On live music

THIS ISSUE: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Take a left on 57th.

There’s a notion among audiophiles that we must be regular consumers of live music, especially live acoustic music. It’s the only way, the thinking goes, to calibrate our ears to the sound we should all be aspiring to at home.

This notion persists despite some deep and obvious flaws. For one thing, it doesn’t matter what live acoustic music sounds like if that sound isn’t captured on the recording we’re listening to—it usually isn’t—and it’s impossible to know whether it has been or a sound independent of the means of reproduction is questionable except as an abstraction or, at best, an unapproachable ideal. The only people who have a chance of knowing what a recording sounds like—how close it comes to live—are people who were there when the recording was made, especially the recording engineers. Even for them, there are issues.