And Curiouser article

Funny, every time I go to a concert I remember how much I prefer music without mistakes, drunken performers, screaming crowds who don’t know how to shut up and enjoy something, and never getting to sit down because I can’t see anything and technically that’s the only thing I paid for. Oh, and nice refinement and actually hearing the audio for what it’s supposed to be – polished and with all parts, not screamed and choked through.

Concerts are silly, dumb dumb dumb things. Is this why there were so many gross greasy metalheads around the MTS Centre?

But cellos are nice-looking, at least.

“I can’t see anything and technically that’s the only thing I paid for.”

“Oh, and nice refinement and actually hearing the audio for what it’s supposed to be – polished and with all parts, not screamed and choked through.”

Every artist in the world just died a little inside :(

Hooray! :)
Music isn’t mistakes, and an artist who prefers to be heard making them cares more about himself than his music.

Bah! An artist who would rather have you buy their CD than play their music for you most likely isn’t worth listening to in the first place. Saying CDs are how music is “supposed” to sound is like saying that a great painting is “supposed” to be viewed as an artifact-laden JPEG.

If you’re willing to claim that seeing the musicians is the only reason to go to a concert, I’d be so bold as to declare that you’ve never actually heard music in your life. Of course, I know that you deliberately overstate your point of view in order to stir up controversy and propagate the “Jamie hates everything” image, so I’ll say it with a grain of salt :)

I completely mean this one, there’s no overstatement in it. I’m anti-concert, and you should be too. :)

That concert was amazing

My sister and I were on the floor at the gate on the left side of the stage and it was insane. It was one of the best shows I have ever attended.

I am hesitant to comment on this thread as I can’t tell if this is an inside joke, but in the event that it is not…

Jamie -> You don’t seem to have any grasp of how hard it is to play music live. The idea that you would rather hear the plug-in laden unreality of a recording (to me) shows how stupid and spoiled the average music consumer has become.

I sincerely hope that this a ruse.

Difficulty doesn’t equate to quality in music. You’re not spoiled if you want a meal prepared without bugs in it. Whether it’s made in front of you or not makes no difference – a cockroach in your salad will always ruin the meal.

Despite the voice in the back of my mind reminding me to not feed the trolls…

Music is recorded live. It takes the atmosphere, noise, and reverberations and crudely captures it with a microphone. Then, that captured down is dumbed down from analogue sound to digital waveform, with the vast majority of the sound data lost (all high and low levels, mid levels that become interpolated, not to mention the intricate play of colliding sound waves crunched down to two channels). Then, this waveform is output yet again through several pieces of cheaply constructed fabric, attempting to recreate the sound with absolutely none of the materials that produced the sound in the first place. Almost everything is lost except the bare minimum required to recognise the song.

Seeing Nine Inch Nails live was thunderous, epic, powerful, moving, and presented you with sound that literally shook you to your core. The sound and compression of a snare is nothing compared to the same thing dumbed down to a CD. Live music can be awe-inspiring. A CD, at its best, can be loud. Attempting to portray the CD as “how it’s supposed to sound” is asinine. Music, techno aside, is supposed to be live. The difference between live music and recorded music is the difference between a piano and a harpsichord — it could be the same song, but while one can soar through an almost endless range of emotion, the other is only a paper-thin representation.

And that’s just the technical side, which frankly isn’t the reason I prefer live music. I prefer live music because of the sheer emotional and soul that can be interwoven with a performance that no recorded medium could ever capture. The intangible connection with someone immensely talented sharing their talent with you. When on stage, musicians bare a little of their soul for you. It’s an awesome, emotional connection with music as the medium. It’s one thing to hear a recording of a song, and quite another to have a person play a song for you with their own fingers, own vocal cords, and own soul.

And so, I declare: Live music trumps recorded music in every single possible way. It beats it handily on a technical level and makes recorded music seem almost crass in how emotionally removed it is. We accept recorded music because it’s as close as we can get to hearing it live, hearing it performed for us. But it’s a distant facsimile, and anyone who would willingly prefer it to live music has a gross misunderstand of what music is at all.

(Wow, that was longer than expected.)

Great, just when I’m feeling up to dropping the pseudonym, someone posts with my real name.

That sidebar dealt with, while I understand Jamie’s complaints regarding the common venue, I do prefer the actual sound of a properly mixed performance to that of a recording. I generally dislike concerts because I find the mixing to often be very poor, the volume to often be raised to compensate for poor mixing and unruly audiences, and the audiences to be smelly and crass.

The music itself is generally wonderful, if you can make it past all those factors.

Frankly Aaron, in a stadium environment you’re really only getting the average between recorded and immediate — assuming even a good mix — as you’re still getting 99% of what you hear through the speakers (hopefully still analogue).

Live chamber music, now that is glory!

“Frankly Aaron, in a stadium environment you’re really only getting the average between recorded and immediate — assuming even a good mix — as you’re still getting 99% of what you hear through the speakers (hopefully still analogue).”

You’re right, to an extent. In a stadium environment, a lot of the music you hear is through speakers, but each microphone and each speaker is specifically tuned to portray each instrument as well as possible. Even if the mix is off, you’re still generally left with a more genuine sound, and it’s still 1000x better than anything you could ever rig up in your house. And like I said, a large part of the performance is just the experience of having it performed live.

Now, in anything other than a stadium environment…

Also: Wait, so then who is the Ryan who posted? I assumed it was you. Identify yourself!

I’ll take an MP3 over a concert any day, regardless of any of that. It’s like one of the worst aspects of food – that you can only eat it once, experience it once, and then it’s as if it never happened so why spend that much money on it?
People who perform for you always have that hint of arrogance to them too, I’ll take a big clunky speaker before a human face any day.

… to carry the food analogy, I’d say that recorded music is like a McDonalds cheeseburger. Delicious in its own way, but at the same time more or less exactly unlike a cheeseburger.

Everything needs food as an analogy. Food is the best analogy of all.

Dude, you did NOT just bash the harpsichord . . .

Woah, woah woah. I wasn’t bashing the harpsichord. I’m just saying that it doesn’t have the range of the piano.

Ask Matt — he’ll confirm that I’m one of the last harpsichord evangelists in existence. Love the thing.

Ha! Just kidding. I’m not emotionally invested in said instrument.

I can see both sides of this argument. Personally I have hated many (indoor) concerts – mostly due to unnecessary volume, fellow fans who were “clearly” stupid and unappreciative, not to mention smelly.
There is the sheer excitement of seeing/hearing something that will never happen again in quite the same way – the frailty of it, the infinite variations of sound and emotion, it’s true. I find that it also depends on the kind of music you’re listening too – some genres work much better live than recorded. Some music I would never ever stoop to buying in CD format. Some I would refuse to listen to live.

“I prefer live music because of the sheer emotional and soul that can be interwoven with a performance that no recorded medium could ever capture.”

- I don’t know . . . if a band is good enough, shouldn’t the music be able to transcend limits like recording? There are several CDs in my collection that I would say does this . . . the ability to make me stop short what I am doing, discard distractions, and just LISTEN. That kind of emotion and soul that puts me in a trance. That said, I actually haven’t had the opportunity to hear these bands in concert, maybe after that I would be spoiled forever and never condescend to listening to a trash CD again.