3 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

Frank, it may have been that the person of which you speak thought your preference was the "classic HiFi thing" and the words you quoted defining realism didn't apply to your choice.

I don't follow what you're saying here, at all ...

Yes, this is essentially a repeat of a post made some time ago ... but the 'problem' won't go away, so ...

This is often used as mark of excellence, that a product is very sensitive to things like power cords,

Umm, no. This says that the engineering has not been sorted out ... because if it was, then the SQ would not change, with something 'as silly' as the power cord used! My very cheap gear is sensitive to how well the mains power is delivered to it, but that makes sense - it doesn't when the components purchased cost something like 50 times as much! And that is why I'll keep harping on about this - it's absurd that after so many decades of audio development and production that the quality of what you hear is so precariously balanced, no matter how much money is paid!

It is weird, if I take a nose spray or move furniture in my room, things sound different as well. It does more with expensive and well engineered gear compared to cheap gear. Years of audio development still didn't solve that either....... 

Not really weird ... the human senses are superbly attuned to picking up nuances in things - but they only fire up to "full strength" when it's worth doing so. Consider TVs - old time receivers gave you just enough detail to work out what was going on - and we were happy with that; modern technology allows to you note "every blade of grass on the playing field" - your expectations, and what is now interesting, keeps evolving, changing ...

So many audio "experts" are really down on human hearing - the truth is, feed the listening mind with the data - and it will lap it up . Low cost gear blurs it all together, in a pleasant way - like watching that old TV ; once you "pump up the action", with a more 'revealing' rig, your ears are now confronted with "so much more". Trouble is, every tiny hair not quite in place now becomes obvious, especially the ones in the playback chain! You can't do much with the source material, without going to a lot of effort - but, the replay system is completely under your control! And experience tells one that refinement of the part that you do control makes a huge amount of difference - if, and it's a big IF, you do all the right things, then a bit of magic happens in your brain - it discards the remaining defects in what you hear; and you experience a direct injection of the musical event captured, in your senses. A conjuring trick ... but, a remarkably effective one, .

6moons look at the Dutch & Dutch, with BACCH happening, https://6moons.com/audioreview_articles/dutch-dutch-8c-bacch/, and a paragraph on what this should do for the listening. Reading that, the parallels between what the process is aiming for, and what competent playback does are close enough to make a comparison:

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provide a remarkably three-dimensional you-are-there realism with a sonic image which subjectively extends far beyond the loudspeakers in both breadth and depth.

Yes. Far beyond in breadth is not something I would say; the width merely reflects what was happening in the recording space.

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Sound images will exist to the left and to the right well beyond the limits of the loudspeakers. A very occasional sound image may exist all the way to your right or to your left

Again, just beyond, not well beyond. Sound images always remain behind the plane of the speakers; the latter defines where the 'window into the recorded space' is placed. You only might get stuff in front of this if the source mastering played with phasing tricks, to "fool your ears",

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The 'front-to-back' or 'stage' depth will be from 10 to 20 feet in front of you, with sound images clearly floating in space behind and from time to time in front of the loudspeakers.

The front starts at the plane of the speakers, and extends back as far as the acoustic cues "tell the story". When I first heard my system work this well, it felt like the back was literally a km away, on some really juiced up recordings. The floating in space is never in front of the speakers - it's that window thing again.

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You can turn your head to 'look' at the sound images and they will stay 'put' in space. Sound images will clearly emerge from beyond the limits of the room boundaries.

Yes. Exactly how it works.

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At your listening position and from all around you including over your shoulders, you will sense - and this is very hard to describe - an almost palpable 'feel' of the space or 'sonic signature' that belongs to the concert hall or recording studio.

Yes, apart from the over your shoulders bit - you're looking into the acoustic space, sitting at a large opening to it; you're not somewhere inside of it. The sense of the space captured is quite remarkable - this is because there is always 'murmuring' at some level; there is no such thing as 0 dB background noise, but it takes very clean playback for what's on the recording to make sense - which means, on some, say, classical recordings the sounds of the furniture, the movements of the bodies, intake of air, and other spurious noises can be quite something - this could irritate some people, but I find it fits the mood of the occasion; it doesn't bother me.

The ECdesigns thread keeps giving ...

Yet Another nice summary of, competent playback - this is what is actually on recordings; not the watered down, bland, wussy stuff you so often hear, from less than decently sorted rigs ...

Just keep remembering that this particular setup is not distorting the event capture; it's merely providing a clear view onto what took place, in front of the microphones - there's nothing more happening than reducing the subjectively objectionable replay artifacts to decently low levels.

