On 2009-02-09, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Rob wrote:
Where on earth do you get hold of the notion that people (men?) who
listen to classical music are 'more intelligent and canny' than other
music genre followers?!

Given that pretty well all pop music is heavily processed *after* the
studio etc recording to make it sound as loud as possible - and this
apparently helps sales - it would be fair to say the average pop listener
has little interest in quality. Most classical music lovers would be
horrified if the same techniques were applied to that. And would return
the recording as unusable.

I speculate that the acceptability of processing may possibly be related
to whether the music has an "acoustic reference" or not.

I suspect that music of the classical, jazz, etc. type has a sound
that listeners recognize from live performance and it therefore sounds
unacceptably wrong if processed in any significant way. Other, largely
"electronic" genres (whether studio-only or live) has no such acoustic
reference and can be produced (or reproduced) in manipulated form without
causing such clear offence.

--
John Phillips