| Originally Posted by John Potis Whether I'm at Baltimore's Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, various Rock concert venues or even at the country club where I make my living and regularly get to hear all manner of live bands and orchestras, I find that I get regular doses of live music to keep me honest as a reviewer. And if there's one thing I learned a long time ago, it's that there's no such thing as the absolute sound. Sit in one seat of any concert hall and take an aural snapshot of what you're hearing. Now move ten seats away. Take another snapshot and compare it to the first. You'll be looking at two very different pictures. Now move to the other side of the hall. Take another picture. It won't look as though it was taken in the same hall. Let's not even get into how those compare to what you'd hear at the city's other hall, the Lyric. That's not to say that if you were to place a microphone at any one of those seats, make a recording and take it home, the goal shouldn't be to have what you hear match as closely as possible that what you heard in the hall. It should. But when judging gear by recordings whose birth I did not witness, there's little point in judging them against some unfathomable standard of absolute truth. Not where it concerns characteristics such as tonal balance or even bass authority just to name two. Give me a speaker -- any speaker -- and I'll find you a seat in the hall where you'll hear comparable bass and another where you won't. There's that much variation within a hall. |
