I didn’t want to sound negative. I just wanted to add a reality check. I have invested heavily in both digital and analog, for the simple reason that it enhances my ability to listen to all types of music with the widest possible reach. I have bought over the past two to three years a large collection of mono jazz vinyl albums that might never make it to Roon. The only way to listen to a lot of great jazz from the 1930s to the 1950s is on vinyl in mono. It sounds splendid to my ears, even though it’s obviously not very faithful to the real live sound. When I listen to the sound of a big band from the 1930s or 1940s in mono vinyl, I can only imagine how thrilling it must have been to hear the great jazz performers live! I can’t do that, sadly, without time travel. So, mono vinyl is the best I can do. For example, the wonderful Time-Life Jazz series has incomparable liner notes written by music lovers who knew the jazz classics. This series is worth acquiring for just the liner notes with the fabulous black and white photographs. To me, no streaming album compares to this level of liner notes and the dedication required in producing this series.
Streaming provides a great source of enjoyment for me for listening to modern classical music to a wide range of composers with a simple swipe. That’s amazing in and of itself. Roon is a great boon to music lovers like me, and I was one of the earliest lifetime members of Roon, the best $500 I have ever spent in the last 35+ years in high end audio.
But, getting back to the main point. Here’s an analogy. We all take pictures with our digital cameras, from humble smartphones to fancy medium format cameras. I have bought virtually every type of camera format there is, from Nikon film cameras, to Leica rangefinders and 100 mega pixel Hasselbad medium format cameras (that cost a bundle!). You know what? Compared to the real world, all digital cameras simply suck! There’s a simple reason. The CCD sensor used in every digital camera does not see color! It’s not like the human eye in any way at all. CCD sensors (or CMOS sensors) only see grayscale! Color is an illusion created by the Bayer filter (
https://www.arrow.com/en/research-and-events/articles/introduction-to-bayer-filters).
That is, an algorithm examines the gray scale pixels and synthesizes color. It’s remarkable that it works at all, but of course, it is no match for the human eye. Even with my fancy 100 megapixel Hasselblad, I can go out into my garden, see a lovely rose in bloom (in the Bay Area, we have an ideal weather for growing roses) with my naked eyes, take a very high resolution image that takes up hundreds of megabytes, look at it on my fancy 8K Dell monitor, and boy, does it suck! I mean, it’s not remotely close to what my eye sees in my garden. So, all this fancy camera technology is great, but it does not come close to the human visual experience.
That’s exactly the analogy I wanted to make with high fidelity recordings. The great violinist Jascha Heifetz called hifi “High Phooey and Hystereo”!. He had a point. It is so far removed from what instruments sound like in the concert hall, and recording live music is like trying to reach the moon by climbing the tallest mountain. Yes, on Mount Everest, you are closer to the moon, but it is still a long ways away!
Yet, that’s the best we have, and I enjoy it (both cameras and hifi), since it does enrich my life But it is no substitute for real human experience in the aural or visual worlds. The human eye and the human ear are miracles of evolution. Cherish and enjoy them.
