I've seen a few articles asserting an opinion on this in one form or another, and it seems they tend not to really ask the orchestra members. I have a few frie

I've seen a few articles asserting an opinion on this in one form or another, and it seems they tend not to really ask the orchestra members. I have a few friends who play in orchestras and they all tend to think that they're much more synchronous with a conductor. If they practice without the conductor, then they all say they sound fine to themselves, but everyone else tends to drift slightly out of time. An orchestra is a complex, dynamic web of bi-directional signals. Certain sections will use other sections as their cues for certain phrases, and these relationships will change as a piece progresses. Having one master clock to sync against allows these relationships to not drift too far from each other. Also, visual cues are faster and more reliable in loud, reverb-filled spaces than audial cues. Personally, I'd love to see how an orchestra played to a completely virtual avatar of a conductor, which based it's "emotional" timing and dynamic instruction on a corpus of famous conductor's work. Imagine being able to turn up the "Stokowski" :-)