New Think Piece From Roy Gregory

[gleeds]

The topic of online YouTube audio reviewers is interesting, as are other significant changes occurring in our industry. Indeed formal education or time and experience in the industry are optional to starting a channel and considering oneself an expert. On the other hand, we all have our own opinions and experiences we bring to the table and present de facto reviews on WBF all the time. In the end, anyone's opinion be they a reviewer or simply an audiophile, should only be used as a guide. Ultimately, if we trust our ears to ensure anything we include to improve our system moves us, we are all winners.

Speaking to Elliot's efforts with Goebel. I had an interesting discussion with my colleague Fred Crane, US importer for Destination Audio about the future of our industry and how to level the playing field with the big brands. We concluded without a Forum like WBF to introduce our wares, that would prove dawnting and also unaffordable. Thanks, Steve, Ron, and Julian, for creating this forum and continuing to welcome newcomers like me to contribute to the discussion.

Happy New Year to All!

 

[marty]

Interesting thread that somehow got de-railed as a regular reader is made numb once again to see that somehow it has become all about Caesar. Regarding the topic of the OP, I think Roy Gregory really did a nice job of pointing out the "emperor has no clothes" issue when he discusses this forum's (and many forums) focus on gear as opposed to music. At least he doesn't apologize for it, but rather, considers it a valid interest of many forums and therefore perfectly fine. Criticizing him for pointing that out is not really fair and very different than whether you consider him a particularly enlightened gear reviewer. Few are. (Even fewer are able to express what they hear in a meaningful way by using comparative examples (Valin and Pearson do/did this rather well.) But as Gregory points out, if you really want to hear learned thoughts on music, this is not the best place for you. Posting endless album covers of what you played last night without any commentary is a worthless use of cloud space, IMHO. Spending more time reading Gramophone or Allaboutjazz.com will surely be more productive. (The album reviews in TAS and Stereophile are also very useful as well, as are the often wonderful and concise reviews on Roon.) That said, I'm not sure why it took Gregory 8 pages to say what he said. Most of it was in the first 2 pages. Made me wonder who his editor is?

BTW, we may not know much about Caesar, but I'll bet my house he is not a shill from Wilson Audio.

 

[facten]

Posting endless album covers of what you played last night without any commentary is a worthless use of cloud space

For me it is another source of possibly finding new music/artists , and likewise for me to also alert others in kind. This isn't really any different than how individuals may find new music via streaming. The more sources the better, print, cloud, word of mouth, radio, whatever.

 

[Elliot G.]

As much as I want to believe that most want to listen to music it just isn't true. There are many that want to listen for differences between the equipment and the musical content is only the tool to which they can accomplish the task. THe few online sights/review youtubers alomost never talk about music but rather make comments with nebulous audiophile terms that they throw around and pound their chests to prove they are on to something. The publish lists of whats good to reinforce their own opinion.
In my opinion if you are spending your time always comparing gear you are defintely not worried about the music. I think at some time in our past most of us have done that and if you don't find the way past it you will never enjoy your system or ever be happy or satisfied.

Audio is not a great secret journey. It takes time, effort and the want to make your room and system work. It makes little difference what you buy if you don't get the basiscs done properly.

Placement of Speakers
Seating position
noise level
power requirements
acoustics
all of these have to be addressed to have a chance.One doesnt need six figure components to get great sound.
you need the effort or to pay someone to put in the effort.

In my opinion this is why there are so many different opinions

BTW i have been sharing my musical list for free for years and found that so few people cared that I stopped updating it except to my friends that ask.

 

[gleeds]

As much as I want to believe that most want to listen to music it just isn't true. There are many that want to listen for differences between the equipment and the musical content is only the tool to which they can accomplish the task. THe few online sights/review youtubers alomost never talk about music but rather make comments with nebulous audiophile terms that they throw around and pound their chests to prove they are on to something. The publish lists of whats good to reinforce their own opinion.
In my opinion if you are spending your time always comparing gear you are defintely not worried about the music. I think at some time in our past most of us have done that and if you don't find the way past it you will never enjoy your system or ever be happy or satisfied.

Audio is not a great secret journey. It takes time, effort and the want to make your room and system work. It makes little difference what you buy if you don't get the basiscs done properly.

Placement of Speakers
Seating position
noise level
power requirements
acoustics
all of these have to be addressed to have a chance.One doesnt need six figure components to get great sound.
you need the effort or to pay someone to put in the effort.

In my opinion this is why there are so many different opinions

BTW i have been sharing my musical list for free for years and found that so few people cared that I stopped updating it except to my friends that ask.

