Sound reproduction and playback

[pbrower2a]

(12-04-2018, 07:07 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-03-2018, 07:05 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Economic reality is also a factor. I have noticed that places that even  try to sell high-fidelity equipment are getting scarcer.

If it is musical performance - I am a classical music fan, and I am not convinced that the  musical talent is thinning. The repertory certainly isn't thinning, although the discography is thinning. Is Simon Rattle less competent than Toscanini? I think not.  

Economic reality has its role. First, our educational system is more interested in training  people for existing jobs than in showing people how to live. Emphasis on STEM is desirable, but in view of the shrinking workweek we might need to teach people how to spend their leisure time. That means music, literature, and the visual arts.  Second, smaller apartments allow less privacy for enjoying music on a sound system, so having a chance to listen  to a loud, colorful work like a symphony by Anton Bruckner with the volume turned up on a stereo system gets dicey. Third, retailers have no idea of how to sell high-fidelity equipment. Inflating a price tag and then taking a gigantic markdown is good for selling many things -- but not sound equipment. What sounds good for the price (if one must consider price) is  better than something with an impressive markdown. 

Today's values are convenience, not quality.  Earbuds and files on a streaming service are tiny and the music library is huge.  Never mind that the reproduction is horrid.  It's convenient, but it is a raw deal.


First and foremost, the audience for classical music is shrinking.  Interest in jazz and other serious music is also declining.  Attention spans are collapsing even faster.  I don't see a return to the older values any time soon.  So appreciate what you have, and cherish the fact that the recorded music we have is both abundant and excellent if you look for it.

Convenience, low cost, and superficiality -- such is exactly what one wants if one is overworked, underpaid, and scared of the boss. Such says much about American politics and economics. Our economic order practically demands that people become philistine because the enrichment and pampering of elites is not the means but the end. Confusion of means and ends always gets perverse results because life becomes nothing more than compromises.

I am a classical fan because I love the predictable richness of sonority, counterpoint, and emotional range of the genre. Jazz and folk have respectability in that aspect, as did rock on occasion. Classical music almost exclusively offers musical entertainment that lasts between two and three hours, paradoxically the attention span necessary for appreciating a sporting event. The question remains: what can one listen to for two hours?  It might be an opera.

At my age, I would love to share my cultural values as a worthy and enriching tradition. Maybe the Millennial generation is at fault for its philistine ways... but that is how they were brought up. For a Boomer, government was a friend until one became an adult due at the least to inexpensive college education if one needed or wanted it and was able to apply oneself. One could take a 'useless' major because employers appreciated intellectual rigor. One might get a major in history and show the ability to program a computer or do traveling sales; after showing one's abilities, who cared what one's college major was?

X got the shock as the system changed in the early 1980s when it was not fully grown up. The Millennial generation knows that their world is not only hardscrabble (the GI Generation experienced that and were no worse for it) but, far worse, pay-to-play.  One might be trained (at the cost of going deeply in debt) to perform competently at an entry-level, technical role -- but that is where one gets stuck. Because of the rigid class system even in offering opportunity. Birth and affiliation matter more than competence because the system churns out plenty of competent people who have the 'wrong' birth and affiliation. Add to this, the cost of things so basic as housing, utilities, and transportation become fiendishly expensive. Add that employment is increasingly transitory, and one could never do something that takes time and attention must be sacrificed for a critical, capricious communication that orders one to one's next gig. Orders? Sure -- because economic reality is the only reality in contemporary America, and it is nearly as harsh a master as the fictional Simon Legree.

People have to be warned to turn off their cell phones while at live theater, the opera, or the concert. The tools of 'connectivity' are our masters and not our servants -- because most of us are now servants of rapacious, ruthless, selfish classes of owners (now mostly heirs) and managers (now mostly affiliated by birth) to owners. There might be exceptions on this, probably between white Christians and everyone else, because white Christians (and the worst expressions of American capitalism, like Donald Trump) still have some residual faith in capitalism at its worst and everyone else knows that our plutocracy is no ally. If one starts a small business (more likely for people either non-white or non-Christian) one is in as much rebellion against the established order as if one were an out-and-out Commie. That is the political divide and the meaningful cultural divide in America.

We are as productive as ever -- indeed so productive that we make more stuff than we need or can even keep. We even produce huge amounts of bilge in 'culture'. The paradox is that we can do better, and occasionally do so. We are in a second Golden Age of Cinema -- maybe not as brilliant as the late 1930s, but the generational constellation suggests that we are in a parallel time. Maybe people who can watch a ninety-minute feature film can just as easily listen to and watch an opera or listen to a symphonic concert.

For me, intensity of experience is the cause of bliss if the experience is benign. I am willing to ride an emotional roller coaster that culminates in catharsis. I can listen to The Art of the Fugue in one setting because the masterful counterpoint creates its own drama. To those who lack the time -- can they watch a football or basketball game? If one can watch a sporting event on TV, then one has the time. But if one watches a sporting event on TV one has a distance from the 'stage' and one may need to do something on the side (like guzzling mass-market beer and devouring snacks heavy in caloric content but 'light' in nutritive value).

So my discussion of a cultural trend and the technology that it rejects becomes a social critique. That's how things go in this Forum.