This is what I got 40 years ago ... and it is amazing to me that it has taken this long to have a few more components on the market that have got it together enough to "get it right", straight out of the boxes, .

Decided to point to this post,

Yes. Competent playback 'magically' makes more bass ... how? Because the bass line of the track now makes sense, and has its 'personality' fully resolved - it's trivial to follow, and can be listened to as something apart from the whole, if one so wishes. The bottom of line B&W bookshelves I started my journey with were so more impressive than any of the monster speakers I came across at the time, in terms of rendering what was going on in the bass - which is why I have never had the slightest interest in subwoofers  ... a "waste of space", .

29 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Decided to point to this post,

 

Yes. Competent playback 'magically' makes more bass ... how? Because the bass line of the track now makes sense, and has its 'personality' fully resolved - it's trivial to follow, and can be listened to as something apart from the whole, if one so wishes. The bottom of line B&W bookshelves I started my journey with were so more impressive than any of the monster speakers I came across at the time, in terms of rendering what was going on in the bass - which is why I have never had the slightest interest in subwoofers  ... a "waste of space", .

It's because you reduce impulse distortion, which improves the grip of voltage on the driver.

If you get a well-designed single driver, place it on a proper enclosure, and feed it music with a source and amp that pass square waves at high-frequencies, in both current *and* voltage, it'll SLAM.

You can achieve similar effects with first order subtractive crossovers, aka, "constant voltage" as per Richard Small, which shunt the undesired signal to ground rather than let it turn to heat in the same device that's filtering out the signal.

Small-Constant-Voltage-Xover(1).pdf

Yes, there are all sorts of methods to improve the accuracy of recording replay - getting the amplifier to drive the speaker correctly is a big part of it ... in the last decades of the 1900s, most systems were pretty terrible at this; the standard you typically got had me shaking my head nearly every time.

Note that the "SLAM" is not an artifact of a particular setup; it's what's actually on the recording - and if you don't get it, well, it's another marker of inaccurate replay ...

I'm very immersed in the visual thing right now, 'conjuring up' believable viewports onto a 3D world, based on 2D image captures of "real stuff" ... also very satisfying when it nails it, - have already mentioned this a few times.

Which got me curious about the "virtual ABBA" concert thing - how is it done? Well, how about that!! ... No 3d, hologram sorcery  - just LED screens! A bigger, better version of your current, in your lounge, TV ... nothing more.

So, why does it work? The visitors love it, it ticks the boxes ... the answer is, wait for it, quality . The sound system is top of the class, the screens are the "best you can get", carefully optimised to squeeze very last ounce of resolution out of the 'tape' - everything is done to make the, yes, illusion solid for the audience ...

Does this remind you of anything ... ?

18 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Does this remind you of anything ... ?

Yes, good marketing. 

The best marketing is word of mouth ... things succeed in the long run, because they're good quality and are astutely marketed ... Tupperware would have died soon after they were pushed into people's homes, if they were only so-so, or mediocre in how well the items lasted. Marketing gets you the intro ... then, you have to deliver ...

1 minute ago, fas42 said:

The best marketing is word of mouth ... things succeed in the long run, because they're good quality and are astutely marketed ... Tupperware would have died soon after they were pushed into people's homes, if they were only so-so, or mediocre in how well the items lasted. Marketing gets you the intro ... then, you have to deliver ...

Tell that to Bose

Yes, that brand name ... I haven't actually heard them sound "so bad" - apart from their PA units, the "two pointy eyes staring at you" model - these are universally awful, IME .

Curious, I found this: https://www.quora.com/Is-Bose-audio-really-bad. And I reckon the first few replies are spot on - they fill a place in the marketplace; keep their customers happy - and so deserve "to be around".

Bumped into this ... if the "purpose" was to immerse yourself in maximum eye candy land, then I reckon you would be hard pressed to better this:

At, https://cosmotronloudspeakers.com/

Are you trying to say they are "out of this world'?

Sorry, I would call them 'Oligarch Audio'.

Deleted…. 

Another form of, "Oligarch Audio" ... https://wapo.st/47ErwZI - the subject of another thread here ...

Hobby or obsession ... where's the boundary? And how does one go about it? The trouble with that journey was that it was deeply rooted in the belief that money, lots of the stuff, was needed to get, Big Sound  - and note that it was so complicated that a plethora of settings had to be juuust so ... otherwise, it was just, off .

