Why Orchestral Music Doesn't Sound Super-Sharp On Any Hi-Fi

To understand how and why orchestral music sounds on hi-fi, first understand how orchestras are seated.

 

The bass is on the right (as the listener sees it), the mid-range in the middle, and the treble on the left. All the loud noise is on the right, and all the delicate sounds are at the top or on the left. Orchestral instruments are also loud<;, which is why a classical solo violinist can fill the Albert Hall without an amplifier. A full-strength orchestra at high volume can be over 100 dB. And nobody else gets heard when the brass section lets loose.

A lot of orchestral pieces have passages where a theme or phrase is passed from one group of instruments to another with slight variations: from flutes to clarinets to oboes to violins to bassons. A lot of those groups are between the middle and the left and half-way up the soundstage.

As I write there's a particularly soulful bit of Bruckner going on. It's all in the darker tones: middle C and lower: violas, cellos, oboe, clarinets. All in the middle and right.

If the composer has the orchestra playing a chord around middle C across the instrumental groups, the result will be a splotch across the soundstage. Because the instruments are literally positioned across the soundstage.

There are maybe two or three orchestras in the world, or maybe all of history, with string sections that change notes within a millisecond of each other, and all hit the exact same position on their (fretless) fingerboards. Seriously. Same with the wind players: it might be the same horn, but there will be tiny differences in the moment they start playing and in their breathing. The orchestral sound has smear built right into it. That's why it's such a relief when just one or two instruments play a soprano phrase: it sounds precise.

And this is before we even consider the difference between the way smaller ensembles are recorded - with one mic per instrument and other sound isolating methods - and the way orchestras are recorded with Decca trees and two other mics each side high up to add width.

If you are used to Nils Frahm, John Digweed or even Corelli and Bach, and then listen to even the best recording of Bruckner or Schumann, you're going to think something just went wrong with your hi-fi.

Nope. That's what orchestras sound like. All that gear that picks apart every bit of the sound and separates it from the others? Not going to work on the London Symphony Orchestra at full blast in Wagner. Many of the hi-fi reviewers are into rock, indie, jazz, electronica and perhaps some contemporary composed music: that stuff is well-treated by the kit they review. Heck, my mid-range system sounds fabulous when fed Nils Frahm, Chico Hamilton or John Jenkins. Not so sharp with even a modern recording of Dvorak or Bruckner, though much better now I have the speakers well-positioned, but I can't un-pick the clarinets from the oboes.

Photographs I'm Printing (32)

 

(Olympus OM-10)

Because what else would you have in the middle of a lake in the middle of Helsinki? Every capital city lake should have a broken-up boat there. 

John Rawls and Really Existing Distributive Justice

Recently,  someone called Zeke Emanuel, who is a "Coronavirus Advisor" to the man who might be President of the USA, said that the Pfizer vaccine should be handed out to poor countries first. It is a problem of distributive justice, he said.

If you ever thought that philosophers were all harmless scribblers, then think again. One of them turned out not to be, and it wasn't Nietzsche. It was a boring political philosopher at Harvard called John Rawls.

Ever wondered where all those Social Justice Warriors and their ideology came from? The money may come from all sorts of sources that scuttle away at the approach of investigative sunlight, but the idea comes from John Rawls.

In 1971 he published A Theory of Justice . I was a philosophy student at the time, and I bought a copy. I started to read it, and soon ran out of energy wading upstream against the awful syntax and the endless digressions and discussion of counter-arguments I wasn't even interested in.  Even without getting too far in, I had the feeling that Rawls was pulling a fast one. In fact I was sure of it. 

Justice is the application and enforcement of the laws. It can be done well or badly. Amongst the ways it can be done well is that it is `blind': it treats everyone the same. 

That has now become controversial: mere `blindness' to the individual is not enough. Now we have to take into account their exact degree of victim status. Race blindness is racism. Gender blindness is sexism. Anything that does not allow the victims compensatory privilege is oppression.

For all that, you can thank John Rawls.

In his 1971 book, Rawls was pushing a particular conception of justice - he called it Justice as fairness. Rawls' idea of fairness was that a society is fair if it was arranged in such a way that the least-advantaged were better off than they would be under any other arrangement. Which is not what you and I mean at all. Justice for Rawls is not something procedural about the law, but about  the distribution of the resources of an economy and society.

Rawls claimed that this was a conclusion we would reach if we were making the rules of justice from scratch, but without knowing what position we held in society, if we were rich or poor, or even if we had marketable skills.  If we treat this as a test - would you approve of that law if you were poor? - it has  a use, but as the moral equivalent of Cartesian doubt, it just won't work. And he never explained why rules made by a bunch of people with serious psychoses (they do not even know if they are able-bodied, intelligent, have social skills, friends, children, jobs; they know how society and the economy work but not how they got that knowledge; the list of impossibilities goes on a while)  should be superior to those made by people who know who they are, and also know they are lucky to be so fortunate.

The idea of distributive justice (aka 'from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs') sounds attractive.  But the flaw is built right into the idea. For people to be `disadvantaged', there has to be a norm, which is also the norm for being `advantaged'. If the reason for the disadvantage cannot be overcome with hard work, social skills, education or a trade, if it is held to be structural or innate, then it is insurmountable, and that justifies a massive State bureaucracy dispensing welfare and administering hiring quotas, positive discrimination, and unrestricted immigration (because distributive justice knows no national boundaries). 

If that sounds like America today, that's because America for the last forty years has been the world's experiment in really existing distributive justice. Just as Russia was for really existing socialism. An idea that can be hi-jacked so easily by apparatchiks and political grifters is a bad idea.

And what does one say to someone who takes the taxpayers' money for his salary, and then tells those taxpayer they have to wait in line for a vaccine so they can pay for the rest of the world to get it first?

Voila, monsieur, la madame Guillotine perhaps?

Photographs I'm Printing (31)

 

(Olympus OM-10)

I may have posted this before. Definitely a wide-angle lens, possibly 23mm. Thanks to Sonera for sending me over there a few times. Sonera doesn't exist now, the Swedes took it over a long time ago.

Photographs I'm Printing (30)

 

(Olympus OM-10)

Obligatory black-and-white of bottles on a kitchen table. Everyone has to do these, just to prove they can.

Photographs I'm Printing (29)

 

(Olympus OM-10)

I took one of my girlfriends to New York - way back in the day. We went to an exhibition at PS1, which was in Brooklyn. The contrast between Manhattan and Brooklyn at the time was stark: PS1 could have been on a small town in a western. The girlfriend wasn't sure she liked the vibe and we scuttled back over the river. Good art though.

Photographs I'm Printing (28)

 

(Caffe Nero, Soho - Canon Powershot A590)