Musicians are mostly broke. Let's get this one out there. Audiophile gear costs serious money. When they do get some money...
Musicians spend money on musical instruments, and associated gear. Duh. Performance-grade instruments cost at least ten times as much as the ones your kids might use in school. There's no such thing as a cheap, good electric guitar. Plus these days musicians have to fork out for Macbooks and music software, recording gear, and headphones. Plus running costs: professional guitarists change strings on way more guitars way more often than I do.
Musicians listen for different things. Audiophiles want to hear the squeak of the third violin's chair during a quiet passage. I can understand that. Musicians talk about hearing flat-7-add-4 diminished chords like they can actually hear one in the music as it's playing. (I can hear major vs minor, and a major 7-th. I can hear that a chord has odd notes in it, but I can't tell that it's a Lydian 5th with an augmented 13th. Audiophiles have no idea if those are real chords or not.)
Musicians don't play in audiophile conditions. Small clubs have awful acoustics. The Royal Albert Hall is famed for its echo, and the Royal Festival Hall for an acoustic drier than the Sahara desert. Anyway the musicians are on stage and can't hear themselves. Orchestral musicians are deafened by the brass section. The guys in bands, well, there's a reason they look at each other's playing (and in flamenco, the dancers' moves), because there are a lot of cues from the movements another player makes, and those visuals help fill in the messy audio.
Musicians regard gear as tools. This is the big difference between pros and amateurs. A pro regards their gear as a tool with which to ply their trade, an amateur regards it as a good-in-its-own-right. (This is very noticeable in photography.) Musicians want to hear what other musicians are playing so they can steal ideas. They can do that with a Spotify account and a decent pair of noise-cancelling phones. Musicians want to create certain sounds and effects, at an affordable cost, with gear they can afford to insure to play in public.
Audiophiles draw from a narrower range of sources. Audiophiles play from ripped CDs (a lot), CDs (a little), vinyl (rarely), or stream from Tidal or Quboz - the high-end streaming services. They rarely mention the other services that feature newer artists: Beatport, Soundcloud, Soundclick, and Reverb Nation to name just a few I found on Google. Nor do they mention Naxos for classical music.
(I was inspired to think about this by Adam Neely, who has remarked on a couple of occasions that all the musicians he knows are NOT audiophiles.)
My son is a professional symphony musician, which does not make me an expert, but gives me a bit of insight into some of these issues. I think you're right on point with most of your list. They're more interested in making the sounds than replicating them with some supposedly Platonic accuracy. Musicians are more interested in teasing out the elements of the performance than duplicating the exact acoustics, and even midrange-quality equipment (lossless mobile phone audio, decent over-ear monitor headphones of the type used in many recording studios) is more than up to the task of them hearing the notes, dynamics and timbre to understand what the original intent of the musicians is.
ReplyDeleteI'm getting him his first turntable for Christmas (a Fluance with an AT-95 cart, good but not zooty by the turntable world). Maybe we'll see if this is some sort of epiphany for him. He's practical enough that I'm far from convinced that he will be wowed by the experience.