Quoted from the The Audio Adventure, February 1996, Vol. 3, Issue 2 review of the Vivaldi speaker, designed by Siegfried Linkwitz
A Speaker For All Seasons
Audio Artistry And The Vivaldi Loudspeaker
By Adam Walinsky
(...)
What Is Accuracy?
All this points us toward the heart of the mystery: what is it that a system is supposed to do? For decades we have assumed that a high-end system is supposed to reproduce with maximum accuracy - what? If the aim is to reproduce the original sound, the absolute sound, then how are we to compensate for the multitude of changes made in recordings by the thousands of mostly faceless engineers who have made or edited our recordings over the last 50 years? These technicians have introduced massive distortions, intended to make up for the limitations of the recording and reproducing process, as those were perceived at the time. Compensating for those distortions would require a complex and comprehensive set of sound-shaping circuitry and controls (not to mention an excellent trained ear): exactly what the high end has rejected as a spurious corruption.
Even with the most modern recordings, using the most sophisticated technical means, there are serious questions. Recording engineers - they are after all engineers - devote enormous effort to capturing the frequency spectrum flat from 20Hz to 20kHz. But I suspect that the great concert halls (at least midway in the orchestra and back) do not bring sound to our ears with that flatness. Especially they muffle the more discordant squeaks and brays, while somehow letting the music come through with seemingly effortless clarity. Composers (at least before the mid-Twentieth century) wrote not for recording but for the concert hall. They were writing with a direct ear to popular opinion and financial success, and we have to assume that their choice of voicings and instrumentation was made in consideration of how the music would sound to its listeners - that is, in the hall, church or chamber. Most recordings give it to us with a flat balance that I believe is much brighter and sharper than the composers intended us to hear.
Even assuming recording by extremely sensitive and musical engineers, with which we are blessed remarkably often, audiophiles have left virtually unaddressed the full extension of Ivor Tiefenbrun's first-things-first principle: that everything depends on the microphone. In the many hundreds of equipment reviews that have appeared in the absolute sound and Stereophile, not to mention Stereo Review and High Fidelity before them, how many have been of professional recording microphones? How much critical analysis has there been of their flaws and quirks, to push their designers to improvement? More important than reviews are the imperatives of the marketplace. Even high-end speakers may sell in the thousands, amplifiers and disc players in the tens of thousands. But professional microphones can hope to sell at best in the hundreds. There are not the same revenue possibilities to attract and pay for the same engineering investment. Moreover, microphones, like all transducers, are art as much as science, and the electrical engineers who have dominated American audio design seem more comfortable with science than with art. That is why we have a choice of hundreds of amplifiers, why new digital converters appear every month, and why (even in the heyday of analogue) we had a relative paucity of phono cartridges, most of them from Japan and Europe.
So while we all consume their output, microphones are entirely a professional product. And the audiophile community just eats whatever it is given, without analysis or comment.
With so little control over the start of the process, and with recordings subject to so many distortions deliberate and inadvertent, what does it mean to say that our systems are "accurate?" Of course one system, or one component, can be a more accurate reproducer than another. But it is at least arguable that accuracy of signal reproduction may not be the right criterion. I am reasonably certain it is not the only one.
The System As Music Maker
Let us think for the moment of our systems not as electro-mechanical devices, but as musical instruments. This is not farfetched. Consider a piano transcription of a symphony. We do not play these, but four-hands versions were widely available for amateur music-making in the days before recordings, when pianos and playing them were features of the enlightened middle-class home. Or consider Bach's Musical Offering, which can be played on virtually any instruments. The different versions will sound very different, but they are the same composition, and they convey the same musical emotions. This is equally true of a comparison between the usual modern Messiah, even a small one like Davis', and the lovely original instrument version of McGegan (HMU 907050.52): they sound very different, they differ in emotional detail, they have a different musical impact. Yet the reverence and devotion are the same. And if your eyes don't at least glisten at "He shall feed His flock" or "For unto us a child is born" on either version, get a home theater and watch Arnold movies instead.
By this token, we might think of our systems not as making the vain attempt to reproduce the absolute sound of the real instruments in a real hall, but rather as producing a different, yet still valid presentation of the same underlying musical composition.
This would seem to be a standard of unabashed subjectivity. Yet any judgment of music is inherently subjective. This is not to say that everyone's opinion is entitled to equal weight, much less that no comparative judgments are possible. The authority of a Tovey is very different from that of a Leonard Bernstein or Charles Rosen, yet each of these great performer-analysts is recognizably profound and far above common opinion. There is no "objective" standard by which we can rank Mozart ahead of Spohr, or Beethoven above Rossini, but their contemporaries and all who have followed have been able to tell the difference.
Judging audio components and systems as musical instruments would require us to thoughtfully consider what systems should sound like. Obviously they should sound the way music sounds in its natural state. But we don't have systems that really do that. And the ways to approach "natural" sound will cause some debate. I, like most of us, keep reaching for more detail, more resolution; yet I also know that any system that sounds sharper than the concert hall, that loses the sonorous richness of reality - no matter how accurately it reproduces the signal it is fed - is not musical, and is inferior to a system that produces, even through distortion of the signal, a more mellifluous and balanced sound.
(...)
