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[log in to unmask] schrieb: > > ----- Original Message ----- >The information available to any > third-party observer is a summary of what the listening party > THINKS he/she/it hears; as such, it is of limited value in a > scientific sense. > Steven C. Barr You are completely right with this statement as seen from a scientific point of view. On the other hand this scientific view at least partially misses our objective. We are, or should be, dealing with - hopefully recorded - sound and not with its technical representation. At least that should ideally be, what we are cumulating in our libraries. We only use the representation, because this is the best we can achieve. One might even argue, that the original sound only exists in the listener's ears and so does a replay of its technical reproduction. Thus there are indeed two separate lines of investigation and two separate ways of gaining additional knowledge: There is the scientific quest for the best possible representation of sound by technical means and there is sound itself, which defies scientific treatment, because it is impossible to treat sound scientifically without using a electronic - or any other human-free - representation of it. In other words: We are dealing with something, which we want to preserve for posterity, but which only really existed during its creation. Anything we do depends on our ears and minds as well as it depended on the ears and minds of the players and those, who recorded it. It is of course our first obligation to do anything we can to make a representation of a performance as accurate as possible and this can only be done with scientific means applied to all parts of the recording, preservation and replay processes. Even if one can only measure, what one wants - or expects - to measure. Anything else has to be left to the device for which any sound was meant, the ear. No serious judgment made with this instrument should be dismissed. Even if the results are not quantifiable, we must consider them real, because there is no way of falsification. I do not want to start any 'flame wars' or any needless self-repeating discussion about basic facts or decisions, but I want to make a clear distinction between the technical processes involved in recording and playback and the decidedly non-technical and non-scientific processes involved in listening to/using/understanding any sound, which must define how we think of it and how we measure its technical representation. Greetings, U. Sieveking