The reality is always, always that you can't do better than what's on the recording- the closer you get to that, the better it sounds ... you know, you might even call such a thing, "accuracy"

Where money does make a genuine difference is in how loud it can go, without, subjectively, "falling to pieces" - this requires really well engineered stuff; which you typically have to pay for. And also, the ability to produce really, really low frequencies without oodles of distortion - most subwoofers are pretty ridiculous things, they pump out so much distortion that they completely rewrite what what you hear in the bass line - which may sound impressive, but has nothing to do with what's on the recording. I've heard a couple of units do it properly ... and they are quite 'boring', because, well, low, low bass frequencies are very boring . Interestingly, my current actives are more capable of producing this part of the track than anything I've had before - and I find the intensity of that sound to almost start to make me feel sick, if it has been pumped up too much in the recording; it has an oppressive feel about it, which actually works against the sense of the music. OTOH, and strangely, country and western tracks have some of the best bass content in them, in terms of energising the feeling of the song,

An example of not connecting the dots ...

First,

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I didn't like COAX into my R-26

almost immediately followed by

The 'purpose' that one should have in evolving a system is to reduce the obvious distortion to below audible levels ... nearly all rigs, no matter how expensive, have oodles of the latter - in audiophile circles this is swept under the carpet by calling it "character", or "signature"; but, this very clear degradation of SQ irritates the bejesus out of me - which is why I have little time for such setups, .

People often describe what they hear in terms like I just saw in a post,

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... light on treble. Up sample mode loses a little of mid range density but treble balance is better.

Ummm, no. This is just a subjective reaction to the spectrum of the injected distortion altering ... there is no such thing as the treble content of the actual waveform altering; nor does any density emphasis shift. But the 'quality' of the playback chain grunge has altered - hopefully in a positive direction ...

It was interesting to see how the audio friend up the road initially saw things as variation in tonal balance and such - but this has also evolved to, thumbs up, or thumbs down, . That is, the audible distortion is either acceptable - or not. Which makes it very straightforward to assess one's progress.

This is a noteworthy bit of prose ... talking about a high end turntable, which was meticulously set up by someone who knew his business,

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Evaluating the AF1 is very difficult as all you desire to do is listen. I sit here and begin writing and then 10 minutes later realize I haven’t finished a single sentence. I’m in awe - a suspension of disbelief - of the natural sound. The sound is beyond mere words. You have to listen to fully appreciate, but here’s my best attempt:

The AF1 delivers dynamics, energy, detail, and slam! It has an uncolored nature. There’s freedom from resonances. There’s a seamless extended sound. Moreover, there’s convincing spatial information and sense of venue ambience. It’s has the most realistic and convincing vocals I've ever experienced from an analog source.

The AF1 has the ability to draw one front and center into the venue where the music is playing. It does this in a very natural way where one feels as if they are completely part of the original venue. When I hear Bach I sense I’m in Leipzig, Krall live in Paris, Eva Cassidy at Blues Alley, and the Doors at their (arguably) most famous concert at the Hollywood Bowl in CA. TechDas teleports to the venue.

On familiar LPs the groves are displaying many nuances I’ve never heard before. Time seems suspended as you hear so many more details in the grooves. There’s a sense of presence and emotional involvement. Surface noise is nil. No distortion! 3D images are the best I’ve heard and the midrange is astounding. The AF1 has a master tape-like serenity - similar to my friend’s Studer - and yet it seems a cut above even that (his words, not mine).

Though there’s a beautiful collective whole to the sound, each instrument has its own space. So do the vocals. They seem to magically appear and disappear from the immensely vast soundstage without effort. There’s a black curtain behind the sound. The music out of nowhere reaches out and immediately captures and emotionally grabs you. It’s transcendent!

The bass is deeper, tighter, and more linear than other tables I’ve heard. The pace and timing are magical. The overall presentation is full, rich, and naturally detailed. More texture, dimensionality, and clarity than I’ve heard in other TTs. There’s layer after layer of nuance. It's the whole package (table, tonearms, carts, phono-stage), rendering the information in the groves with total and complete resolution. You are immersed in blissful sound.

The point? This is a solid description of what competent playback is like ... it has nothing to do with the source mechanism, nor what the makeup of the rest of the chain is. It is simply the end point of achieving adequate accuracy from the setup; so that what you hear within the capture of the musical event is no longer compromised by deficiencies of the machinery used. I could have used the same phrases to describe that 'transcendent' moment that my CD based system came together, those decades ago ... but, I haven't, .

