Last night I went to a symphony concert: Shostakovich’s 10th, preceded by Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge.
We were sitting in the second row from the front – so quite close to the piano. I wish I had taken a photograph, but I was so paranoid about my phone ringing mid performance that I left it turned off! The image above shows the empty venue.
We really enjoyed the concert. Chiyan Wong is an amazing piano soloist, and CCSO were spectacular. The sound was formidable from a large orchestra, and we got to hear the fairly new Steinway grand in great detail – the piano was removed during the interval, for the Shostakovich that followed.
Now, I do often listen to this sort of music with my system, but this was the first time I had been to a concert to hear this specific Russian ‘genre’. Of course I couldn’t help but make a mental comparison of the sound of the real thing versus the hi-fi facsimile that I am used to, as I was listening. And you know what? I have to say that a good hi-fi gives a pretty good rendition of the real sound.
The real thing was very loud, but also very rich – I have observed that ‘painfully loud’ is more a function of quality than volume; you need good bass to balance the rest of the spectrum. So this was very loud, but at no time painful. Bass from the orchestra was wonderful, but didn’t take me by surprise – I sometimes hear such bass from my system. (It did take me by surprise the first time I heard it from a hi-fi system, however!).
Some people cite piano as being the most difficult thing for a hi-fi system to reproduce. I don’t know where they get that from: I loved the sound of the piano, and I think a good system can reproduce it fairly easily.
I was struck by the homogeneity within the different sections of the orchestra. Listening to a recording of just a piano, or just the violins, would not tell you very much about an audio system. It is only when you hear a combination of the piano, the violins and the brass, say, that any ‘formant’ (i.e. fixed frequency response signature) within your system would show up.
As discussed previously, ‘imaging’ of the orchestra was not as pin sharp as you get in some recordings, but many purist recordings portray the true effect quite accurately. The width of the ‘soundstage’ of a stereo system is more-or-less right, and the room you are listening in enhances the recording’s ‘ambience’ around and behind you.
Of course the concert is a very special experience. The stereo version isn’t always as deep, open and spacious, nor is the envelopment as complete but, all in all, I think if you sit down in the right frame of mind to listen to a fine orchestral recording using a good hi-fi system, you are getting a very reasonable impression of the sound, excitement and visceral quality of the real thing. And that really is quite an amazing idea.
The Rational Audiophile 