[Nick Zwar]

I don’t want to repeat too much from the Your Film Music Origin Story thread, but my interest in film music and classical music more or less grew parallel. I was just always attuned to music, I always noticed it, whether in a Pink Panther cartoon, a TV series, a movie, or when it was played at home.
The main focus of my listening tends to be what is more or less referred to as “classical music”, but I also listen to a lot of film scores, some jazz, pop, rock, eletronica, whatever… But my main “reference point” is probably “classical” music.
For me, the ideal sound would be the sound of the perfect seat in a Philharmonic Hall. The more natural, the better. I tend not to like when the dynamic range is compressed or unnatural. When I hear a flute that I think would not sound like that in a natural setting, I sometimes hear the “mechanics” behind it and imagine a mixing pult setting the flute to “louder”, so I tend to prefer the general dynamics of a performance to be captured rather to be mixed. But I tend to listen to music in the evening, when it is quiet, with the music from my loudspeakers, so yeah, when I hear a Daphnis & Chloe, I want the quiet passages to be as gentle and soft as just a wisp in the trees and the loud passages knock over my furniture, I think that’s what Ravel had in mind and how he wanted the composition to sound. But of course, there are some compositions that are already composed with certain mixing and dynamic decisions in mind, and that’s fine too. When I listen to music in my car, I tend not to pick orchestral music, but more electronic/rock/jazz etc. music, because a car is not suited for much orchestral detail in quieter passages.