The "High End" and Live Performance

In the context of music reproduction, the "high end" refers to the equipment used for optimum resolution of recorded music and sometimes also to those listeners who use that equipment for listening to music.

With the arrival of digitally recorded music on CD in the early 1980s, the promise was made that we would have "perfect recordings of music forever." That claim later proved to be wildly inflated. The quality of early digital recordings on CD, particularly of classical music, to most ears was demonstrably inferior to the quality of the best recordings on traditional vinyl LP records.

The auditory gap between digital recordings and analogue recordings on vinyl has narrowed considerably, particularly with respect to recordings in new formats such as SACD and DVD-Audio, although CD still wins for convenience hands down. None of these new digital "high-rez" formats shows any sign of replacing traditional CDs, at least not any time soon.

Conversely, there is a resurgence of interest in high-quality vinyl recordings, mostly reissues of classic recordings. Download formats such as MP3 remain inferior in quality to CDs for most discriminating listeners of classical music.

Sometimes lost in the competition among formats for recorded music is precisely the objective sought to be achieved. It is assumed that the goal of recorded music is to reproduce as nearly as possible the experience of live performance (except, of course, for rock and pop, where virtually all recordings are made in the studio).

But how realistic is that goal? To achieve any semblance of the experience of live performance presupposes first, a superior recording by producers and engineers made with technical skill and musical sensitivity. Second, the listener must have a home reproduction system that can extract all the musical content from the recording and then reproduce it in a way that mimics the original performance but in a vastly different acoustic environment. To put it another way, can any recording played at home, no matter how skillfully recorded, ever convincingly correspond to the experience of hearing the performance live at Carnegie Hall?

Even to approach the live experience requires expensive, sometimes prohibitively expensive equipment. Afficionados of the high end think nothing of owning amplifiers, turntables, and speakers costing tens of thousands of dollars. A well-designed and properly configured sound reproduction system can produce a very satisfying experience for any music lover.

But even if the acoustical properties of the listening environment are optimized, does the experience truly mimic the experience of attending a concert performance live? The listener, after all, is at home, not at the Met or at La scala, two venues that differ radically from each other in almost every respect. Does a great recording of Joshua Bell played through a superior stereo system in a professionally prepared listening room really bring Joshua Bell into the room?

Some systems do an astoundingly good job of recreating the sound of Joshua Bell's performance–the quality of the sound of his violin, his phrasing, the nuances of his musical interpretation. But still, it is not like hearing him live, nor can it ever be, since the live performance is bound up so intimately with the occasion and the venue in which he performs.

Moreover, virtually every professionally made recording enables the performer to "touch up" the performance to his and the producer's satisfaction. An element of artificiality is inherently present in a recording. Still, many listeners prefer the convenience of having a recording always available for pleasure or study.

While I enjoy recordings, I still miss the sense of occasion, that frisson of tension and excitement that always precedes the curtain going up at the opera. So even though I am a devotee of the high end, it will never be equivalent to the experience of live performance. A live performance is always a bit of a hire-wire act. Hearing a performance live almost always means hearing wrong notes, but as one astute listener commented on hearing Arthur Rubinstein live, "But what wrong notes!"

Where do you get your music?

Anne Midgette, classical music reviewer for the Washington Post has a survey going on her blog. How do you get your classical music?

UK reviewer Jessica Duchen has some interesting thoughts in reaction to the survey. She outlines (for her) when CDs are best, when the radio's the choice, and of course, live performances.

Personally, I pick up classical music everywhere. One of the things I like about WTJU is that no two announcers are alike -- so I hear a large variety of music over the course of the week as each DJ presents the compositions and recordings they prefer. I also read a lot of reviews, mostly Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine, which keeps me up on new releases and sometimes leads to the discovery of new composers and works.

As far as owning classical music goes, I prefer CDs. That's not to say I don't have a digital library. I do. But it's a digital library on my terms. Let me explain.

There are several things I like about classical CDs.

1) Liner notes -- especially important for vocal music. Its difficult to fully appreciate a vocal work in a foreign language without a libretto (and translation).

2) Backup -- hard drives fail. I've had three fail so far, and lost many files (I now do regular backups, but still). If all of my music only exists digitally, then a good portion of it will be gone forever (and there's some tunes that Iwon't miss). I like having hard copies of the important stuff.

3) Sound Quality -- Classical music, more than other genres, rely on very subtle harmonic and timbral shadings that tend to get lost with heavy file compression. OK, some classical music can be bought with sampling rates of 256kbps (about double the normal MP3 bitrate), but there's still a lot missing. Especially when you consider that file is only about a fifth of the size of the origianl from a CD.

By ripping my own discs, I get to decide on the sound quality (which for me is Apple Lossless).

4) Creative Control -- Downloads were designed for popular music, and all of the organizational tools are oriented in that direction. Try finding classical selections on most download sites -- it's a mess. Missing opus and catalog numbers render titles virtually meaningless. Performer fields may have the performer, or perhaps the composer. In some cases the composer's not even listed.

When I rip CDs, I can set the data fields to show what I want them to. My classical music files are always easy to find, and search.

5) Too Much Music -- Again, digital music programs were designed for 4-minute songs, not 2-hour operas. Purchase a symphony as a download, and you get four separate tracks (billed separately, too). Want to hear them in order? You'll need to create a folder for them, and you can only hear the movements in sequence if you select that folder.

In iTunes, I can join consecutive tracks on a CD before importing. So the movements of a symphony are always locked together and treated as a single work in my iTunes library -- even on shuffle play.

But there's a drawback. I can only join together tracks from a single disc. So the best I can do with a 2-disc opera is create two files. But I can't join them together once I import them.

So my solution is just to leave the operas out. I'll pull in the overtures, but if I want to hear a complete opera, I'll just to have to pull the CDs off the shelf, and open up the booklet to follow along.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing at all.

So you do you get your classical music? Take the survey and let us know!

- Ralph