Music is so much more than sound

One of our readers posted the topic subject in the comments section yesterday and it really struck me as getting to the core of it : lest we lose sight of where we're going and where we want to be. "The goal for me is access to the creative and communicative force that music is. I want my music system to provide my consciousness with the experience of music not the sound of music." Well said Tom. The sound of analog and the sound of digital can both gain access into the composer's soul - of that I am quite confident. There are those who would suggest digital can never achieve that piercing look into the soul; for taking apart the continuous stream of analog and breaking it down into small bits, then reassembling it back to its original form, must by it's very nature be flawed. I would argue that this is itself fundamentally flawed logic. At the end of the day everything is made of small bits - even analog. The idea of a continuous unbroken stream that we see and sense in the physical world is nothing more than an illusion. In fact, nothing is "whole" and nothing is "continuous". It just looks and sounds like it is. So the real debate comes down to how fine the bits get before we can no longer distinguish them from what we perceive as solid and unbroken. My point of a few days ago that the sound of analog is just what we've gotten used to and accepted as "real" still holds. Again, unless you have live musicians in your living room you've never heard "real" in that same space. We get used to what we think of as a standard and that becomes real. Film vs. video is a great example. For many years I could always tell a movie shot with video as opposed to one shot with film. Film has a number of distortions that we accept as "right" and video doesn't have those. One you might be familiar with is when the movie camera pans from left to right. The 25 frames per second exposure is slow and moving the camera creates what is known as motion blur. It is now so accepted and expected when we see a movie that many video cameras offer a motion blur option to duplicate it. My TV has the means to override and compensate for motion blur and both Terri and I absolutely hate it. Looks like someone shooting with a home video camera. A growing number of films are not shot on video and I can no longer tell the difference. Music is so much more than sound. Whatever it takes to help you connect with the soul of the composer and the musicians is what really matters. If I design a piece of equipment for you, it is this quality I value over anything else. It is why designers who listen to the music rather than their meters make better equipment.