Elliot. I would love it if you would DM me your music list. Thanks. Gary

 

[tima]

As much as I want to believe that most want to listen to music it just isn't true. There are many that want to listen for differences between the equipment and the musical content is only the tool to which they can accomplish the task. THe few online sights/review youtubers alomost never talk about music but rather make comments with nebulous audiophile terms that they throw around and pound their chests to prove they are on to something. The publish lists of whats good to reinforce their own opinion.
In my opinion if you are spending your time always comparing gear you are defintely not worried about the music. I think at some time in our past most of us have done that and if you don't find the way past it you will never enjoy your system or ever be happy or satisfied.

WBF is a gear centric forum not a music focused one ...

Like you Elliot, I too used to believe that many want to listen to music and that is why they are audiophiles. I agree with you that is not true. There are a few here constantly comparing gear and declaring betters. For them music is the means to that end. Some cannot emotionally connect to music unless it is through a hi-end system -- I feel sorry for them. For some music is but a way to demonstrate the prowess of their system. For some their system is their laboratory and working in the lab is great fun.

You suggest if we cannot get past the equipment we will never enjoy our systems or be happy or satisfied. I used to think that too -- in effect however that is going beyond being an audiophile where music is the goal and gear is the means. I doubt many at WBF have that as a goal.

Roy wrote an interesting article in the way only Roy can, but it seems like old news.

 

[the sound of Tao]

Like you Elliot, I too used to believe that many want to listen to music and that is why they are audiophiles. I agree with you that is not true. There are a few here constantly comparing gear and declaring betters. For them music is the means to that end. Some cannot emotionally connect to music unless it is through a hi-end system -- I feel sorry for them. For some music is but a way to demonstrate the prowess of their system. For some their system is their laboratory and working in the lab is great fun.

You suggest if we cannot get past the equipment we will never enjoy our systems or be happy or satisfied. I used to think that too -- in effect however that is going beyond being an audiophile where music is the goal and gear is the means. I doubt many at WBF have that as a goal.

Roy wrote an interesting article in the way only Roy can, but it seems like old news.

It’s good to see this discussed in press (not seen it discussed much) and again in our forum… I too have been making this listening to sound and listening to music differentiation for quite a few years now but I I’ve never pushed it too much because as a distinction it can be an area of some sensitivity for some I figure. We all like to think our motives are at the highest and while I think building a great system is a fascinating and extremely challenging obsession underneath it all is the music that has the value of art instilled at its core and has a bit of perhaps more of a purist cache.

I’d say it was back sometime in 2014 that I first realised that while I had friends as audiophiles who loved playing music but it wasn’t just the music that they were celebrating but rather the quality of the sound and the performance of their systems and not necessarily the performance of music that most thrilled or drove them. If was very much me doing this also, that my decades of building systems had really made sonic focus something of an embedded priority.

At that time I had three mates that I regularly shared listening time with, two others with Magnepan 20.7s like myself and my mate with his Tune Animas. I noticed when I was at a friends who had Maggie 20.7s with all solid state (Soulution pre and magtech amps and then later an MSB amp) we mostly talked about how noticeable the high quality of the sound was. My other mate with all tube gear driving his 20.7s and also at mine (I had a Shindo pre into Magtech) there was still a good bit of discussion on the music but a strong focus on the current state of the setup development and system tuning and what was then happening then with the sound… but when I visited my mate with the Anima horns and 300B amps all we talked about really was the music.

When I had his Animas at my place for a few months in 2016 with the Maggie’s still upstairs I noticed more and more the pattern of the horns and SET anchoring me more purely into connection with the music. I marvelled at the flow and natural connection but then I’d forget about the system and even the nature of the sound and just fall into the music.

I think we move into various phases in this journey where the dominant driver (sound, gear, music) can vary in the balance of our appreciation of our systems and the gear and the quality of sound in our listening and the drive to perfect the sound and gear can easily completely overtake the focus on the music itself.

Some even seem to have little empathy for music at all but I would figure we would most have a bit of love for music, a bit of love for sound and a bit of love for gear. The priorities are individual and also may change over time. I realised in my choices since 2018 that music has increasingly become more the focus once again for me but I had wandered fairly deeply into the realm of sound and realm of gear at times and now more recently (say in the last three or four years) music really outstepped any more obsessive focus on sound and gear that clearly carried from earlier days… that said i am completely satisfied with both the gear and the sound attributes in my system and think that is why they no longer get in the way of my focus on music. My default expectation when listening is just different now and is more again like the way I started… more simply loving the music and in the wonder of great music and great musicians and how music can make me feel.

 

[morricab]

How can you pretend these comments aren’t “personal”?

I think these comments are obnoxious and unfair.

Ceasar is attacking his professional reviewing style and content, not Roy himself as a person…therefore the attack isn’t “personal”.

