Farming Music
No, I do not mean music to farm by…
A common argument people use to sidetrack audiophiles and audiphiling is to say, in this ‘trump-card tone of voice’, “well its the music that is the important thing”.
That is like telling an organic farmer [oh, so now you see the why of the title? not that you have to agree with the analogy but…] who is talking about different natural fertilizers and crop rotation algorithms that, well, the food is the important thing.
It is like, “yeah, really?” People like food do they? People like music? Wow!
Yes. OK. Everybody likes music [for the most part].
But as audiophiles, we talk about and try to farm high quality music.
In fact, everybody likes high quality music, and food. But everybody does not know where to find it, how to grow/make it, nor how to talk about and discriminate between various qualities and flavors.
Nor does everybody want to pay for it… ergo the success of McDonalds and Bose.
Some of this has to do with the need for humans to feel like they are better than the other guy. I like music more than you. Food cooking is most important. No, ingredients. No the eating is the important thing. No, the presentation. The atmosphere. The company. The organic purity. The size of the farm. The location of the farm. etc.
Food has a much richer social structure than high end audio – but as you might try to map some of the previous points of view from food to audio, you can see that audiophiles are perhaps less cantankerous than foodies? Or maybe it is just that our ranks are few and, although nutcases we have plenty, perhaps the percentage is less than those in the population in general? š
Oh, anyway, as an audiophile I like thinking about – and have special appreciation for – the quality of sound of the music I listen to. But everybody likes music. So don’t bore me by pointing it out. Everybody likes quality sound, too, they just don’t like thinking or talking about it much. But there is nothing wrong with that. Are they still audiophiles? Not everybody cares about the presence of [or lack thereof] cumin in their ‘bonzo beans either. Are they still foodies? There are people who love movies [me!] and then there are people like Ebert [not me!].
Still do not think this is Amir’s ‘professional’ versus inexperienced. More to do with emphasis on what a person pays attention to and cares about. Or perhaps I am picking on Amir’s choice of wording too much and if we replace professional with 1. experienced and 2. cares about and has the ability to describe sound in the context of these experiences – then I think we are good to go [think about reviewers in this context, for example].
Ebert cares about weird esoterica that is interesting – but I really do not have time to learn about nor really appreciate to any great depth. I can understand when he thinks a movie is ‘important’ or a ‘classic’ but not exactly why. Hopefully posts like this will help spawn a number of Ebert-like people in audiophiledom. I truly believe we have none at this moment.
