Future perfect

Abstract

Consider the means available to us for enjoying a piece of music, such as this, which I am about to play, Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave—a cassette recording made on a machine costing £10; an EMI studio tape played through equipment costing £3,500, or better, through £8,000 worth of stereo or quadrophonic equipment; or even a live rendition by the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall. If you were to compare these versions of Tchaikovsky, what you would experience is a quick and simple demonstration of the law of diminishing returns: As each step towards perfection is taken, costs escalate dramatically. Now this law happens to be universally applicable and stands squarely in the way of man's innate desire to attain perfection. The urge towards perfection is so powerful that the law, acting as an unwelcome barrier, is usually either deliberately ignored or conveniently forgotten. Your hi‐fi enthusiast, for example, continues to pore over equipment specifications and buys bigger, more sophisticated and cosdier items regardless of the facts that his small lounge will not accoustically fit a thirty‐two‐foot organ pipe and that unless he is young he cannot hear notes above seventeen or eighteen kilohertz. How many of you, I wonder, would realize it if the studio recording of Marche Slave had been rolled off by EMI at fifteen kilohertz? Certainly I could not detect it, nor could anyone else above the age of fifty‐five. So why strain so hard for perfection? Indeed, why bother?