Why does it get "this good"? Quite simply, the SQ is now of a high enough standard that the listening brain can take over to discard the remaining, leftover anomalies; and it doesn't matter if the source is streaming, CD, vinyl, tape, whatever ... the overall accuracy of the chain is the "magic ingredient" ...

As always, the downside is the difficulty of evolving a rig to this level of integrity ... however, once you are aware of what can be achieved, and begin to understand how certain flaws savagely undermine reaching such SQ, then you can start making better decisions, on what to do to improve the system where it really counts, and thus allow this experience to manifest ...

Just came across this - someone experiencing where a DAC made by the people behind ECdesigns, and a conventional, high end DAC, is notable in the differences,

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If you switch between the DACs momentarily, either DAC can be perceived as being the better choice for different reasons, but after having listened to the Mosaic a whole evening, then switching back to the Aeris, it’s difficult to come to terms with its sound again. It’s akin to having played LPs all night and then switching back to CD… there’s a kind of hardening and flattening to the sound that prevents me to get connected emotionally again.

Yes. This seemingly almost never solvable 'gremlin' has been around forever ... it is indeed 'fixable', and has been so from the beginning of the digital era - but it requires quite a bit of dedicated effort to exterminate. The digital "cockroaches" are very resilient, and "always come back", if you turn your back on them for one second - the price of listening pleasure is eternal vigilance, , ...

Comment here about "natural", versus "neutral",

Neutral, meaning dead flat frequency response, is of little use in the face of excess audible distortion, the lack of which makes the presentation, 'natural'. Exercises with the DEQX DSP unit to get "perfect", flat curves demonstrate that the distortion signature doesn't go away. So if you don't like the sound of a rig, then playing with, typically, the treble just "hides it under the carpet"; it's the same way you deal with a cheap radio, using a basic tone control to cut the disturbing, because they're distorting, higher frequencies.

Recordings' true nature is to sound, real. Take that in for a second, or a minute, or however long ... that's a fundamental in this field; and that's why I have zero tolerance for ambitious, expensive setups that "make a mess" of a high percentage of musical captures ... .

Do audiophiles always like "more accurate" sound? IME, no, and this review is a good example of such, https://darko.audio/2024/01/dutch-dutch-8c-bacch-plugin-review/.

To sum up, he didn't like the "raw" sound of the D&Ds - and the BACCH plug-in made it more acceptable. Now, there is always the possibility that these speakers were under performing - which is always a misgiving I have; there are always going to be circumstances where a rig doesn't show at its best, for a huge variety of reasons - say, some interference in the room to which these speakers are susceptible. Then again, he wants "a bit more textural elasticity and flow" ... whatever that means. IME, accuracy delivers texture and flow to the same standard as live music - so, if you're a person who feels the need to juice up the latter, then indeed extra 'seasoning' might be called for, .

So, horses for courses. There is no single answer to the question, "What is best sound?" - but where I stand is that if a system can have any, I repeat, any recording put on, and you immediately enter the world of the music being played, and have close to zero sense of the mechanism being used to create this experience, then this is a pretty good place ... .

No point in continuing posting in that speaker thread - once the shutters come down, in people's heads, nothing more will be gained by attempting to have a rational discussion, .

Why is audio land such a strange quagmire? Now and again I ponder this - and the answer is pretty clear: it's largely driven by ego, and that means he who has the most 'badass' rig wins. Automatically. Unfortunately, the most butch looking, in your face ostentatious, laboratory microscope is not going to be one ounce better for looking closely at specimens on the slide, than the boring, ugly, utilitarian model which has been put together with just one thought in mind - to see what's on the glass as clearly as possible.

How has this industry got away with the bizarro mindset for so long? Largely, because decently accurately replay chains are so rare that they are considered outliers; not really part of where the "exciting" action is. And that is, tailoring the sound of a recording to the listeners' tastes, rather than being true to the contents of a track - yes, things are very, very slowly getting better; but you need to pay close attention to what's been said on some of the less travelled paths.

We're still nowhere near where what I said in my last post here, with regard to walking up to an unknown setup, and finding that

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... you immediately enter the world of the music being played, and have close to zero sense of the mechanism being used to create this experience ...

The eccentricities, the foibles of the equipment used are nearly always screaming at you - and can't be ignored ... you're squinting like crazy through the eyepiece of the very expensive microscope, and struggling to work out what is in that blurred mess of detail, which is never "quite in focus" ... (but everybody said it was the best on the market!!!)