Talk R2R: How to Describe the Sound of R2R?

Talk R2R: How to Describe the Sound of R2R?

As I had struggled to describe the sound of R2R, I was astonished by what Robin wrote in an email to me. More than waxing lyrics, its eloquence is so heart-felt! It encapsulates the perfect listening experience:

"...I was so happy to read your Yumcha Diary entry on our get-together last Saturday! I feel awed, but delighted of course, that you liked the new system so much. Since then, it's been getting noticeably better each day, as the new capacitors settle down and start singing their little hearts out whenever I put on a really good quality tape. Sadly, there are fewer of these than I thought: now that everything is so clear and well-defined, I can hear major tape dropout on quite a few of the tapes I'd previously felt were OK. (They've gone straight onto the "B" pile, for future recycling as empty reels.) Overall, I must revise my estimate of the wastage rate among the tapes I've bought so far, to at least 35 percent. Still, I'm gradually learning which ebay sellers are reliable and which aren't, so hopefully I'll be able to make wiser purchase choices in future. I've probably wasted around US $400 in all so far with bad tapes, but I'm just going to see it as my "tape culture 101 tuition fees"... No pain, no gain, etc...

As I have more and more of those special listening moments that you eloquently described in the case of the Shostakovich s.q. #8 on Saturday (isn't that tape something!), I'm starting to experience music in ways I never have before. I can only describe it as a kind of "synaesthesia": a merging of one's separate physical senses into one, single continuum of sensation. As Oliver Sacks writes, people who "suffer" from synaesthesia can see sounds, smell colours and hear paintings, etc. (In certain practical ways, this must be a problem; but on other levels it greatly enrich their lives.)...

What I've found lately, listening to music via magnetic tape - and as you point out, the big Yams also deserve a lot of the credit here - is that (for example) a particularly expressive line on the cello gets converted -- in some very basic part of my brain -- into a kind of "analog" of the sensation of brown/wood/earth. Or rather, the lines separating what I'm hearing, per se, and the numerous other sensations - visual and/or tactile - that the sound directly conjures up in my field of awareness, begin to blur, and it all becomes a delicious sensory amalgam...

Similarly, when Paolien and I went to the Botanical Gardens on Sunday afternoon, just after I'd been listening to a Bohm/Berlin Philharmonic tape of Mozart's symphony #33, and the sun was pouring down, I sat on a bench and looked at the trees / skies / flowers all around -- and I almost saw (or began to see) a symphony taking shape before my eyes! The tall trees were the cello section, the red flowers were the oboes, the green shrubs and bushes all around were the first and second violins --- sorry, I should stop all these fanciful ramblings!...

The time dimension is another area where I find magnetic tape brings very unexpected results. The special clarity and directness of the sound one gets can be attributed, perhaps, to four key factors: better dynamics, linearity, coherence, and texture. Subjectively, one outcome is that a piece of music seems to last much longer, on tape, than the same piece heard from a CD or LP. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that one simply stops paying attention to time while the tape is playing. The relentless ticking of clock time, which governs our lives in so many ways, known and unknown, these days, becomes irrelevant -- and instead one is simply "there", in the continuous moment as the music organically unfolds..."

Isn't that something!