Turtles Pointing at the Moon

Teachers of Buddhadharma are quick to point out that the teachings—whether spoken or written or however communicated—are the finger pointing at the moon, and not the moon itself. The Tao Te Ching puts it just as succinctly: That which can be named is not the true Tao. Both sayings are pointing to the obvious, but sometimes overlooked, one-off nature of all words or descriptions. They can describe, but they themselves are not what they describe. Furthermore, words themselves are also things that can be described, but those descriptions are not the words. So it's an infinite loop as the moon is pointed to by a finger, which finger is then pointed to by another finger, and so on and so forth ad infinitem.

An eminent scientist once interrogated an elderly woman about her conception of the cosmos. The Earth, she said, rests on the back of a giant turtle that moves it through the skies. The scientist figured her for an easy mark and asked: So what holds up the turtle? She answered: The giant turtle rests on the back of another giant turtle. At this point the flustered scientist started to blurt out another question, but the old lady interrupted him and said: Don't even try it, young man! It's turtles all the way down.

It's turtles all the way down. We musicians know all about those turtles. A piece of music is a turtle; it rests on the back of an infinity of giant turtles in endless recession, all of them pointing to an infinity of moons in endless recession. The topmost turtle might be notated music, or a MIDI file, or a memory, or a spontaneous mental conception. But the moon is the music, in that wonderfully no-there-there sense. A performance of the Beethoven Eroica is not the Eroica, because there is no the Eroica. There is no abstract, perfect, unsullied Eroica that we could achieve just if we were gifted enough or practiced hard enough or long enough or studied with the best teachers or could record enough retakes. We can't get there from here—largely because there is no there, and there is no here. Under such circumstances it's not even correct to say that we can only approximate, because an approximation makes sense only if there is a non-approximated, precise amount that serves as a standard. Yes, 2.95 is approximately 3.0; it's off by 0.05, in fact. But only if there is a 3.0 from which to measure.

So we point to the Moon. We point to a light in the sky about the size of a dime held at arm's length. We see it take on an array of different shapes—full, half, crescent—and even disappear altogether. Surely we don't think that the real moon is shaped like a fingernail paring when it's in the crescent stage. We draw on past experience to understand that the fingernail will become a half-circle and even a full circle. Then we conjure a whole that encompasses the parts. Just to come up with a statement along the lines of Oh, honey, look at the lovely harvest moon! requires considerable conceptual firepower. Lots of gaps require bridging.

Put it another way: we'll always need plenty of turtles.

Which brings me to my actual topic. Recorded sound, played back on a home stereo, never can be the moon. No matter whether one's system is a pair of cheap speakers plugged into an iPod or a $250,000 rig with its own dedicated power line, that stereo is not reproducing some original performance. Even the "original" in this case—the performance from which the recording was made—is not the original, per my thoughts above. In many cases the recording isn't even a single performance, but made up of multiple takes, some of which might have been recorded years apart. Furthermore, even the most hoity-toity audiophile recording may well have been goosed up; a bit of reverb, a 1.43 decibel boost at 1453 Hz, that sort of thing. Digital recording requires filters. Analog recording requires equalization. Turtles and more turtles.

Thus I'm not all that sure about judging stereo equipment only by how well it reproduces live music performed in an acoustic space. Demonstrations in which musicians perform a piece onstage while being recorded, with the performance played back immediately after by some insanely expensive rig, not only prove no point, but they serve no purpose. Even if listeners were unable to distinguish one from the other, that's only going to be valid within the context of that one acoustic space. But even then, so what?

A good sound system is a musical instrument in and of itself. There is no system, no matter how elevated its lineage, that does not have a sound of its own. Reviewers are quick to use words like transparency and blackness to heap praise on equipment that refrains from adding extra sound to the proceedings. Yet there is extra sound. There has to be. The equipment resides in a room. That room is full of air. That air starts jiggling around in response to motion of the speaker drivers. It's not the same place as the recording locale, if indeed the recording was even made in a physical space.

Nor does that seeking after a nonexistent Grail account for one of the more intriguing phenomena to arise in recent years—the resurgence of vinyl LPs amongst not only audiophiles but the relatively hip of today's youth. On the surface it doesn't make a lot of sense. Yes, vinyl analog LPs carry an astounding amount of information, far more than anyone hitherto suspected. The same is true of pre-electric acoustic 78 RPM discs; there's a lot more sound lurking around in those grooves than old-timey Victrolas and their ilk could reproduce. Just as higher quality record players opened sonic doors on acoustic records, today's sophisticated turntables, tonearms, cartridges, and phonostages are revealing detail, presence, breadth, depth, and a host of other fine things from those RCA Red Seals that wound up in garage sales worldwide. But the case for analog LPs isn't made around accuracy. It isn't that LPs are necessarily truer than CDs; it's that they can be more musical.

And if there's a word more laced with ambiguity than musical, I'd like to know about it.

Really it all gets down to what we like in our musical instruments, and not necessarily what the measuring instruments tell us. A case in point might prove instructive. My home contains two sound systems, my big system in the living room and a more modest rig in my home office. Both are purebred audiophile outfits. The office system is built around an Arcam d70 integrated amplifier driving a pair of B&W 805s speakers. My primary sound source for this system is my home computer, which outputs a digital stream via a Firewire connection to an Apogee Duet digital-to-analog converter, which in turn feeds into the Arcam.

For some time I used a Benchmark DAC1 USB for my digital-to-analog converter in this system. It's a higher-end DAC than the Apogee, costing about twice as much. Superb performer, flawless really. But system just plain sounds better with the Apogee Duet. That's not a matter of measurements or objectivity; it's a purely aesthetic judgment. Something about the synergy of the Apogee with the Arcam makes for particularly nice sound—just as I chose the Arcam originally due to its synergy with the B&W 805s speakers. So in the case of my home office stereo, I prefer a $600 DAC to a $1200 one. The system is just more innately musical, more engaging, with the Apogee. That implies no disrespect to the Benchmark, naturally. It's just a case of a plethora of subtle sonic details that combine together to produce a particularly pleasing whole.

Given that my home office is a home office and not a dedicated listening space, my speaker placement is wildly off the ideal. The shape of the room—not to mention the desks, tables, bookshelves, digital piano, and other impedimenta that I have squeezed in—prohibits a speaker setup in the usual equilateral triangle with me at one apex. I'm sitting more or less directly between the speakers and one of them is about two feet higher than the other. I can hear a treble drop in the right channel—its higher placement puts the top-mounted tweeter a bit out of range. Overall the system sounds like headphones, with me there in the middle. But it works. It's a lovely-sounding system, musical and warm and engaging.

It boasts its own specific character, a personality that leans more towards sweet & charming rather than big & authoritative. An instrument for making music, just like a piano or a violin, and not to be confused with a machine for reproducing music. I don't think it reproduces anything; rather, it creates anew. It rests on its own endless array of giant turtles, all quietly lumbering through infinite acoustic space, all pointing happily at the moon and cooing in turtle-speak over its beauty.

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