[mikebauer]

i think it's pragmatically real to actually hear something like the Busch quartet's recordings and have that tell you that there was a different sound at the time. just as a pre-war steinway's sound was sweeter and less analytic -- not more shoddily made or anything, just made for a different aesthetic.
 
i'm a composer, by the way, so all you say about interpretation is trivial -- basic to the understanding: that the problem with having your music performed is that it's performed by players with personalities of their own. sometimes that's as good for the composer as learning how a violist actually fingers.
 
but, what i'm getting at is that we've got this big music now, in huge auditoriums and stadiums, and what are people actually receiving as music? i think they're getting a Hammond organ experience, that gut-thumping swoon so beloved by drunks and losers.
 
today is now, but so is my understanding of how music is noise bent into melody. melody is everything, even in webern.

 

[mikebauer]

i think what i'm saying is that the headphone or amp isn't an instrument, even though it's the instrument which performs the busch quartet's recording of schubert.
 
music is noise, and using warm-0-matic wires and phones isn't giving anything but themselves as instrument. people use headphone plugs into their front-panel headphone amp on their integrated and couldn't really possible hear enough of a clarity of sound to make any difference in performance from any half-quality over the ear.
 
obviously, there have been some very clever or wealthy people who've had a very good hi-fi sound for many years, and they're the ones who've pushed for electrostats, for instance, back when we were still listening to LP's with world war ii morse-code headphones. : ) now that things have finally gotten cheaper -- my HD800's are a third of the price of what that level of reproduction would have cost in the 80's, i too can start to find the truest reproduction of sound in recorded music. i'd always thought i was getting there, with VFET yamaha B-2's and moving coils and all, but it was really the introduction of linear crystal wire which first allowed us -- and, the reviewers in absolute sound -- to hear the stretching of the timpani in a BSO recording. the same wire which first used in scale in the sony walkman created a new level of clarity for the beachboys or whatever. they sounded as good as listening to a stax, for what we were listening with, and were suddenly the new sound. it's seems to me that most of the audiophile movement has been about eliminating the tone controls for purity and warming up the cables and transducers so that really badly recorded harsh recordings sounded mellow. but, you never can tell -- the teldec's from the eighties were screetchers, impossible to track or listen to: bad mic wire? no, just bad home amps. now that i've got a decent amp and headphones i can hear the sweetness of the individual voices and chorus. that's a program of subtraction of components, not add-ons.

 

[duanejqbx]

I can totally afford it

 

[mikebauer]

"I can totally afford it

"
 
intellectually or emotionally? ah, dollars. but, then, i've always got this pure music going through my head anyway and it costs only social skills and lost friends.

 

[Eee Pee]

You feeling okay mikebauer?

 

[mikebauer]

am i not being cool, or are you not used to beyond 'me no like'? i'm trying to get conceptual here, so i'm assuming you're a philosopher asking after my thinking processes and as to whether or not i'm going to be able to get beyond the emblematic and obvious. i need your help with this. is music noise or something inherently melodic 'inside' the mind?

 

[palmfish]

Who's to say what "uncolored" sounds like? If you have a collection of "screetchers" from the 80's (and I own more than a few myself), then tone controls might be your best friend. I know I use them!
 
I attended concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. Madison Square Gardens too. Radio City Music Hall? Yup. Benaroya Hall, dive bars, jazz clubs, middle school gymnasiums too! My HD800's don't sound like any of them. Neither does my home theater. And they never will.
 
People are free to find what sounds best to them, and they are no more right or wrong than you.
 
Maybe you or someone you know spent six-figures on a true (theoretical) "wire with gain" system - that's great! It still cannot reproduce what the artist intended. It can still only give what the engineer(s) decided to put on the disc, tape, record, etc. based on what they heard through their microphones, miles of cables, hundreds of transistors, mixing boards, etc. And what about the room they were in? The speakers or headphones they were listening too? How neutral were they? And their hearing? And their personal taste?
 
There's no such thing as an uncolored recording, or the reproduction thereof.
 
Audio as a hobby is all about finding and enjoying equipment that makes music enjoyable to you.

 

[mikebauer]

if you get music out of a motorcycle revving, then you're musical enough to find music. it's everywhere, and i listened to the teldec Bachs to try to find the music in Bach. what you're saying is real, but remember that there is a violin and it sounds just as it particularly sounds, drawn on by a particular person. if you have a very good sense of hearing and an innate feeling for sound as emotion -- it works on you -- then you'll hear only that violin at that time and in that way.
 
if you remember and want to hear it that way again, over time, then getting it to sound just right is what audiophile is about. if it's just about making your foot tap, then, yes, that's a hobby, not a solution to music as sound.

 

[palmfish]

Being an audiophile is about whatever it means to you. Or me. Or anyone else. It's personal.
 
If your definition works for you, then congratulations, you are that much closer to your holy grail. Godspeed on your quest!
 
Me? Tonight I think I'm gonna pour a glass of iced tea and crank up some Led Zep (my system recreates to a "T" the sound of a Gibson Les Paul amped by a Fender Tonemaster with winged C 6L6)... 

 

[Eee Pee]

Quote:

 i need your help with this. is music noise or something inherently melodic 'inside' the mind?

It is what it is.  My mind is always making music, or noise.  It can be annoying sometimes.  So I play music to calm it.
 
I can't remember where I was going with that...
 
Cheers, sleep well.

 

[mikebauer]

it's nothing or it's something. but, does music enter you and reform your consciousness? or, does it cause your consciousness to change into a dancing form? if music is noise, then it changes the brain by singing un-moo sounds at it. the brain turns everything into moo.
 
if music is like consciousness, then melody resonates with the melodies hard-coded in you. so, if it's just resonating, any kind of speaker or headphone works.
 
if it's noise, then only the most acute and resolving system will allow the actual pattern of the noise to show itself and be able to be formed into rationalized music.
 
probably music is both dance and mind together. when i'm freaked or alienated, any kind of melody works me back into myself. but, if, like you, i'm riddled with music or beaten by some banal music repeating itself in my head, i'll take over the sound and cause the banal melody to change keys or rhythm or hear it playing on a different instrument. that's mind overcoming the physical, where the physical is an abstraction of sound. but, if my neighbor is making noise, i'm just not conscious or genius or happy enough to turn that into music. that's the physical forcing me into a dance i will not dance.

 

[blueangel2323]

Have we gone on a little tangent here?

 

[palmfish]

Agreed, lets get back to the HD600...

 

[mikebauer]

the point is that if it's not the actual sound of the instruments you're looking for, then the sennheisers are more expensive to you than they're worth.
 
what more are you going to talk about? their color? you're talking about a device for reproducing sound. the focus is on the sennheiser hd 600's -- you have people here who cannot tell the difference in their sound from a sony ear bud. the question i have is why can't they? because, on a very clean system you can fall into the room the recording was made and hear the various instruments individually. it's not a subjective thing at all to be able to hear that a flute actually is made of metal or that the recording hall was actually a small theatre and not a living room.
 
people who use music as magic wall paper don't need the sennheisers. Bose was invented for just that decorative function.

 

[blueangel2323]

Their colour - that's a great topic! The black paint on the grills wears off after a while. Any way to refurbish the finish?