Where is Audio Truth ?

[徐中銳]

And an individual's truth, may be conveyed by a photo...

Recalling :

[徐中銳]

 

I was skeptical of the "Love" soundtrack when I first heard about it after my wife and daughter went to the actual show and came home raving. Then I listened to it and really dug it. Perhaps a large part of why it works so well (and it is just beautifully woven together) is that we are so familiar with the original Beatles recordings.

 

Mostly so, yep - after all, it's the soundtrack for a Cirque du Soleil show. But some pieces I really like didn't come from the old quilt; they are alternate takes with less production around the voices. Examples are the Love versions of Strawberry Fields and While My Guitar Gently Weeps, which have John and George's voices, respectively, relatively straightforward and unadorned compared to the originally released versions.

 

In my view, its pluses and minuses aside, "Love" is merely taking a stitched together quilt, separating the parts, cutting them into smaller parts and restitching them into a new quilt. For my ears at least, whatever its other achievements, there is still "no suspension of disbelief". (I see it moving in the other direction.)

 

« Look behind the scenes and see how this re-arranged version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was created from The Beatles LOVE performance by Eira Glover of Cirque du Soleil. »

[fas42]

On 6/25/2013 at 2:51 PM, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

Is Audio truth, then, a matter of greater 'accuracy'. If we get more clever in our measurements and our gear improves to faithfully reproduce what we measure then it stands to reason that more accurate sounds better ? Does the more accurate CD sound better than Vinyl ? Does halving Total Harmonic Distortion have the inverse affect on sound quality ? Does eliminating all jitter sound better ? Is there a 'sweet spot' in increasing digital resolutions ? Or is there something in the flawed nature of analogue sound that appeals to us ? Stay tuned for the answers…..but not from me.

 

 

Probably a really, really dumb idea to resuscitate this thread, which I was just pointed to ... anyway, my answer to this part of a well constructed OP is a resounding, Yes! That is, better reproduction of the capture of the original event always benefits. Emphasising flaws, whether it's due to part of the chain being analogue or whatever, will only 'win' in a narrow, localised sense  - every experience of mine has reinforced that the better you understand how defects of the playback chain can impact playback, the greater the potential of the SQ that can be realised - from all recordings.

[Audiophile Neuroscience]

35 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Probably a really, really dumb idea to resuscitate this thread, which I was just pointed to ... anyway, my answer to this part of a well constructed OP is a resounding, Yes! That is, better reproduction of the capture of the original event always benefits. Emphasising flaws, whether it's due to part of the chain being analogue or whatever, will only 'win' in a narrow, localised sense  - every experience of mine has reinforced that the better you understand how defects of the playback chain can impact playback, the greater the potential of the SQ that can be realised - from all recordings.

 

Hi Frank

it's been a while since I visited this thread. 47 pages! I doubt this thread is able to be resuscitated but that's fine.

I recommend you have a read from the beginning.There were a lot of very clever people who contributed and some great discussion.

 

 

[fas42]

Cheers ...

[fas42]

On 8/28/2013 at 9:34 PM, bdiament said:

In my experience in different studios, most have monitoring I would think it fair to call abysmal -- essentially car speakers but capable of playing loud enough to harm the listener. Studio A and studio B sound quite different from each other but have many characteristics in common, including what I said above. There are variations in the rooms themselves, of course but there are common trends because many studio designers imitate what they see in other studios.

 

The trend for decades has been a combination of large speakers, attempting to combine the wildly different characteristics of a large, reflex loaded woofer with a horn loaded tweeter, placed in corners(!) where every mode the control room has will be sure to be stimulated. These are accompanied by small, somewhat dynamically constipated, bass deficient speakers placed on the meter bridge of the console, where the reflection from the top surface will guarantee a midrange dip at the engineer's ears. In recent years, the larger speakers have been replaced with some other designs and moved to floor standing positions, directly in front of the control room window. In sum, I have never yet heard a studio monitoring setup that sounded even remotely like what occurs on the other side of the glass, where the players are. Lastly, these are all too often played at a level that is far past causing hearing damage and in the region of damaging internal organs! (Talk about weaponized sound!) There are a (very) few exceptions but unfortunately, that is exactly what they are: exceptions, not the rule.

 

Sorry to keep adding to this thread, but this confirms what I largely picked through other reading, etc. Trying to hear "what the recording engineers intended" is a nonsense, because their methods of monitoring their efforts were so poor that they have almost zero value to those want to hear the efforts of the musicians.

[sandyk]

19 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Sorry to keep adding to this thread, but this confirms what I largely picked through other reading, etc. Trying to hear "what the recording engineers intended" is a nonsense, because their methods of monitoring their efforts were so poor that they have almost zero value to those want to hear the efforts of the musicians.

 

 Not this one !

 

 

Click on the image to enlarge it.

[Ralf11]

Audio Truth??

 

Ask Demosthenes - he's the dude with the LEDs

 

or does the OP mean "Truthiness" ??