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Records sound like records because they provide a different sort of experience than live music.

This difference is made up of many factors.

Some of them are obvious, such as the fact that we associate recorded and live music with our responses and behavior in different types of environments and social settings.

( Music often sounds best to me when I can dress informally and sit in something more comfortable than a theatre seat.

) From the technical standpoint, records differ from live music to the degree that they fail to convey the true color, texture, complexity, range, intensity, pulse, and pitch of the original.

Any alteration of one of these factors is distortion, although we generally use that word only for effects so pronounced that they can be stated quantitatively on the basis of standard tests.

Yet it is the accumulation of distortion, the fitting together of fractional bits until the total reaches the threshold of our awareness, that makes records sound like records.

The sound may be good ; ;

but if you know The Real Thing, you know that what you are hearing is only a clever imitation.