Archive: My Back Pages

Are we getting closer to the musical truth?

By Max Christoffersen

November 2004. Originally appeared April 1991.

 

Long-time AudioEnz contributor Max Christoffersen wrote this - his favourite article - as a thinkpiece for AudioEnz (then called AudioVideo) in 1991. Thirteen years later it still asks questions that need to be asked of every audiophile.

It all started when I was about 14. I badgered my Dad into buying me a second hand Bell Oriana. It was a five watt per channel stereo, with a flip-down dustcover and separate bass and treble controls. It had hardly enough power to light a light bulb, but it came complete with two separate speakers. To me it was the most exotic stereo in the world.

Although I didn't know it then, it would be the first step of many in a journey through the confusing world of stereos that would come to dominate my leisure hours for the next two decades.

Afternoons spent with my Bell introduced me to a love of music. I would listen for hours taking in the fresh new sounds. Like a musical sponge I was open to music in a way that was free of any constraints. I wanted to experience more and more music, and spent every cent I had on new records. I can still recall the absolute thrill of biking home as fast as I could from school, to put my stereo on and listen again to the songs of the bands on my five watt stereo.

Those first early days of listening were important days. The bands I listened to on that stereo are still some of the artists I listen to today. And my early listening to that music built a foundation that has been added to significantly since. Looking through my record collection today, I can still recall the exact event that created the scratches and marks caused by the Garrard turntable that came with the Bell.

I long ago sold the Bell, and started on the first steps towards a stereo system that would be like the ones my brother's friends had, or I had read about in overseas magazines.

Of course since then, stereos have changed and over time, so it seems have my priorities. In the early days of my Bell I listened to the music. I was too naive to listen to anything else. The tunes remained in my head for days, weeks months and in some cases years after I had played them for the first time.

Blissfully ignorant in my listening, I was too interested in the song to know about the musical problems inherent in a system that was so unsophisticated. As I listen to my system today, which now boasts a stylus that alone costs more than the Bell, I wonder if somewhere along the way I lost what it was that I was listening to.

What was so clearly obvious in the ignorant bliss of my musical youth became entwined in an obsession with better performance and specs. Later it was to be replaced by an obsession with what salesmen now term "more musical sounding equipment". Somehow I forgot why I was listening to music. Like a record collector who collects rare and exotic records but never listens to them, I became sidetracked from my love of music.

Today, experienced hi-fi artisans, salesmen and stereo companies talk about getting you back to the music. But when I hear that, I wonder is there a connection between the enjoyment of music and the fidelity of the equipment used. More often now, I question my own, if not all audiophiles' motivation for hi-fi.

WB Yeats once asked whether we could know the dancer from the dance. Likewise it's a difficult trick trying to separate the music from the hi-fi - one is so much apart of the other. But like the dancer and the dance, the harder you look the shakier the relationship between music and hi-fi.

The jargon of hi-fi is the first clue. Is transparency music? Is warmth music? Is it possible to be affected by recorded music without these components? Indeed it is.

Long ago I realised the most important part of my listening to music was when I turned the stereo off. Then the digestion of the experience took place and far from worrying about technicalities or distortions, the tunes and words would be fully digested. I would turn the stereo on again, not to relive the experience but rather to remind me what it was that had started the thing off.

But like a photograph, stereo systems can be alluring objects which titillate the senses. An illusion of a sensory experience, produced by electronic equipment. Often it seems that is what audiophiles want. The amplifiers, speakers, CDs and turntables aren't musical instruments, but to hear audiophiles speak of them, you could think these black boxes no longer just play the music, they actually create it.

Of course such an experience gets you no closer to the truth than a good photograph does to the subject of the photo. There's nothing like seeing a picture alive with contrast and full of colour and detail. It is an impressive sight. But how more impressive is it to see an old black and white crinkled through years of storage and neglect, but through the dust, the subject was caught in a unique situation which is the way you remember that person, pet or place.

Today, music to me is more like that, than some mystical experience. I much prefer the content over the packaging and delivery, and substance over style. In fact some hi-fi systems which have been the most transparent and to some peoples eyes "musical" to me are like that fine colour picture: full of colour and full of detail, but somehow the pristine performance has caught my attention before I have noticed the music.

It wasn't until I was caught unexpectedly by a song from my past recently that I realised all of my experience had not departed. On the way home from work, a song I had grown up with but hadn't heard in some time, came on the radio. I had to stop the car and turn up the crackly AM car radio to hear those words, that tune and that voice. Through it all, the emotion of the song survived the translation.

The AM radio that did the job had more in common with my long forgotten Bell than the systems I had dreamed of owning in the early days. It made the point to me that music is above the jargon of hi-fi and the salesmen who will sell you a more musical system than the one you currently own.

Music is a state of heart and mind, and long after I have traded in the equipment I now own for something else, the music will always remain.

As many more hours have been spent listening to music than almost any other activity in recent years, I look back on the first early days. I wonder whether I ever knew then, that I was far closer to the "musical truth" on my five watt Bell Oriana than any sophisticated stereo would be capable of delivering in my lifetime.