Vol. II No. 4

There is an audiophile named Herbert Von Karajan who is known for promoting digital audio in the early days after its introduction.

I was listening to 93.1 FM in Miami moments ago and trying to figure out why people at that station would choose to have such a terrific playlist as they do but have no shame or compunction about playing uniformly boring, eviscerated travesties in the form of digital versions of the songs.

The answer I came up with is that they are not in a real sense listening to the songs as much as they are reminiscing about the way those songs moved them in the past.

My next thought was that it is an injustice and a disservice to young people who have never heard the original versions.

What leads Von Karajan and others like him into error is their concept of reproduction “purity” defined as playback gear that will not emphasize any pitch or tone in an unbalanced or non-linear way.

Never mind that the music is produced by a wizard who uses hundreds of controls to emphasize and de-emphasize all sorts of pitches and tones. These “purist” audiophiles want playback systems that will do as nearly as possible nothing to color the sound.

With 24 tracks of music mixed into just 2 channels there is a tremendous amount of music in an all-analog recording. If at any point you digitalize that signal, the sound from that point forward consists of a mere fraction of its original content. Therefore digital versions can make all sorts of defects in the final playback output disappear.

The producer has tweaked the sound to be optimal on his studio speakers. Your amp and speakers are different. That’s why I suggest having your own mixing board to optimize the sound in your configuration.