Review by Jon Eben Field In his treatise, The Beautiful in Music, Eduard Hanslick, a Bohemian music critic and major proponent of Brahms, famously wrote, “Music means itself.” Here we discover the can of worms that emerges in attempting to write about music and the devices that reproduce it in our homes. That other more famous quotation, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” gestures towards that same space. There is an inherent difficulty in attempting to write about music. Music is a language, any other description is inevitably supplemental. And there is a whole other layer of difficulty involved in describing to others what a device will do to the reproduction of music in their homes under highly idiosyncratic and unique conditions when the review has been written under another set of entirely complex and different conditions. Reviewers have to grapple with these issues every time we sit down to write about a piece of equipment. Yet reviewers persist, as I will in this instance, because of our belief that the articulation of the experience of reproduced sound is not only clearly possible, but also clearly possible in ways that are noticeable and describable across a wide array [...]
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