5.1 mixes

Hi,

I totally disagree, and specially when what is suggested here that ones listening can not possibly be clean and clear. That is NOT the sign of a musician and artist that is clear on his attempts to express his own feel of things through music.

There are, no words, to describe the sensation of the clarity of the wholeness of everything, specially around you and I. However, we are so damn selective about what we hear and what we want to hear, and how we want to hear, that the ability to be able to listen to it all, is nearly impossible, and the suggestion that your sense of the acoustic space which can't be matched ... is but an illusion, because regardless, the real thing in front of you is always the very best ... maybe for your taste and mine, in the right hands of course.

Stereo/mono and even 5.1, are IDEAS that have been added since the beginning of time ... let me change that ... the beginning of "sound" in the 20th century from movies and recordings on to today ... that were/are a great attempt at making the real thing sound better than it really is, and all that is saying is that it is filtered and touched up to sound cleaner and better than the real thing.

YOU HAVE NO FILTERS, if you are outside and trying to pick up as much as you can for each specific second in time. And the ability to pick up more than one thing for us, is nearly impossible since our senses are defined by our culture from day one. NOW, there is something else here. Take a blind person, and they are taught from day one to use their 4 senses to make up for the missing sense ... and what do you get? Blind musicians can hear more than you and I do, and they show it all the time, although some folks in older days did not have the ability and the studio ability that someone like Rachel Flowers does today ... but when you hear her do some KC (the Bill Bruford versions) you can hear that she added the little touches that Bill had in the music that almost no mixes of KC had shown ... and it makes the music richer ... and all this showed me, from my experiences on stage, was how much more was there that even we can not see, or hear or experience.

tempest_77 wrote: ... Also, I've studied improvisation, both acting and musical. I've spent a lot of time learning about listening.

My studies in this will include a book I'm working on, about improvisation in many artistic disciplines. The hardest part of it all is learning its history, since it can go back to many "occult" studies and how so much was used, and experimented with. And, in the end, this all reminds me about don Juan in the Castaneda series when Carlos asked about the drugs. "You were so plugged up that we had to distract you, so you could learn about one little thing or two!" 

The day we stop being fooled by "imaginary" processes that supposedly show an instrument better than it really is, is the day that music will die! Because in that day, you are no longer needed, and neither are "listeners". A sort of Arthur C. Clarke Overlord thing, if you will!

I am sorry, but I am not one that thinks that all of us humans do not have the ability and that some technical invention is better than what you and I have. That's for robots, not people in my book!