sound practices reading club /11

After a manifesto, it is now time for a fairy tale. The ecstatic Harvey Rosenberg recounts it in sound practices issue 3: The search for Musical Ecstasy: An Excerpt. Being a beautiful story, I am not going to give a synopsis here, just read and enjoy.

teaser quote: ‘Questions of hierarchy are inevitable. Who is the high priest of audio? Who has the best audio system? This is not a bad thing. Let me share with you how I was blessed with discovering the world’s best sound system.’

bonus tracks

More ecstatic reading can be found at meta-gizmo.net, specifically at the triode guild. Totally unrelated, but a riveting read nonetheless, is the story of the other Harvey Rosenberg. The things google can uncover…

my take

‘Don’t take this article too literal (especially if you felt yourself somehow disagreeing with it).’

What looks at first just like a long and winding road to the punch line, may actually be a main ingredient of the the message. To continue last week’s argument, maybe all this refined culture informs ‘the world’s best sound system.’ I gather that if the whole middle section—between the count’s invitation on page one and the count’s return to the listening room to demonstrate his system on page two—would have been edited out, then it would not make sense at all to us why this was ‘the world’s best.’

It is not that all the refined luxury corrupts Harvey’s judgement and makes him proclaim the system so good. It is that the refined environment shaped the system through its owner, long before Harvey entered the scene. Vice versa: when I told a friend of mine (also Dutch) last week’s story of the 16th century Dutch art scene (read: the sadness of high-end audio), he said ‘right, these guys had no taste.’

Admittedly, this environment is the correct context for the type of music played and it works. Besides that, Harvey also mentions ‘the warmth and intimacy that is the foundation of our musical roots.’ This meshes with ‘why the whole population of this planet has been making music and listening to it for thousands of years’ which I mentioned last week.

Although in this case the performance was not exactly flawless, it was ‘the most ecstatic’ Harvey ever experienced. The transmission of the performance versus transmission of the signal: it is a quality vs. quantity thing that the engineers will never get.

Now go and read the article, see you next week.