iPoders' Ire

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 8:41 AM Eastern on 14 Aug. See below.]

Our uniformly negative post on the use of the iPod as a means of listening to recordings of classical music has predictably brought a number of equally negative responses, both public and private, from iPod aficionados. Among the public responses, Alex Ross of The Rest Is Noise thinks what we had to say "amusing." Sidney Chen of The Standing Room, in his blog's The Reading Room sidebar, thinks us a troll (apparently generally, not just for our post in question, as he's never listed Sounds & Fury in his extensive blogroll that seemingly includes just about every arts and culture site in the blogosphere), and admonishes Mr. Ross for even acknowledging our post ("don't feed the trolls"). Patricia Mitchell of Oboeinsight thinks we "hate a lot of stuff," but says that's OK, and then goes on to defend her use of the iPod. And Ben of Classical Convert imagines we frown on bloggers posting their current playlists of music being listened to (we don't and never did; we merely censured playlists that are iPod playlists and so identified).

Of the fair number of negative private responses, the main theme seemed to be setting us straight on the technicalities of the various digital audio formats, and why the iPod is not so terrible a thing as we imagine.

For us, the most interesting thing about all these negative responses is that they all seemed to miss our principal objection to the iPod as a means of experiencing classical music. And that was simply that it's one of the most incompetent and distorting of incompetent and distorting means; means which include even the most accurate and expensive playback system imaginable, a point our post made abundantly and at-length clear, our stated argument being that a live performance is quite literally an irreproducible benchmark, and the only true and fully acceptable means of experiencing classical music.

We don't at all have a problem with negative responses to our posts here on Sounds & Fury. We in fact welcome them as much as we welcome positive responses. What we have a most decided problem with, however, are responses responding to what their authors imagine we wrote (or failed to write) rather than to what we actually did write. That, we confess, drives us right up the wall, and makes us surly as hell.

So, please, dear readers, before sounding off one way or the other, read the damn piece carefully — all of it — before responding, and abjure your own knee-jerk reactions to trigger words, phrases, or ideas even though we freely admit to occasionally (OK, more than occasionally) including such in our posts to tweak the deserving.

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Update (11:11 PM Eastern on 10 Aug): Ben of Classical Convert now gets it.

Update 2 (8:41 AM Eastern on 14 Aug): For what appears to be a necessary clarification of this post, see this post.