home entertainment 2007

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain
physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
My knowledge of art history
is limited to what I
learned in high school
and a few bits and pieces
I’ve picked up since. It’s
not much, but it’s
enough for me to realize that there’s an
analogy, if only a rough one, to be made
between art and the audio hobby.
The history of art is long and complex,
but if you narrow the focus to the
European tradition you can uncover a
useful if oversimplified narrative. Up
until the late 19th century, the artistic
arrow pointed toward ever more naturalism.
European artists aimed to
achieve their artistic aims through the
representation of people and objects in
the most realistic manner possible.
Then, beginning with the Impressionists,
representation became very personal,
colored by artists’ individual
natures and transient emotional states.
The shifting of art’s focus from the
outer world to the inner psyche
reached the point early in the 20th
century where artists aimed to represent
inner emotional states with no
direct reference to the outer world. But
before and since, most art has tried to
combine the inner with the outer.
There is art in designing audio
equipment, without question. But
audio-system design is not an art in the
same sense as painting or music. Hi-fi
as art, I think, is best thought of as the
penultimate step in a collaborative act
of creation involving composers, musicians,
recording engineers, architects,
electrical engineers, and discriminating
consumers. (The ultimate step in that
collaboration is the act—I choose the
word carefully—of listening.) Thinking
about our audio systems in such a context—and
recognizing that many of the
participants in the collaboration change
every time you stick in a new CD—can
help us understand just how complicated
putting together an audio experience—and
an audio system—really is.
Each stage in the collaboration is complex,
with its own subjective elements,
and the stages are interrelated.
AS WE SEE IT
Jim Austin
Intoxication, Art, & the Audio Hobby
In the late 19th century, artists
reached a similar conclusion about the
nature of art—that when it comes to
things perceived (and not measured),
objective reality is at worst nonexistent,
and at best unapproachable. Principled
artists gave up on naturalism and began
to present the world to the art-viewing
public in novel and deeply personal
ways. Artists began to be judged not by
how closely their works resembled
nature, but by how much insight they
were able to provide into the relationship
between perception and reality—
and here, I believe, is the important
analogy to audio.
In work he did at Canada’s National
Research Council in the 1970's and
1980's, Floyd Toole may have done
more than anyone else to make the
design of loudspeakers reliable—and
based on solid science instead of a
flighty art. He uncovered strong correlations
between loudspeaker measurements
and the preferences of trained
listeners. 1 Once they’ve learned how to
listen properly, he found, most listeners
like the same things in loudspeakers. In
other words, there is, in loudspeaker
design, something like a common reality.
Like an 18th-century painter, Toole
was out to discover what is universal,
or at least general. Though his principles
still are disregarded by a few loudspeaker
designers, Toole gave them
something to work with besides their
own ears. Listener preferences and
objective measurements were linked,
and the correlation was strong.
Jokes have circulated for decades in
the hi-fi world about objectivists
choosing mates and subjectivists choosing
surgeons—but choosing an audio
system is different from choosing a
mate or a surgeon. It may be true that,
as Wes Philips wrote in his review of
the HeadRoom Desktop D/A headphone
amplifier in the April 2006
Stereophile, “Looks don’t last but cookin’
do,” but I think the choice of a mate
should come mainly from the heart, and
the choice of a surgeon mainly from
1 Floyd E. Toole, “Loudspeaker Measurements and Their
Relationship to Listener Preferences,” Part 1: JAES,
Vol.34 No.4, pp.227–235, April 1986; Part 2: JAES, Vol.34
No.5, pp.323–348, May 1986.)
the head. Choosing audio components,
I’ve realized, must have elements of
both. If you don’t love your system,
you won’t enjoy it much. Toole gets
the general right, but leaves the personal
out of the equation. That was
precisely his goal—but it’s not the
whole story.
Years ago, having finished graduate
school, I decided to buy a truck. After
six years of grad-school poverty, I was
used to pinching pennies, and because
my brother worked at Ford, I was eligible
for an industry-accommodation
price. So I didn’t really shop; I just
bought the cheapest Ford truck, a fourcylinder
Ranger. The special price
made it a better value, per mile, than
any used vehicle I could have bought.
My new truck was underpowered and
felt cheap and hollow, but it was reliable
and functional. It was an entirely
practical choice.
Those of you who’ve some life
experience already know how this
story ended. It wasn’t long before I
came to hate that truck, but one of the
conditions of my accommodation price
was that I had to keep it for at least six
months. After six months and one day,
I sold it, and I didn’t lose much money.
The reproduction of recorded music
is unusual, if not unique, in so intimately
combining elements of art and
science. I’m not sure love is adequate to
describe Van Gogh’s vivid, agonized
distortions, but for many modern
artists the word well describes what,
beyond—or perhaps instead of—naturalism,
they add to the picture. For the
uninitiated, it might seem odd to link
our blatantly consumerist hobby with
enduring art, but we audiophiles know
better. Audio is based on solid science,
but the Impressionists, Expressionists,
and other modern artists were on to
something that many audiophiles have
long known, and that others, such as I,
are in the process of learning: When it
comes to all the things we care about,
love and reality are hopelessly intertwined.
You can’t have one without the
other, and wouldn’t want to even if you
could. ■■
www.Stereophile.com, May 2007 3