Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - i miss records: why they were better than cds

roachboy · 08-03-2007, 09:36 AM

there is a lovely audiophile store in philly located in a norton motocycle repair shop around 5th and arch (if i remember correctly, but i could be shifting it south a bit) that you can go to and dream about tube amps, electrostatic speakers, optimized turntable configurations while listening to playback that etches itself into your skull. the kind of sound that spoils you. the kind of sound that prompts you to think that digital, with all its advantages of total reproducibility and almost creepy absolute silence between sound-events, really just doesn't do it in terms of complexity and depth. i am sure that as you sit there, you could also read various studies from consumer magazines that would persuade you that what you are experiencing is an illusion, but it hardly matters as the illusion is consistent internally and so is no different than any other aspect of being=alive. but then again, this perception of superior sound quality might be triggered by the visual aspects: sitting in a chair looking at a wall of tube amps constructed by design fetishist producers and huge flat speakers does have an effect on what you hear and how you hear it, not to mention on the quality and orientation of listening, which is a disposition toward hearing. and hearing is a socially and historically contingent mode of organizing sonic information. if you can measure frequency responses and align them with purely physical responses in the workings of the ear, you are measuring a physical relationship, not hearing and certainly not listening, so perhaps these studies that show your experience in that chair isnt really happening serve mostly as comic fodder, something to make you laugh. and the idea that hearing can be treated as a discrete sense is also kinda silly, given that your everyday experience--like moving up a street on foot, say--demonstrates that what you hear and how you hear it is totally tied to what you see and how you see it. if you want to hear 360 around your head, you have to close your eyes. same logic obtains for the relation of graphic information and music when you encounter a cd or record: what you hear and how you hear it is shaped by what you see, what you read, how you understand it and whether that visual material can function for you to organize projections into the soundspace because projection is central to hearing and listening just as it is central to the experience of space, whcih only exists because of our way of percieving sequence or multiplicity.

08-03-2007, 09:36 AM	#34 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	there is a lovely audiophile store in philly located in a norton motocycle repair shop around 5th and arch (if i remember correctly, but i could be shifting it south a bit) that you can go to and dream about tube amps, electrostatic speakers, optimized turntable configurations while listening to playback that etches itself into your skull. the kind of sound that spoils you. the kind of sound that prompts you to think that digital, with all its advantages of total reproducibility and almost creepy absolute silence between sound-events, really just doesn't do it in terms of complexity and depth. i am sure that as you sit there, you could also read various studies from consumer magazines that would persuade you that what you are experiencing is an illusion, but it hardly matters as the illusion is consistent internally and so is no different than any other aspect of being=alive. but then again, this perception of superior sound quality might be triggered by the visual aspects: sitting in a chair looking at a wall of tube amps constructed by design fetishist producers and huge flat speakers does have an effect on what you hear and how you hear it, not to mention on the quality and orientation of listening, which is a disposition toward hearing. and hearing is a socially and historically contingent mode of organizing sonic information. if you can measure frequency responses and align them with purely physical responses in the workings of the ear, you are measuring a physical relationship, not hearing and certainly not listening, so perhaps these studies that show your experience in that chair isnt really happening serve mostly as comic fodder, something to make you laugh. and the idea that hearing can be treated as a discrete sense is also kinda silly, given that your everyday experience--like moving up a street on foot, say--demonstrates that what you hear and how you hear it is totally tied to what you see and how you see it. if you want to hear 360 around your head, you have to close your eyes. same logic obtains for the relation of graphic information and music when you encounter a cd or record: what you hear and how you hear it is shaped by what you see, what you read, how you understand it and whether that visual material can function for you to organize projections into the soundspace because projection is central to hearing and listening just as it is central to the experience of space, whcih only exists because of our way of percieving sequence or multiplicity. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 08-03-2007 at 09:39 AM..