The editorial impact of system choices
By Roy Gregory
Many decades ago, I remember reading a flippant aside from the late, great reviewer Paul Benson, an early advocate of Linn-Naim thinking. Unlike many of the subsequent flat-earth acolytes, he remained open-minded and constantly questioning, often rejecting the dogmatic attitudes of the more cultish hordes. “It took me a while to realise,” he opined, “that when I bought the Mission 770 (loudspeakers) I stopped listening to Dylan.” Like all the best, or at least the most pointed jokes, it contains more than an element of truth: truth that applies to all of us with an interest in audio performance.
The idea that certain components suit specific types of music is hardly new. How many speakers have been damned by the throwaway line, “Good for classical music”? Indeed, any review that depends on musical examples or comparisons, also depends on the tracks selected. A big part of writing an informative review consists of choosing those musical examples that show a product’s strengths (and those that show its weaknesses). But there’s a big difference between selecting tracks to reveal the nature of a component and simply playing the same tracks on every component. That becomes even more of a temptation when it comes to direct comparisons between components, the ‘shoot outs’ so beloved of and demanded by many readers. Stable references are fine and some tracks have a certain, universal quality, but we are talking about two very different functions here. Playing the same track on two different set-ups tells you exactly how those set ups react to that track – and that track alone. It’s dangerous to extrapolate general conclusions from such limited evidence, the same as it’s dangerous to draw conclusions about a single component having only heard it once, in an unfamiliar system – yet that doesn’t stop thousands of keyboard warriors (and not a few reviewers, who really should know better) doing just that, during and after every audio show.
But the selection criteria for musical examples have far reaching implications, impacting everything from the products that we choose to listen to, to the products we actually choose to buy, from the efficacy (or otherwise) of reviews, to the kind of listener you really are. The notion of ‘reference’ recordings really got started with Harry Pearson and The Absolute Sound. Prior to the emergence of ‘subjective’ reviews (observational is a far more accurate term) actually listening to music when assessing audio components was considered largely irrelevant. HP changed all that. He wasn’t just specific in terms of identifying the recordings used to illustrate his reviews, he actually published a listing of his ‘reference’ recordings –a list named with typical modesty, The Super Disc List. This had its own deleterious impact, with audiophiles rushing to acquire said discs, spiking prices (especially in the secondhand market) while also skating over the all-important niceties of specific pressings. A whole generation of audiophiles grew up listening to HP’s record collection, rather than their own – a collection that reflected not only his particular taste in music and musical reproduction, but his resolutely US perspective. Yet despite the obvious issues with the approach, it didn’t stop those who sought to follow in his footsteps mimicking that singular act of hubris.
