Compact discs and Jimmy Young

In one of the tales from his Difficult Loves, Calvino tells of the adventure of a near-sighted man.  Upon realising that he was near-sighted, and obtaining some spectacles, the man discovered a hitherto unsuspected richness of detail in the world.  He rejoiced in the his new-found clarity of vision.

Not everyone feels the same way.  An optician tells of how he prescribed some glasses for an artist.  A few days later the man returned, complaining that he found them unsatisfactory.  The optician tested the artist's eyes again, and confirmed that his glasses should ensure perfect, sharp vision.  But it was precisely this that the artist objected to: his world had lost the soft burr of romance and mystery.  Finally the optician prescribed some weaker lens that did not strip away the veil. 

This visual opposition of clarity versus cloudiness has a venerable history.  Its apogee was the split between the hard line of Florentine High Renaissance art, represented pre-eminently by the flat and totally precise drawings and frescoes of Michelangelo, and the Venetian art of the same time which concentrated on colour and light, reaching its peak in Titian's moody and elusive pictorial poems. 

If these alternative approaches to the reproduction of the image have long been commonplace, the situation for sound is a different matter.  Since the words 'Mary had a little lamb' first emerged from Edison's phonograph, technology has struggled against the problem of background noise.  Until the last few years, everybody's experience of recorded or transmitted sound was a curiously warped one.  With all their imperfections the gramophone record and radio were almost re-interpretations of a musical event rather than a faithful transcription.  And just as for visual chiaroscuro, the world has been divided into two camps over this.

The purists and techno-freaks would argue that since the whole point of the transmission process is to reproduce, then we should strive to eliminate any obfuscatory elements.  Others say that we need to be constantly reminded that radio and records are media, and that this should be flagged by a different aural perspective.

The question is no longer an idle one.  With the advent of digital recording techniques and compact discs, the totally faithful, noise-free reproduction of sounds is for practical purposes achievable.  The digital approach makes the conceptual breakthrough of providing a totally neutral and transparent medium - numbers - which leave content untouched.

The first time I heard a compact disc of a full orchestra was in a small room.  Such was the actuality of sound that I felt that the entire 80 piece band was in that room with me.  I could almost feel the bowing of the double basses.  It was totally oppressive.  If I had any doubts on the score they were effectively dispelled by hearing a particularly clear transmission of a commercial for Ariel washing powder.  Once you have experienced Jimmy Young next to you in your living room you begin to sympathise with the Luddites. 

(22.3.86)

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