DANCING AROUND THE MESSAGE
Ivan Berger's August 1985 "Spectrum" column has given me a fine handle for more thinking on a subject that has been on my mind for a couple of generations of Audio readers, since hi-fi began: Audio listening.
What else? It's what we do. More specifically, how does one listen for the two big preoccupations that our interest involves, the music and the fi? Aren't they one? Yes indeed, and quite inseparable. And yet, for good reasons and bad, we often act as if they weren't. On the one side we ignore the audio. We have ears only for the message, which is maybe 98% music these days. On the other, and quite as determinedly, we bypass the music as though it were not there. Crazy. But to an extent this is both necessary and useful. It all depends.
I'm going to reverse the Berger argument after a fashion, though it doesn't make much difference. He says that somehow you must hear a system's audio characteristics (or, for that matter, a recording or broadcast) through and past a foreground of content-the message. That means music, for the most part, if of many kinds. (I think we would agree that "classical" in all its variety is the best test music, the most revealing.) A curious thing. You hear music-and you judge audio.
"Even being just a music lover, as I am, can dull your critical listening faculties," says Ivan. (He means, of course, his audio judgments.) "Listening to music is fun; by the same token, listening past the music, to hear the system's sonic subtleties, is work." You bet. Especially for a man who is professionally into such listening, and particularly if he doesn't like the music and/or the way it is being treated. Also vice versa. If one enjoys the music and thinks that it is being well served, then one is apt to overlook, or condone, a number of li'l failings in the audio department. This is reprehensible, I admit, on the part of one who purports to be able to judge by ear the audio qualities of a given reproduction.
I long ago concluded on this basis that I am not an audio critic, even though I have some strong ideas on the subject now and then. After all, I started as a musician before audio had a name. I have never even hoped to be more than a somewhat addled music critic, who has perversely made the musical sound of audio a life's work.
Plenty of musicians, says Ivan, have very presentable hi-fi systems, which is also my observation. Why not? They too are citizens, and almost anybody who is into some sort of music likes to own the going sort of musical decor in home or car. Musicians listen to music too-via these systems. But, says Ivan, many "would be just as satisfied with lesser systems. Musicians, you see, know the sounds of music so well that many can re-create that sonic splendor mentally, from even the tinny cues of a pocket AM radio. No matter what the sound system puts out, it's always hi-fi in their heads." A gracious statement, Ivan! But it also goes for thousands, maybe mil lions, of plain music lovers who are experienced in listening to their own preferred kind of music. That surely includes Ivan, at least in his off-duty moments. And myself. I can turn my audio judgments off, privately speaking. A compelling musical message can override anything but sheer in comprehensibility. Then, and only then, do I and others like me begin to get annoyed at the audio obfuscation! It spoils the music.
All of which thinking, I'd guess, should drive a dedicated audio man to despair. If so few give a darn about audio quality, then why bother? I truly sympathize. I understand.
But take heart--it isn't really that bad. Good audio, by which I mean technically accurate, faithful, responsible audio, very much including the final listening acoustic, does decidedly make for better musical enjoyment across the board. (Some pop music benefits from lousy audio. That's the intent.) Audio sound gets better, richer, smoother, etc. every year. You think that doesn't impinge on our lives, which practically depend on audio all the time? What we have to consider is the marvelous flexibility of the pair of human ears and the receiving mind in be tween, a biological system that easily grasps the thinnest of clues for usable sense. Even the dopes have it. People indulge themselves in this extraordinary ability. They are happy with what they have, crude though it may be from the measurement viewpoint. Remember "Home, Sweet Home," that main stay song of the outing and picnic repertory in days long past? Be it ever so humble, there's no place like-yes, we do attach ourselves to things that are easy and comfortable and familiar, including a staggering amount of bad audio.
It is unwise, then, to criticize the Unwashed Public for its lack of audio finesse. Bad taste? That "taste" is more on account of the ear's ability than any slothfulness. The people are right.
They don't need the fi.
But a really good first experience of higher things in audio can once in a while work wonders, and lead some body onward to constructive change. It doesn't even take advertising. What really matters is a personal experience. Nobody is going to pass up a good thing, once it becomes real in a really personal way. How often do hi-fi demos do that job? Not often enough.
"Unconscious musical enjoyment is one of my clues to a sound system's quality," says Ivan Berger. In his rather thorough professional experience, what sounds to be good music is often good audio. Now there's your trained and analytic mind! "At a show, if I find myself drawn into a booth to ask what record is being played [italics mine], it's a good sign that the sound was so good that I became unconscious of it. I then shake myself and . . ." Mustn't let that music run away with you, Ivan! So he chastises himself by listening on the same system to music he doesn't like, deliberately. That is indeed work. But it is the honorable way. The business of audio is music, as I said years and years ago, and that's why Ivan has to work so hard.
