When you listen to - FLAT -undistorted (meaning unamplified) live music, it sounds enjoyable. If music equipment ( speakers or otherwise ) can sound like the same, why would people have a problem with it ?
It is not as simple eh...!!!
Why indeed? But it isn't that simple!
Last week I downloaded and listened to a recording (it was only 128 MP3 too!) of a concert that I attended a few months ago. The feature of this concert was that, so far as the audience present were concerned, it was entirely unamplified. Mics were used for recording, but there there were no speakers in the hall at all. It was a solo carnatic violin concert.
Which was the best experience to listen to? In many ways, the recording was! It had all the fullness and richness of tone which we associate with the violin, whereas the live experience only brought a rather thin sound to my ears, the venue being actually a little too large for the experience.
Of course, the "flat" unamplified performance is just as subject to the space in which it happens as any attempt by speakers to reproduce it. So what is flat? Are our ears conditioned to identify the PR-presented sound as being the
natural sound of an instrument? The veena has become as attached to pickup and speaker as has the electric guitar, and its sound is certainly now defined by the combination, even if the overall performance may not be amplified.
This is, of course, as much a rant by a dissatisfied Chennai rasika as it is a comment on speakers and music reproduction. But ...it's all about music, isn't it?
I have been to most of a current series of concerts presented as unamplified. Some have worked very well, some not so well, depending on the artists and the venues. It is so rare, now, for artists to perform outside their homes. without amplification, that it is not really fair to expect that they will simply be able to adjust their technique. In every case, it has been a great experience to get away from the tyranny of the PA and the man on the mixer, even though it has sometimes made the audience work hard to hear.
In one case, in particular, I was astounded at the tones of the mridangam. The short, sharp,
nam sound (the basic non-resonant sound of the index finger on the outer circle of the right side) was not nearly as short and sharp as all PA systems/speakers render it: there was such richness in hearing the whole stroke from attack through decay.
Most hifi listeners are not regular live music listeners. In cities like London, regular concert going is, sadly, an extremely expensive hobby. Consequently, it is only the few that, when they speak of high fidelity, have an actual good sense of what the fidelity actually is. That odd subset of us who are Chennai Carnatic concert goers can
easily get better sound in our living rooms than that which we hear at most "live" performances --- and even the Western musicians often face bad acoustics in their venues.
So what do we do? We buy the sound that appeals to us. I'd say that my preference is for some warmth. This probably originates from my earliest days of music listening when even the radio had valves and the music came from a boomy Radiogram. However, in more recent years, when I hear those "flat" studio monitors I find the cleanness of the sound breathtaking. If and when I can afford to spend on speakers in the future, it is this direction I will take, even if I find it lacking in a little of the comfort element of a warmer sound. Lucky (or,
hardworking is more likely the truth of it
) are those who can experiment with such things.
