Ceasar - I have never understood your posts. How is "less fidelity" good for "everyday listening experience"? Or why would “Deeper Understanding” stand between you and "getting carried away by the music". How would you get more of "humanity and warmth, passion and overall performance", if you are hearing less of it? You do realize that your brain is the one who determine how you feel, right?
Philip,
I think the disconnect we are having has to do with different subjective experiences we have had and goals we have about the hobby. For many music lovers, Magico only touches the intellect , that Deeper Understanding Wolf is so proud of, instead of engaging our whole selves in the state of flow of the musical experience.
Quoting a famous statistician, George Box: “essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful”. I think a lot of people in this hobby see audio only in terms of its scientific merits. The purpose of audio gear for them is to reveal all that's possible in resolution, tonality, dynamics, sound-staging, and other favorite audiophile vocabulary terms. On this very forum, there are some members who agonize over gear measurements more than monks living in a monastery meditating about their salvation. Just like the monks, these suffering WBF members have not found their audio salvation. But agonizing over measurements is just one way to look at the hobby. Listening to real music and comparing audio gear to what real music sounds like is, in my humble opinion a much better way. And like I said many times before, Magico can have exemplary measurements and exceed all benchmarks for audio terms, but it does not sound like real music unless one uses the most pristine recording. The problem is that most of those pristine recordings suck musically. Here’s a quote from Valin, before he took his job as a Magico sales rep, who describes this quite well:
Here are a couple of quotes from Valin reviewing MBL speakers, before he took the job as the Magico rep:
Reviewing the 101’s:
..."What made and makes the 101 Es such showstoppers is their uncanny ability to get the first step in enjoying music right. Before it does anything else (and it does many things else), music works on us physically. It excites us. Gets us moving. Starts our toes tapping and our butts wiggling and our arms and fingers waving like air-guitar players (or air conductors). When a performer or a hi-fi really allows us “into” the music and the music “into” us, we are always and only a half-step away from dancing and singing and sheer self-abandon. It’s one of the chief reasons why we listen..."
reviewing the Xtremes:
“...Sheer sonic excitement may not mean much to those joyless souls who want to hear a second-rate jazz vocalist or a third-rate performance of a Mahler symphony sound precisely as good or as bad as it did in the engineering booth on the day of a recording session; as for me, I still thrill to the thrill of getting goose bumps on my arms or feeling a chill run up my back when a stereo—a mere contraption playing back another mere contraption—captures the excitement of the real thing....”
Coming back to answer your question, though, to me, the most influential people are those who can see a problem from several, sometimes from conflicting perspectives. Because audiophiles focus on measurement precision, a perspective that is frequently missed discussing audio is psychology in general, and specifically, subjectivity. Let me throw a Shakespeare quote at you, from Act 5, Scene 2 of As You Like It, to help illustrate what I am talking about:
“But Oh, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes. “ Now just substitute the word happiness for a musical experience…
Before I freak you out, let me give a more concrete example on how this relates to subjectivity and audiophilia. One of the shows I found on our home DVR is a reality show called Abby and Brittany. My wife watches it sometimes. It is about conjoined twins. One of the most interesting things about the twins is that despite sharing many of the same organs, they are two distinct persons. They are happy optimistic people. But to most of us, we would think of their life experience as wretched and depressing. Would we wish something like this on anyone except our worst enemy? Hell No! So who is right? Maybe they think they are happy because they have had a really limited set of experiences and don’t really know what happiness really is. But no one knows what Abby and Brittany feel. Maybe we are the impoverished ones because we have never had the support of a loving sibling who will stand by us no matter what….This kind of reminds me of that LOUSY SCHMOCK who tells you that tweaks or cables don’t make a difference in your system because he didn’t hear it in his system or he is just too smart to give it a try, but I digress…
I guess I am full of quotes today, so here’s one from Winston Churchill: “First we shape our buildings, then they shape us.” Well we shape our musical experiences and then they shape our references. So coming back to music experiences, I am fortunate to live 15 minutes away from world class musical venues, so I attend great shows a couple of times as week. Or better yet, my friend is a drummer who has played with some of the most talented people in the world. Both of us know what a jazz or blues band really sounds like. And I hate to burst the bubble of not only Magico fans, but most audiophiles, that their systems don’t sound like the real thing. BUT , BUT, BUT , some systems do much better than others at mimicking a real show. For example, designers of MBL Omni speakers and electrostats such as Quad and Soundlab have made much better compromises than Alon Wolf in trying to make their gear sound like the real thing. Quads and Soundlabs pretty much get the small scale stuff to sound like real music. MBLs get the bigger scale stuff and rock to sound like you are at a concert.
But if you are an audiophile who has not left your house to see a live show since 1976, and you have been listening to a handful of old recordings using low powered tube amplification on an old turntable, your reference is much different than mine or that of my drummer friend. Or if you are a reviewer who loves Magico or dCS, you have been conditioned to love the sound as defined by those dreaded audiophile words – transparency, soundstage, etc. However, to those of us who are so used to that live sound that it has become our reference, Alon Wolf’s obsession with getting measurements and audiophile vocabulary just doesn’t cut it to put us, music lovers, in a state of flow.
It’s kind of like going on a great date and having ice cream. You may score that experience an 8. Well on the next date, you have ice cream and then come home and have sex. I can assure you that if on the following date you only had ice cream, you probably wouldn’t score it an 8…. This again reminds me of that LOUSY SCHMOCK, who doesn’t know what he is missing, tells you that the magic fluid you sprayed on your cd’s or cables don’t make a difference in your system because he didn’t hear it in his or he is just too smart to give it a try, but I digress again…
So from a point of view of a music lover who has developed a strong reference to judge audio gear on the basis of live music, Magicos don’t cut it; the above mentioned brands do much better. Again, it is a perspective of a people whose prior experiences serve as a context, a lens, a backdrop, a background for the evaluation of all other audiophile experiences. My observations happen to match those many of the WBF members who are music lovers, many industry insiders, and reviewers who have NOT reviewed Magicos.
I do want to stress that there is nothing wrong with enjoying Magicos. I’ve said this many times, it is the pathetically pandering media elites, not the Magico fans, which I have a problem with. We are all just having different experiences, and we have different subjective calibrations of these experiences.
Good listening to you.
