The other day someone posted a quote by engineer and musician Alan Parsons who said “The audiophiles do not use their equipment to listen to our music, they use our music to listen to their equipment” with which I agree partially, since in some cases it is true and as in all things, there are other cases where they really enjoy music, even better than those who work in it. And this is a reality because not all engineers work in totally isolated studios, with 12 “or 15” cornets and high-quality components, without this being detrimental to the final result of your product. So, as Alan’s assertion may be offensive, I might also be envious, although I do not think that is the case.
Now, this led me to remember once that I went through a sophisticated equipment store, a brand very famous for its designs; I casually carry with me a CD that I used (now it is a pen drive), where I have several songs that I have mixed and other engineers, to test the concert halls and the studios where I work. When playing this audio for the line stop horns, whose design resembled that of a long cone with a flying ovni embedded above, it turns out that everything sounded the same. I explain, to the songs with a lot of bass, you did not notice that excess; the bright excess was sweet; the song that was skinny, suddenly went to the gym. I told the seller that these tunes did not sound like that, that I knew them very well (I still use them). His answer left me cold, “is that these speakers automatically equalize and correct all the excesses”, to which I asked: “according to the criteria of who, Alan Parsons?”
Here lies one of the problems of art, once it is made public, we can not control the way it is enjoyed, admired, delight or criticized. It is like when a painter draw a painting, with a certain light, he takes care that that light is the same in the gallery where it is exhibited and then the buyer hangs it in his house where it does not give the correct light or puts it in a place where It is not appreciated by the angle or the color of the wall does not favor it. But perhaps the most important thing for the buyer is that it is a Picasso or a Soto, that by themselves they are noticed and not the work itself. The same thing happens to us in the audio, we do not know which speakers and where they are going to listen to our music, probably a high percentage listen for a small headphones (little bones as Jesus Jimenez calls them) or in the car, through the limiter of a station of radio. Art deserves respect without being able to avoid the snob or fashion factor that surrounds society and that is part of a percentage that consumes, for the wrong reason or not, and to which we also owe. We only have to inculcate and demonstrate that respect from its procreation to its existence in the audiophile discography.
