Putzeys rejects the idea, which most tube-amp enthusiasts take for granted, that it’s okay—desirable, even—for an amplifier to ”color” the music it is reproducing.
”Audio is not supposed to be art,” he insists. ”Making music is art. Getting it from the CD to the listener should not be art.”
His views were forged in part during his one and only foray into the world of music production, in 1998. He was visiting some friends in Finland who were in a folk music group. They happened to be recording a CD while he was there, with a producer who handled mostly hard rock and roll. The Finnish folkies fired the producer, because ”he was drunk all the time and he knew nothing about folk music.” So Putzeys took over. ”I didn’t know anything about production, but I knew I couldn’t do worse than that guy.”
In the end he decided he wasn’t cut out to be a music producer. But he also had an insight into the debate, endless among audiophiles, about coloration. ”If it sounds good,” he says, ”the right place to put it in is in a recording or mastering studio. There, an engineer can add the coloration that is appropriate to the music. You get an artistically informed choice about when the coloration is used, and when it isn’t. It’s better than using it indiscriminately all the time”—as would be the case if your amplifier added the coloration.
