Just stick your head outside your door and you will hear that the world is mono. What gives sound its location is volume and frequency.
The audiophile world is awash in reactionary thinking—puzzling, given the technical leaps taken by audio over the past decade—but that statement, from a letter to the editor of an industry magazine, seems a bit extreme. The writer was suggesting that we never should have made the move from monophonic to stereophonic. That’s pretty reactionary, almost right up there with the fellow who made an impassioned case for staying with 78 rpm discs, despite their playing maximum of about 4 minutes per side.
I took the letter-writer up on his offer. I stuck my head outside my door. What I heard was not monophonic, but richly and gloriously stereophonic. A ring of sound around me, in fact, from the dink-dink-rustle of birds in the tree house next door, to a thrum at about 2:00 coming from people talking on the street a half-block away, to a hard right from a wind chime in my next-door neighbor’s yard. The underlying bass rumble of a city all around me had more of a doughnut shape than coming from a single source; it had texture and palpability, always changing in minor details but always maintaining its overall character. At one point I almost jumped out of my skin when my cell phone inside the house emitted a little beep, not only to my right but a bit behind me. In short, my experience utterly invalidated the letter writer’s experience. Sound is fully three-dimensional; we sit in the midst of it, our ears privy to an ever-expanding sphere of multi-positioned acoustic phenomena.
Stereo is so much more than mere left-right positioning. Like vision, stereo pops the acoustic image into much greater focus and gives it a palpability that it cannot achieve in mono. I have said in a previous posting that stereo becomes mono as you leave the room—i.e., as you move away from front-and-center before a pair of speakers—but now that I think about it, I do believe I was talking through my hat. Sound never becomes truly monophonic; we always hear the room reflections, which come at us from all angles. That both supports the letter-writer’s argument (i.e., a monophonic sound source is richer than you think) and demolishes it (i.e., it’s a stereophonic world, buster.)
But that’s audiophilia for you. People hear what they want to hear. Sometimes it’s really there, sometimes it’s really not. We hear with our minds, and our minds aren’t machines. We interpret as we go; there’s no avoiding that, nor should anyone want to avoid it. Our varied reactions to the sounds we hear are part of the very fabric of our humanity. Tastes differ, not only in musical styles but in the overall timbre and texture of sound itself. Personally I can’t bear the hard-driving amplified boom that pounds out of establishments in my neighborhood (I live in San Francisco’s Castro district), but there are obviously lots of people who like it, given its prevalence. Nor am I partial to the high-treble, often screechy sound of pop music recordings. For others, that very blare may be heard as vibrancy. Chacun à son goût, mais oui?
That accounts, at least in part, for the extraordinary amount of hi-fi gear out there these days. Tiny boutique companies and major established players alike bring out new stuff, often with little difference from the old save a few jots and tittles hither and yon. That’s just fine; whether the sonic differences vary enough to be audible, a component just might push the ‘bliss’ button for a particular audiophile. Observers might sniff disdainfully, ascribing it all to audiophile whackiness, but it’s the guy’s money, his time, and his business. (And I mean guys, gender-specific. Audiophilia is a guy thing.)
Perhaps high end audio’s ultimate saving grace is its utter harmlessness. Beyond annoying the neighbors on occasion, you just can’t do much damage with high end audio. Compare that to acquiring a penchant for fine scotch or racecars. Neither is necessarily destructive, but the potential is there and in spades. Audio just can’t do that.
Thus no problem with the guy who thinks we should have stopped with monophonic, beyond the observation that it might have been more politic, not to mention polite, for him to say *I* should have stopped with monophonic—it being the mark of a fanatic to seek to impose your own viewpoint on everybody. And there’s nothing whatsoever stopping him from stopping with monophonic; they’re making wonderful mono phono cartridges these days, ditto monoblock amps.
As for me, I have no bones whatsoever to pick with monophonic. I have a lot of older recordings, all monophonic. At this moment I’m listening to the slow movement of the Beethoven “Emperor” concerto, with Paul Badura-Skoda playing while Hermann Scherchen conducts the “Vienna State Opera Orchestra”—a convenient euphemism for the out-of-contract Vienna Philharmonic. It’s mono, and no problem. But the bulk of my collection is stereo. And most of it’s digital, on a server, and streamable to various points in the house.
One can value the past without becoming entombed in it, after all.