 

[morricab]

There will always be a strong emphasis on gear and sound quality over the music because, duh , this hobby is about REPRODUCTION of music…not making music itself (discussion might swirl around techniques instruments) or production of music (then about microphones, editing, mixing etc.). This hobby is about the gear and what it can do to improve the sound quality of recordings. Some guys will obsess on this and some will get what they want and enjoy music and some will do both. It was always so and will always be so.

 

[the sound of Tao]

There will always be a strong emphasis on gear and sound quality over the music because, duh , this hobby is about REPRODUCTION of music…not making music itself (discussion might swirl around techniques instruments) or production of music (then about microphones, editing, mixing etc.). This hobby is about the gear and what it can do to improve the sound quality of recordings. Some guys will obsess on this and some will get what they want and enjoy music and some will do both. It was always so and will always be so.

Not sure what the making music thing is about. Home stereo systems I’d suggest functionally were mainly developed for appreciating music… heaven forbid though that it’d be OK to have different aims other than that of some

 

[morricab]

The internet just exaggerates a behavior that has been around since the advent of the hobby.

Roy and all reviewers (myself included) are perpetrators in pushing gear and sound quality for its own sake…the music is always incidental…

 

[the sound of Tao]

The internet just exaggerates a behavior that has been around since the advent of the hobby.

Roy and all reviewers (myself included) are perpetrators in pushing gear and sound quality for its own sake…the music is always incidental…

Always… for some. This forum is clearly about gear and sound… it’s great, but that doesn’t mean that appreciation of music can’t be a core part of it. Indeed given the function of a stereo is fundamentally about appreciating music for so many of us that some might say it is the best summative assessment of how good a system actually is.

 

[morricab]

Always… for some. This forum is clearly about gear and sound… it’s great, but that doesn’t mean that appreciation of music can’t be a core part of it. Indeed given the function of a stereo is fundamentally about appreciating music for so many of us that some might say it is the best summative assessment of how good a system actually is.

The function of a stereo is to reproduce what’s on a recording. It’s the human listeners job to appreciate it or not. Don’t anthropomorphise the stereo.

 

[tima]

The internet just exaggerates a behavior that has been around since the advent of the hobby.

Roy and all reviewers (myself included) are perpetrators in pushing gear and sound quality for its own sake…the music is always incidental…

I think this right in the most part; there are exceptions.

The purpose of a review of a component is to expose the component largely in terms of the audiophile vocabulary. Most reviewers are trapped in that vocabulary which results in many reviews sounding the same as other reviews. Compare and contrast are done in terms of some other component. But there are only so many "more thans", "deepers" and "clearers" one can write before the differences in degree are diminished by the repetitiveness of the vocabulary.

I give Roy credit for his attempts at breaking out of the standard vocabulary.

Haven't seen much from Valin lately. He may not be my favorite but I give him credit for using examples from music to assess gear in terms of those examples. Consider the following opening from his review of the ARC Ref 10 Phonostage:

"Iberia begins with a forte that is a literal burst of musical color and excitement—as if the entire orchestral has been struck like a tambourine. After this initial tutti a series of eighth-note triplets played staccato on oboes, bassoons, English horn, and castanets leads to a crescendo of downward-gliding triplets on French horn before a sinuous Spanish melody sounded on clarinet—the first melody in the piece—winds its way into the foreground, making a sharp contrast with the stabs of color that precede it. Though we can’t know it yet, the contrast between abrupt bursts of instrumental color and courtly melody will be repeated again and again throughout the piece, as if, for Debussy, this mix of earthiness and elegance sums up the Spain of his imagination.

My point is this: Without a performance that is also by turns (and often at once) suitably earthy and elegant, and a stereo system that reproduces in full the colors, rhythms, and dynamics that express this musical contrast, you will lose the essence of “Par les rues”—and with it Debussy’s magical conjuration of those sun-drenched Spanish streets.

ARC’s new phonostage does this absolutely essential trick better than any other tube phono preamp I’ve yet heard. Nothing else I’m familiar with in glass audio will reproduce that initial tutti with such lifelike speed and power; nothing else I’m familiar with in glass audio will reproduce the staccato march of triplets that follows it with the same blur-free rhythmic precision; and nothing else I’m familiar with in glass audio will reproduce the reedy timbre of the clarinets as if you were there, in Chicago Symphony Hall, hearing them play. "

JV TAS 3-11-2014

 

[the sound of Tao]

The function of a stereo is to reproduce what’s on a recording. It’s the human listeners job to appreciate it or not. Don’t anthropomorphise the stereo.

Uhmmm… you enjoy your version of the hobby, I’ll enjoy mine lol

 

[morricab]

I think this right in the most part; there are exceptions.

