Recording does not capture an objective reality any more than a photograph would. Although this might seem controversial ...
Silly me - I looked at this thread again. This time the opening struck me as odd. On the one hand, the sound of live music that acts on or is received by a microphone is generally accepted as "objective reality" - as input it comes from outside our (or the microphone's) sense mechanisms. On the other hand does anything "capture" objective reality? What would it mean to do that? Identity? Indistinquishability? I take the opening as a straw dog meant to lay the groundwork for the notion that an analog recording is somehow 'artificial'. We already know that in the best imagination digital is artificial as it asymptotically approaches analog but is never identical to it.
And it is no great revelation to claim that reprouction is not reality - whatever that means.
The rest comes across as a canned apologism for digital. I strikes me that those who like and champion digital frequently feel like they are defending the technology. I don't understand why the need to do that is there. Does it need defending? What motivated Michael Connolly to write what he did?
I believe it was Ralph Karsten (
@Atmasphere) who once argued that in the advance of technologies, historically the succeeding technology replaces the preceding, it overthrows it. That has not yet happened in the audiophile world. (The digitally preferenced may be inclined to add: 'yet'.) Nonetheless, audio companies who never made turntables are making them - presumably believing they can pariticipate in the market for turntables.
I struggled to figure Connolly's main point? Maybe it was this:
While distortion in analog systems is unavoidable, with digital systems distortion becomes an aesthetic choice which can be added as desired.
I don't know if this is true or not - I've read arguments going both ways. Maybe it's a debating point - but the debate is silly. (Of course in audiophile world sometimes debating is the point - but it's still silly.)
An "audiophile" - from the Greek derivation - is someone who loves sound. Talking about distortion is talking about sound not talking about music. If distortion means "the output is different from the input" then there is a sense where music making itself is pure distortion. The trumpet player inputs air to his horn and out comes a note. The violinist inputs bow movemen on strings and out comes a note.
Perhaps there are some actually drawn to this hobby because they like sound. The audiophiles I know come to it because they like music. How one chooses to play music is unrelated to the reason why they are playing music.