Make no mistake, most people (trade shows aside) are primarily drawn to the sound of music, not the sound of audio. When you come down to it, even the hi-fi bug, the audio aficionado, listens first of all to music even when he pretends it isn't there.
I think we fool ourselves with too much knowledge, or at least a lot of knowledge we want to show off to the next guy. I've strolled, in my day, through dozens of hi-fi shows, audio fairs, conventions, expos, press demos, always eavesdropping on the end less enthusiastic confabs that go on at such events while the audio bellows at full blast. Virtually all of these excited get-togethers, I have found, are exclusively technical. Very informed, yes, and often quite remarkable-but mu sic, the business of audio, is not mentioned. The sound is discussed virtually 100% as sheer sound, as though what we were hearing-and that's plenty-were some sort of abstraction, totally removed from the messages, the music which is actually being re produced. We audio people seem to try hard to blot out and eradicate the very stuff that gives audio its voice.
Now, this argues us into a corner.
Logically, then, the person who can best separate the music--any message--from the audio itself would pro duce the best audio judgment. Maybe that's the truth. But go further. The person who can entirely ignore the music, and there are plenty of these, should make a very high-order audio critic. A sort of human measuring system! But how useful can this be? All our audio involves some sort of message which has its own claim to importance; in fact, added together, these messages are the very reason for audio's existence. Minus attention to the sense of the audio signal, audio is indeed an abstraction.
Well, why not? Abstractions, whole abstract systems, are enormously useful if kept within their bounds. Algebra, calculus, trig, all mathematics--entirely abstract, and deliberately so. Of course audio is also abstract, as is electricity in terms of its rules and regulations. The audio man can certainly be proud that the abstract principles he learns to apply, and to extend in new directions, are the basis for working audio in the sonic flesh.
Nevertheless, for those on the receiving end, it is the audio message that counts. Who needs fancy hi-fi for radio news broadcasts? Who needs it for all sorts of music? And when we do have it, the audio had better do its job, which is to get over the message--the music--in ever more superior fashion.
In the audio field, with this sharp dichotomy in our aims and preoccupations, we have to be terribly careful not to let the abstraction become concrete-pure audio minus the sense of its message. The message is always there, except in a few test tones and visible readouts. It always counts. But we don't always hear it.
For me, then, it is the foreground that is audio, not the background, and it is all too often dizzily meaningless, like the television screen when the TV breaks down, all senseless flashes and zigzags. This is most evident at audio shows, and at the beach, with hi-fi and lo-fi. Multiple conflicting signals inter mesh in both places for a hash and jargon of nonsense. Hi or lo, it is all the same! To my ear it is noise, and nasty noise at that.
Until . . . . Until suddenly I hear a sensible message. The tiniest wisp of Mozart or The Beatles, at the beach, lost, almost, in the roar of the surf, and I am entranced. I strain to catch every note. I fill in, in my head, the parts I can't hear at all. This sound says something. At an audio show, if the fi is good and the music is treated right, I bless the audio fraternity. It is doing its job! The same would also apply to any other kind of music than mine. I do follow Ivan Berger's reasoning, though it's the audio I have to hear past. After all, the best audio people know a lot about music and how it should be presented on their equipment. Pure audio in design, but in execution the message is always important.
If the musical sense is impeded, disrupted, manhandled, then I assume not poor audio but a lousy audio view point. Millions of dollars in faultless de sign have been negated by such callousness.
I am absolutely furious when I hear good music at a demo suddenly cut off in the middle of a note. A gut reaction.
The message, the beautiful expression that is the reason for it all, has been shot dead. Murdered in front of my eyes! Crumpled on the floor. I can practically see it. Frankly, I think this is biting the hand that feeds.
So here I stand, maybe side by side with you, hearing the same sounds from the same audio. And while you may hear speakers, amps, equalizers, peaks, phasing, TIM and S/N, I blithely choose to hear Mozart, courtesy of good audio, perhaps on a memorable evening in 1785 Vienna and in Studio A or Symphony Hall two centuries later, 1985. Musical composing, musical performance. Audio recording, audio playback! Our four ears, combined, make a single whole.
A nice idea. For that is the way audio listening should be. But it can also be done with two ears. Ivan Berger's? Yours?
(adapted from Audio magazine, Nov. 1985)
= = = =