Being doctrinaire is really not a substitute for thinking. Of course no reproduced music at home is going to be identical to live experience. No one suggested it was. But one could get closer.
And it is just silly to say "go to the performance". The music played , even in major cities, is a very small fraction of what one might like to hear. It makes no sense to say "case closed" all the time. And monotonous repetition of buzz words like "special effect" contributes nothing to anything. Things like this are never closed. Who would have predicted in 1975 the current state of things? (IBM famously said that computers would never become popular home appliances, to take a particularly egregious instance of "case closed" being completely wrong.) Things change all the time. Furthermore it is silly to say that surround failed because of its not being musically interesting. The first try failed (SQ, Quad etc) because it really does not work well to try to put multiple channels on an LP. The second round failed at least in part because the industry shot the effort in the foot by failing to agree on a single format. DVD versus SACD ruined everything at that point. But who is to say that it will never come back? Lots of people have 5.1 home theater setups. They could play music on them. It could sound good. It could all happen easily enough especially since data distribution is getting so easy. It would be nice if Ambisonics were positioned to participate if this does happen. c Robert On Fri, 13 Apr 2012, newme...@aol.com wrote:
Folks:
D> ALL reproduced music is a "special effect" -- if you wish to hear a
performance, as it was actually played, go to the performance. MONO is a special effect. STEREO is a special effect. SURROUND is a special effect. MP3 is a special effect. None of them is a live performance. And, no amount of money spent by "audiophiles" can change that. Neither can a few extremely well-executed recordings. It will always be a special effect and everyone knows it. Starting In the 1960s, the *stereo* special effect beat out the *mono* special effect for the reproduction of music. A lot of people *made* a lot of money as a new mass-market was generated, culminating in the CD (followed by MP3 etc.) Beginning in the 1990s, the music industry tried to promote the *surround* (i.e. 5.1 style) special effect -- driven by the installed base of home theaters and DVD players, along with a preceived need to recapture the revenues being lost in CD sales (due to the MP3 special effect). They *spent* a lot of money, tried various technologies, and they failed. The "consumer" did not believe that it was "good enough" (i.e. compared to the stereo special effect) to make the switch. No one is going to try that again. Furthermore, as music reproduction shifted to MP3-based online delivery and ear-bud reproduction (i.e. another version of the stereo special effect) -- the idea of pretending that all this isn't a *special effect* by trying to get "absolute sound" in your living-room just seemed more ridiculous than ever. Case closed. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY P.S. By the 1990s, the "ground" of our experience had shifted from the acoustic/electric to the tactile/digital and we were "freed" to do whatever we wanted with sound. People playing with Ambisonics was the result. But our personal interests no longer intersect with the now obsolete efforts to generate mass-markets around new sonic special effects. Lou Reed can play around all he wants. It will not create a new mass-market for a new special effect. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20120413/10ced087/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
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