Hi Boss Andrew. Sent you a personal message regarding a repair and general query about my forte KT88 amp.
Thanks.
That was a long post. Actually Hifi audio is a little too complicated. There are just so many factors that come into the chain of sound. From the recording session (which you have no control of, other than choosing what to play or not) to the acoustics of your listening room.
As long as our goal is the music and how it ministers to us then we are in the right track. When one starts focusing too much on the hardware then in my opinion there is a possibility that one may get side tracked. Its like the old song, "the day the music died".
There is a limit to what can be attained in hifi reproduction. But i believe that the major contributor to ones musical ecstasy is the recording process. Many recordings are made in multi-track machines today. This is great for editing and making a mixdown, but the mix may not include the natural air of the studio as most instruments use close miking methods and often times recorded in different isolated chambers and are acoustically highly damped. What this does is it removes the natural atmosphere of a live performance. We must remember that one can ( reverberation and sound decays etc) actually hear the recorded atmosphere of the auditorium. In a live performance everything is mixed in the atmosphere of the auditorium. So then playing back multi-track recording could sound quite artificial, compressed and highly processed. If you have trained ears (live music listening) then you sense the problem and sooner than later no matter what set up you have you become dissatisfied and most often we tend to focus on the setup but the fault is with the recordings we are listening to. The first thing I believe is we must choose the recordings well. A bad one, a highly processed recording will seldom sound natural to the trained ear. Many old recordings where done properly but sad to say today we rely too much on digital techniques of cut, copy and paste so the sound looses the integrity. I am convinced that a properly recorded live performance (and all musical performances are done live, studio or concert hall) will always sound great even in ordinary and simple hifi setups, and one could really enjoy the music, equipment notwithstanding. Heard any good recordings lately? I enjoy best the live onstage performances, to me its more natural than the edited ones. It could have some instruments go out of tune or out of sync, you could hear some coughing even, but that what makes it natural.