The purpose of a review of a component is to expose the component largely in terms of the audiophile vocabulary. Most reviewers are trapped in that vocabulary which results in many reviews sounding the same as other reviews. Compare and contrast are done in terms of some other component. But there are only so many "more thans", "deepers" and "clearers" one can write before the differences in degree are diminished by the repetitiveness of the vocabulary.

I give Roy credit for his attempts at breaking out of the standard vocabulary.

Haven't seen much from Valin lately. He may not be my favorite but I give him credit for using examples from music to assess gear in terms of those examples. Consider the following opening from his review of the ARC Ref 10 Phonostage:

"Iberia begins with a forte that is a literal burst of musical color and excitement—as if the entire orchestral has been struck like a tambourine. After this initial tutti a series of eighth-note triplets played staccato on oboes, bassoons, English horn, and castanets leads to a crescendo of downward-gliding triplets on French horn before a sinuous Spanish melody sounded on clarinet—the first melody in the piece—winds its way into the foreground, making a sharp contrast with the stabs of color that precede it. Though we can’t know it yet, the contrast between abrupt bursts of instrumental color and courtly melody will be repeated again and again throughout the piece, as if, for Debussy, this mix of earthiness and elegance sums up the Spain of his imagination.

My point is this: Without a performance that is also by turns (and often at once) suitably earthy and elegant, and a stereo system that reproduces in full the colors, rhythms, and dynamics that express this musical contrast, you will lose the essence of “Par les rues”—and with it Debussy’s magical conjuration of those sun-drenched Spanish streets.

ARC’s new phonostage does this absolutely essential trick better than any other tube phono preamp I’ve yet heard. Nothing else I’m familiar with in glass audio will reproduce that initial tutti with such lifelike speed and power; nothing else I’m familiar with in glass audio will reproduce the staccato march of triplets that follows it with the same blur-free rhythmic precision; and nothing else I’m familiar with in glass audio will reproduce the reedy timbre of the clarinets as if you were there, in Chicago Symphony Hall, hearing them play. "

JV TAS 3-11-2014

Using music (what else should one use?) to describe sonic differences doesn’t mean there is an emphasis on the music…it just helps in visualzation (or obfuscation) of what the reviewer is trying to convey about the sonics.

 

[PeterA]

Using music (what else should one use?) to describe sonic differences doesn’t mean there is an emphasis on the music…it just helps in visualzation (or obfuscation) of what the reviewer is trying to convey about the sonics.

I lack music education and knowledge of its structure and rules. Thus, for me it is mostly about emotion. I have always found the line between sound and music pretty blurry. When asked to describe what I hear with a particular component in my system, I describe the hollowness of the drums, the weight and tone of a bass pluck, the percussive nature and the decay of a piano strike, etc. I think of these things as sounds conveyed more or less accurately by the system relative to my memory of what these sounds are like live.

When I go on to describe where the string of sounds takes me emotionally and what I think about and what composer is trying to convey, I’m talking about the music. Then there is the music‘s message and my response to it. These are highly subjective and open to interpretation.

The better the system, the better it sounds and the more emotional the experience of listening to the music can become. In general, for me. It is all pretty personal and it comes up when people want to share and discuss. Otherwise, it matters only to the listener.

 

[hopkins]

There will always be a strong emphasis on gear and sound quality over the music because, duh , this hobby is about REPRODUCTION of music…not making music itself (discussion might swirl around techniques instruments) or production of music (then about microphones, editing, mixing etc.). This hobby is about the gear and what it can do to improve the sound quality of recordings. Some guys will obsess on this and some will get what they want and enjoy music and some will do both. It was always so and will always be so.

It’s not only about the gear. Many audiophiles also limit their listening to what they consider to be well recorded tracks. A subset of audiophiles may even be more interested in getting the best version of the same few albums rather than spending money on improving their gear. Obs3ssion with sound quality takes many shapes and forms.

 

[morricab]

It’s not only about the gear. Many audiophiles also limit their listening to what they consider to be well recorded tracks. A subset of audiophiles may even be more interested in getting the best version of the same few albums rather than spending money on improving their gear. Obs3ssion with sound quality takes many shapes and forms.

Read more carefully what I wrote. I never said it’s only about the gear. There is some truth in the rest of what you wrote but the high end audio scene is far different from the record collectors scene. There is of course overlap but the vibe and clientele are largely different.

 

[hopkins]

Read more carefully what I wrote. I never said it’s only about the gear. There is some truth in the rest of what you wrote but the high end audio scene is far different from the record collectors scene. There is of course overlap but the vibe and clientele are largely different.

Gotcha. Most collectors are not interested in sound quality. I was referring to that subset that collect audiophile recordings...