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It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes.

Why I'll Be Staying Away From This Site

Why? Because it's insufferable to read about the death of live, unamplified music. Even worse is to find those who support its death. It’s like reading some terrorist/racist website.

Somewhere a line has to be drawn. Somewhere amplifiers and loudspeakers stop, and real sound begins. There must be some place, some refuge where the sound of real instruments – uncontaminated, uninfected by anything electronic- may sound forth for people to hear.

Being an apologist for electronic manipulation, in my view, is like being an apologist for genocide. Every single despot has grand sounding, often iron-clad rhetoric justifying the massacre of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. In every case, their murderous actions solved certain problems for them, usually enormous ones. The question is: was it worth it? Do we tolerate, even support genocide because it solves a set of problems for tyrants? Is evil an acceptable solution in the face of any problem?

Perhaps some may think that I'm being hyperbolic; just another nut case raving on the Internet. But, the decline and ultimate disappearance of live, unamplified music is no small event. Its loss would amount to the loss of an art form; the same as the loss of live theater, or museums of art. In such a world, who needs live actors stammering on the limitations of a stage when we’ve got movies? Who needs to look at actual paintings when we’ve got excellent reproductions on the Internet?

I think we're reaching a tipping point. It's not too late to turn the ship around. If enough people reject, revile, and complain; complain loudly...loudly enough for orchestra management to hear them, then there's a chance that electronic enhancement in concert halls may slow down. At the very least it'll have a stigma attached to it, similar to, say, transfats in food. Concert halls will proudly advertise themselves as amplification-free.

But, if we don't raise our voices; if, instead, we allow the electronic apologists to hold sway; if we swallow facile arguments about the alleged need for amplification, then the cause is lost.

It's all up to you.


This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Herbie's Audio Lab  


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