boogie' when listening to some johnny burnette that's fine but i don't want ligety to 'boogie'.....
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Imagine your typical American Idol winner singing R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Now, imagine Aretha singing it. Get it now?;-)
 
Is it possible for an American Idol to do better than Aretha, or could Aretha have an off day?
 
James said:
Is it possible for an American Idol to do better than Aretha, or could Aretha have an off day?
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James -IMO, and from what I've heard being forced to watch the crap while I'm eating dinner after work, Aretha on her worst day is light years beyond the best AI has to offer. Just my opinion of course.

Further thoughts for Darryl dreamed up while walking the dogs tonight...previously for me, on crappy hifis or ones that simply didn't connect with me, Bob always sounded like Robert Zimmerman, a unique and sort of interesting singer from Minnisota with a different outlook on life. When I assembled a hifi that connected with me like no other, Bob hit me like Bob Dylan, perhaps the most powerful and profound songwriter that ever lived. When I return to lesser hifi with Bob now, most but not all of the magic stays. My point is it took a great rig to bring him to my attention.

Hope that makes sense because it's about the best I can do for an explanation....
 
Dave,

dave said:
James -IMO, and from what I've heard being forced to watch the crap while I'm eating dinner after work, Aretha on her worst day is light years beyond the best AI has to offer. Just my opinion of course.
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That's entirely possible. I don't watch reality TV crap at all.

Which Dylan album did you not get until you had a proper hifi? I don't have many of his earlier works, but I thought his Love and Theft and Modern Times albums are rather interesting.

James
 
I've heard most of his albums as they came out during the last four decades and TBH, didn't get any of them even on my old Naim and Linn rigs. The Awakening occured with my current mid-level olive rig circa '95 with Good as I been to You. It floored me like a ton of bricks....and it still drops my jaw a thousand plays later;-)

Love and Theft, Modern Times and World Gone Wrong are three of my other favorites. You might like WGW judging from your other picks.
 
dave said:
Imagine your typical American Idol winner singing R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Now, imagine Aretha singing it. Get it now?;-)
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i still don't get you dave....
this is my argument that you have been denying all these months.

you see you are saying it is all 'prat' and the gear in particular naim gear that delivers the goods, but i say it is the composer/artist that matters.....

if you had 2 copies of an aretha song but one was 1/8 tone flat and one 1/8 tone sharp what one would you prefer?

another example:- who would you rather listen to, me a rather poor keyboard player on a beautiful bosendorfer or herbie hancock on a technics digital piano?

it is not the sonics that make you 'get' music it is the brain learning the codes and finally getting enough of it to make it enjoyable.

for the record, roksan when first launched used to play loads of dylan at there demos to show how much more accurate it was than the linn as you could easily follow what bob was saying lyrically, on the linn it sounded confused and like he had a bad cold.

the hi fi will have some bearing on things but it is mainly expectation bias....the proof is you say you kept trying for years and years to 'get' dylan and eventually you did.
the fidelity of the recordings didn't change in those intervening years.
i would suggest that when you reached your expectation level on cost of system and expected sound that is where you feel comfortable and so you are quite happy with what you are hearing.
you said yourself when you feel your system is under performing you give it a clean and reset and you feel it's back on song.
that is usual when doing ritualistic things....it makes you expect the improvement even if there was none.

bit like the sighted wine tasting where one is described as artisan produced wine and the other a good budget factory produced wine, everybody will be fooled into preferring the first because the expectation for it has gone positive where the second wine is described as more disapointing.
this was also shown on a program on sky called body language secrets.
the wines were actually identical though.

with dylan in particular it took me a long time to get him and i got him because i got into other stuff which joined the dots for me.
i got into taj mahal, woody guthrie, nick drake before dylan and that enabled me to un-tangle dylans work; in other words i learnt his language.
 
Expectation bias exists for sure but it is over-rated by some contributors. I think to wave the expectation bias card so readily in people's faces during subjective discussions is also incredibly patronising.

For sure, you can't rule it out but you can't rule it in so readily either. A little more investigation is required first.
 
Weirdly, I 'got' Dylan as soon as I heard his music (via scratchy mono LPs on a Dansette record player). However I bought the first Dylan recording recently on CD, and it sounds awful! Too much fidelity is clearly a bad thing in this particular case.
 
joe - the recording was a low budget affair and the producers moaned that dylan had no microphone technique and dylan refused to do multiple takes so it's hardly 'jazz at the chip shop' :)
 
I guess the scratchy lo-fi mono sound made the LP sound more 'authentic', as if it was Robert Johnson or somesuch old bluesman!
 
darrylfunk said:
i still don't get you dave....
this is my argument that you have been denying all these months.

you see you are saying it is all 'prat' and the gear in particular naim gear that delivers the goods, but i say it is the composer/artist that matters.....

if you had 2 copies of an aretha song but one was 1/8 tone flat and one 1/8 tone sharp what one would you prefer?

another example:- who would you rather listen to, me a rather poor keyboard player on a beautiful bosendorfer or herbie hancock on a technics digital piano?

it is not the sonics that make you 'get' music it is the brain learning the codes and finally getting enough of it to make it enjoyable.

for the record, roksan when first launched used to play loads of dylan at there demos to show how much more accurate it was than the linn as you could easily follow what bob was saying lyrically, on the linn it sounded confused and like he had a bad cold.

the hi fi will have some bearing on things but it is mainly expectation bias....the proof is you say you kept trying for years and years to 'get' dylan and eventually you did.
the fidelity of the recordings didn't change in those intervening years.
i would suggest that when you reached your expectation level on cost of system and expected sound that is where you feel comfortable and so you are quite happy with what you are hearing.
you said yourself when you feel your system is under performing you give it a clean and reset and you feel it's back on song.
that is usual when doing ritualistic things....it makes you expect the improvement even if there was none.

bit like the sighted wine tasting where one is described as artisan produced wine and the other a good budget factory produced wine, everybody will be fooled into preferring the first because the expectation for it has gone positive where the second wine is described as more disapointing.
this was also shown on a program on sky called body language secrets.
the wines were actually identical though.

with dylan in particular it took me a long time to get him and i got him because i got into other stuff which joined the dots for me.
i got into taj mahal, woody guthrie, nick drake before dylan and that enabled me to un-tangle dylans work; in other words i learnt his language.
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Darryl,

All I can tell you is I never "got" Bob after thousands of plays over forty years on as many systems (including Naim CB rigs back in the late seventies and early eighties) until my current rig purchased in '95.

I still listen to Bob on occasion through all sorts of hifis and low-fis and while admittedly, I enjoy Bob on many or most of these devices now, it's just not the same magical connection I get with my aging 15 year-old-rig. The one exception was through a (Naim) Six Pack which was even more intense with it's connection vs my rig.

I'll let you and everyone else speculate what is going on in my head and how to fix it now with the facts condensed even though I think I'm really OK;-)

best,

dave

EDIT Post-dog-walk-additional-thoughts...if the difference wasn't specifically the '95 rig, then why did I not "get" him on my earlier chrome bumper, Linn and asstd round earth rigs and with many rigs auditioned during the massive search for new hifi in '95? (Several Bob disks were borrowed from the wife for judging rigs during the shopping spree as I'd found that if I suddenly found merit in music I didn't previously like, I might have also found The Rig for Me. Unfortunately, the Bob disks used didn't work in this case though ;-)
 
i don't think musical taste and hifi taste correlate, they could very well be the same for many folk ie boring music + boring sounding hifi :D but that's just a coincidence. not everyone enjoys a lively sound even if they enjoy lively music and other variations...
 
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