Don Pearce wrote:

Well, listening is different to recording, and the
requirements of the
room are not the same. When I listen, I do actually want
my room to
get involved to a reasonable extent - depending on what
I'm listening
to, of course. And when I'm listening I can tune out the
room errors
psychologically. This doesn't happen in recording, so a
recording room
needs to be a load better than a listening room.

As a rule, if you want to record, you should probably
spend 95% of
your money and effort on the room. The gear comes a very
distant
second - but it is only the gear people ever seem to talk
about. If
you are just listening, the figure probably drops to 90%

I was surprised when Stewart admitted that he liked
colourful speakers. A recent discussion here about
headphones reminded me that other champions of the
reproductionist school share his taste for paradox.

Seems to me that you've teased out the contradiction quite
well here, and because I believe that it's a key issue, I
would welcome some discussion.

Why do you want your room to get involved?
Why does this preference depend on what you're listening to?
Why do you at the same time note that you're ears can tune
out the room errors?
Why do you consider them to be errors?
Does it follow that you have a preference for some errors?

To me, an error would be a departure from fidelity, rather
than from reproduction. I like to think I'm staging a live
performance.

A neat hypothesis occurs to me, that a performance requires
a single time and place, and that must be your room. It
follows that the source medium should be timeless and
spaceless. The band's playing for me, now, not for a studio,
some time ago.

That's why 'live' recordings...of a band playing for some
other audience at a different time and place...are so
compromised. The idea of 'being there' simply doesn't make
sense because I know I'm here sat in my chair.

While I'm at it, why don't hi-fi headphones have gyroscopes?

Ian