About a week ago I posted an article here in which I questioned whether live, acoustic music is the only possible criterion for evaluating audio reproduction. I wasn’t conducting a serious study, but rather sharing some observations that were triggered by a discussion in an online forum for a major audiophile mag. My overall stance is that many different kinds of recordings are out there, some of them striving to reproduce live music as closely as possible, but many others are the product of various methods of studio artifice. That doesn’t make them ipso facto worse recordings, in my opinion, just different. And I would hold that evaluating an audio system should take its ability to deal with such artifice into account—apparently an opinion held by a fair number of audio reviewers who use a mix of recording styles in their evaluations.
One of my examples contained an error—I referred to the Heifetz & Heifetz Bach concerto as multitrack, when it was actually an overdub, but that didn’t change the substance in any way; my point was that it was impossible for Heifetz to play two violin parts simultaneously in a live concert, meaning that classical recordings are hardly immune to techno wizardry.
I also pointed out that audio tweaking is quite common in the classical world—for example, inflating the perceived volume of a solo instrument against a full orchestra, or popping a microphone into a muddy orchestral texture to provide clarity that isn’t possible in a concert hall setting. I also mentioned the difficulty of dealing with amplified live music, such as is commonly encountered anywhere from cocktail lounges to stadiums hosting a rock concert.
In conclusion, I wrote: “So I can’t really say I buy altogether into the notion of an ‘absolute’ sound—i.e., a holy grail of perfect audio reproduction. But the journey is its own reward, and without that search, we probably wouldn’t have some of today’s wonderful hi-fi equipment, not only at the outrageously expensive end of the spectrum, but also everyday affordable stuff as well. Good stereo systems are musical instruments in and of their own right, and deserve to be judged accordingly, and not only by their ability to provide adequate stand-ins for the “real thing”, whatever that actually may be.”
To my surprise, my ‘comments’ section sprouted a series of dreadfully malevolent messages. Normally I don’t get many comments on Free Composition, and most of those come via Facebook rather than the blog proper. I keep this blog primarily as a writer’s home treadmill for keeping my chops in shape, so I do little by way of promotion. I went through the comments and retained only one—sour to be sure, but at least it was written in grammatical English and the poster did correct my mistake vis à vis the Heifetz recording, albeit nastily.
The other comments were downright wacky, mostly ad hominem insults, bordering on vicious. Given that the subject of the article was hardly confrontational or even all that controversial, Free Composition appeared to have been invaded by a gaggle of psychopaths.
Google Alerts provided the cause for the sudden acid-rain shower: somebody who liked my article and thought it raised some interesting points had posted a link to a Usenet discussion group on classical music recordings. I participated in that group for a while, and enjoyed the contact with some very interesting, well informed, and charming people. But the group is heavily infected by those shrieking spewers of invective who seem to flourish in the hands-off, impersonal atmosphere of a discussion group. I grew disheartened by the amount of chaff blanketing the wheat, and withdrew. I even spent some time in a new moderated group—i.e., one edited to weed out the spewers—but even that one leaned towards the toxic. I don’t participate in online groups any more.
So my feeling that I had been visited by a contingent from the nuthouse wasn’t all that far off the mark.
I used Google Groups to access the group in question and discovered that the original post linking to my article had generated well over 100 followup messages, but only about four or five stayed on topic. I was touched by some very nice remarks from folks. The rest went wandering off, mostly into personal attacks and irrelevant insults, directed towards other group members, not at me.
Ah, well. There’s a move on to end anonymous comments just about everywhere online—newspaper and magazine sites, news agencies, and personal blogs. I can well understand why. However, I haven’t taken the step of disabling comments on Free Composition because in my opinion last week’s occurrence was a freak event, nor was it all that serious. I’ve been called a lot worse. But anonymous comments will no longer appear on Free Composition until I get a chance to examine them first.
In truth I was less disturbed by the ugly tone of the comments than I was about the illiteracy that characterized the worst of the bunch. After all, Free Composition is the product of a writer who has absolutely no patience with “whole language” blather that rationalizes inarticulateness as expressivity. I’m no fan of prissy word-maven wonkdom, but nevertheless I intend to keep Free Composition out of the linguistic sewer.