Headphones or Speakers

Perfect example ... and if you check out my review of Roger's The Wall, opposite the original, you will find that I mentioned this, and how valuable it was to the experience, and mostly when the girl comes in to the room and mentions all the guitars ... in the original, in Quad around the Sports Arena (LA), it was like the door was behind you and the guitars were up front, and she could "see them" and you felt that as she walked across the room to the guitars. On the headphones, that separation is not quite there and developed as well as it was originally, and in Roger's? Totally gone, and it went from left to right on the stage and that was that, and the "personal" experience side of it was GONE.

A lot of this is missing in Steven Wilson's redo's, for example. The ability to make the music "BE HERE AND NOW", instead of an idea of where it should be. SW's mixes are more like a symphony conductor just getting the symphony together cleanly ... but missing a lot of the emotional ability and involvement in the music itself.

That is not a knock on his solo work, or Porcupine Tree, however, it is, in general, something that is very much SW's style .. he's "apart" from it, observing it ... he's not in the middle of it, and I think that is a very important consideration when listening to music.

One girlfriend of mine thought that LZ was very sexy, and got her going. But she would not listen to it on Headphones, because it was not the same. The sound itself, live, or on speakers, provided a physical response that the headset could not provide regardless of how loud it was. Since that time, this has become a huge difference ... how men and women perceive music ... we're too damn mental, and do not know enough or give a darn about the physical. Women, differ in that perception, in ways that we can only imagine. And, at the time (first 4 albums) the other one she could relate to, was Rickie Lee Jones, who lost most of that feeling after "Magazine", when she got "famous".

I agree and I don't. In some ways, this is about ... how much and how well, you want to hear these things?

The impact that you get from a large room with great speakers, is FAR AND FAR AND FAR and away, better and stronger to your body, than if you were to hear it on your headset, and I am not sure that folks have considered this when hearing a lot of the progressive music that we love. 

The impact of it, on the body, is a better experience, in that it goes farther around your body, rather than simply keep it into one area of your body. You can not imagine the experience your body will get when listening to something, just through headphones, rather than experience it in a large studio with equipment that is far and beyond what our ears can imagine and have heard.

It's a weird discussion, in that we're mixing what WAS, with what IS, and that's an unfair discussion. I am not sure that FM radio could have an impact today, like it did 50 years ago, when there was no such thing, and you were hearing this THUNDEROUS music that shook you to pieces ... in stereo, in large cities where the signal was even BETTER than your own ability to conceive it.

Today, this is meaningless, as the ear thing is as good as the stereo on the radio, but one's ability to differentiate is not there, because you have not heard the large room with the large speakers and the music exploding out of the cones!

You will know, why a Strauss is Strauss (or 2001 opening!), or the 5th is the 5th, or The Rite is the RIGHT thing to listen to ... and that experience has a limitation on the ears only, instead of the body!