As I sat in Row J at Davies Symphony Hall last night, soaking up the luminosity of the San Francisco Symphony in a shimmering, glistening, and transparent performance of Debussy’s La Mer, it struck me just how inadequate audio equipment is when it comes to reproducing something as complex, multivaried, and elusive as a great symphony orchestra. It isn’t about power, certainly, and it isn’t about sheer weight or size. It’s about air.
Debussy’s orchestrations are collages; a bit of flute here, clarinet there, a touch of English horn, a pinch of bassoon, one violin, two violins, a brush on the suspended cymbal. Once in a while he brings the whole shebang into play, but even then, transparency rules the roost. A Debussy orchestration is a thing of wonder, but it is no wall of sound rolling over you à la Tchaikovsky. What’s not there is every bit as important as what’s there; the spaces around the instruments, the air in the hall, the listener’s orientation within that sphere of sound emanating from the stage. In my case, I was a bit rightwards and close-ish, so the left-right spread was not only extremely wide but also stretched relatively leftwards. The doublebasses were directly in front of me, and their sound was immediate and present—a delightful experience given the silky sound of the SFS bass section; no ill-considered low-frequency thwomps from this crew. The trumpets, higher and in the back, penetrated sweetly across a good sized arc of stage area. The harps, a bit lower and to the left of the trumpets, were distinguishable from each other not only tonally but spatially, despite being separated from each other by only a few feet.
The solo violin moments, played with such penetrating sweetness by concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, could be downright surprising as they sometimes sounded as though they were coming from beyond the lip of the stage—a sonic mirage probably created by my off-kilter location, with the front row of first violins to my extreme left. But enchanting nonetheless.
The depth of the orchestra was palpable at a much richer level than I have ever experienced in a recording, no matter on how exalted the equipment—and I’ve heard some pretty incredible stuff, gear that costs more than a nice family home in a lot of metropolitan areas. From the back of the stage—percussion to the left, high brass spread in an arc from middle to right, and the second row of basses along the right—came sounds that were wholly distinct spatially from the mid-stage instruments—second violins, violas, winds, horns, cellos—and those, in turn, were notably different from the musicians along the front of the stage, particularly the first violins, the outermost cellists, and the front row of basses. It being the SFS and not some crank band, everything was perfectly distinct, but never cold or clinical. Sounds emerged from space, all blended with the discrimination of a master chef selecting seasoning, nothing out of whack, nothing muffled or blurred.
Then there’s the dynamic range. True, good-quality digital audio can get the dynamic range required by such a large orchestra playing such refined music. But one problem that besets even very good audio equipment is a slight deadening as volume drops. A lot of loudspeakers are at their best only when playing rather more loudly than is the average listener’s experience in a concert hall. (A lot of people, audiophiles especially, tend to play their systems at volumes far higher than concert-hall levels.) But that change in overall sound quality does not happen with live sound. Davies Symphony Hall gets its share of criticism for acoustics, but in truth the hall is remarkably even across the dynamic spectrum. Very quiet playing is not swallowed in Davies, nor does the sound shatter when the SFS flexes its sonic muscles and lets fly with truly ear-popping volumes of sound. Even if a sound system can reproduce those vast dynamic ranges, living and listening rooms with their near walls and relative lack of moveable air simply cannot give the sound enough room to bloom and develop. Loud is easy. Quiet is hard.
Between one thing and the next, when it comes to a great symphony orchestra in a fine hall, “the absolute sound” remains as elusive as in the days of shellac 78 rpm discs on wind-up Victrolas. That probably accounts for the prevalence of girl-with-a-guitar or jazz combo recordings in audiophile-dom. You’ve got a much better chance of getting there from here when you’re dealing with only a few instruments in a relatively confined space, although even then some of it remains tremendously difficult to get right—the plucked string bass of a jazz combo, for example, or the layered nuances of a piano’s tone. Sound is a very big, and constantly moving thing; it’s not a line of vibrations emanating from the instruments and voices, remember—it’s an expanding sphere. A microphone is positioned within that sphere like a raisin stuck on the skin of an orange, except that the orange keeps inflating past the raisin’s location. Not only does the microphone capture only its little raisin’s-worth of sound, but it can capture it only in that one particular split-second of its expansion outwards from its source. That would seem to explain the reasoning behind multiple microphones, having some raisins positioned farther out, to catch the expanding sphere of sound in its later stages. But even then, it’s picking up only a sliver, a cross-section, of that sound.
To be sure, my ears are also raisins stuck on the skin of an orange, or maybe a bunch of grapes would be a better analogy, given the number of sources for all those inflating spheres of sound emanating from the stage. None of those inflating spheres are subject to electrical resistance or capacitors or transistors or loudspeaker drivers or crossovers or jitter or digital filtering or vinyl imperfections or whatnot. They are all happening then and there, untrammeled by electronic capture.
So listening to audio—even the finest possible—is still more like looking at a picture of the wind, compared to going outside and letting the wind blow over and through you. Yet I would be the last person on Earth to deny the charms, and the manifold uses, of good audio. I make a goodly part of my living thanks to those phalanxes of dedicated performers, engineers, producers, etc., who have created the vast legacy of recorded audio available to me. I’m not speaking against recorded sound; quite the opposite, in fact. I am happily addicted to recorded sound in all its varieties, including those spritzy shellac platters from well before I was born. But there’s high-end audio, and then there’s the SFS in Davies Symphony Hall, and it’s the difference in sound that’s absolute.