Personally I don't give the proverbial damn what kind of instruments
anybody uses to perform anything as long as the result sounds OK or better.
I don't think we should confuse historical research with good performance -
both are important and valuable, but that doesn't mean they are identical.
However, Mimi raises an interesting point:

>I also think that the ear adapts to different conditions.  There have been
>times when I would play a record or cd and cringe at the tone quality of a
>performance, or certain technical traits of a performer, and yet, on second
>listening would not mind it half as much.  The MUSIC itself must have been
>the most important thing.  How else could I account for the phenomenon of
>loving classical music in spite of listening only to radio and 78 r.p.m.
>records in early childhood?

I've often noticed that musicians of my acquaintance are content with poor
quality sound-reproduction equipment at home, whereas non-musicians are
much more likely to spend large sums on state-of-art equipment and to pay
close attention to subtle nuances of "hi-fi". There are exceptions of
course (Roger Hecht of this list being a notable one!)

I have a theory that musicians (those who fit this generalisation, at any
rate), have an ability to listen "through" the reproduced sound to some
kind of core that is buried inside the hisses and clicks and various kinds
of distortions. They listen, one might say, to the music and not to the
sound, and can easily filter out the distractions of poor quality
reproduction. Perhaps what they are listening to, in part at least, is
musical structure and not sound at all - and perhaps their trained musical
imagination can fill in what is missing in the recording, rather as some
musicians can "hear" the music simply by looking at a score.

Non-musicians, and those who listen to a lot of music but lack musical
training, do not have this ability to such an extent and therefore rely
much more heavily on accuracy of recorded sound, and their appreciation of
good performance is more likely to be influenced by recording/reproduction
quality than is a trained musician's. In general, of course.

Ian Crisp
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