Electronic organs - circuits, experiences and interests

[ppppenguin]

By way of illustration, the most expensive seats in the middle balcony of the Free Trade Hall were notorious for providing the listener with an unbalanced earful of trombones, whereas the overall experience in some stalls seats suggested a need for serious bass cut and treble boost. The audiophile's search for realism raises the question: which is the real sound that you want to hear?

The Barbican concert hall had some acoustic quirks until they did a major refit a few years ago. I remember sitting in the stalls and hearing the trombones behind me. What madness persuaded the designers to make the front faces of the balconies concave is beyond me. Ideal concentrating sound mirrrors. Had they never looked at the Albert Hall and its problems? They are now convex. I also remember a concert years ago with Alfred Brendel and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. The piano and orchestra each sounded OK on its own in one of the Mozart concertos but when both were playing you couldn't hear the piano properly. Brendel was obviously working hard to get the sound across but it wasn't happening. No idea what caused that problem.

As for audiophools I like to go back to Flanders and Swann in their Song of Reproduction: "But I never did care for the music much, it's the high fidelity!" I think that was 1959. Plus ca change.