Sanity Check

[fas42]

22 hours ago, gmgraves said:

 

So do I. I went to a "Burning Amp" DIY conference in San Francisco a couple of years ago, and Nelson Pass was there (he usually is). He had set-up a demonstration that startled a lot of people. He had taken two 4 X 8 ft sheets of plywood with two-by-fours to prop them up vertical on either side of the room. They had holes sawn in the center of each to accommodate a pair of generic 8-inch coaxial speakers. He was powering them with a cheap amplifier for which he was giving away schematics and parts lists. The signal source was a $40 Sony CD player. Interconnects were generic, as was the flesh-colored 16 Gauge transparent speaker wire that he used to wire the speakers to the amp. Most attendees were shocked when they saw what was  making the very respectable sound. I know that I wouldn't have expected such a lash-up to do anything that could be even remotely considered good sound! So, yes, based on that experience, I find the results of the Spanish test very believable. 

 

Yes, that's the reality of the situation. Remarkably cheap components, nothing special in any area can deliver a SQ as good as would keep most happy ... but they need to be assembled in a careful, 'knowing' manner to deliver the goods ...

 

Many audio systems remind me a car with a massive engine, turbochargers galore, the whole shebang is screaming at high revs as it moves slowly slowly down the road ... going behind the vehicle, I see a huge anchor attached with a massive chain, deeply gouging up the road as the shemozzle struggles to keep up progress ... Ummm, why don't you sort out this anchor thing - say, by disconnecting the chain, eh? ... Can't do that!! That's the Way Things Are Done in this game - everyone says so!

[fas42]

30 minutes ago, Cornan said:

Less, if you spend $$ on the AC mains and DC regulation!

 

Yes, it's those boring, technical areas where the real gains are made - I have heard ultra expensive rigs sound like complete rubbish, and second hand, ordinary consumer grade components create magic experiences - the real difference was the latter had been very carefully sorted and optimised in those areas you speak of. And you don't have to spend $$ if you have DIY knowledge ...

 

Audio can be an enormous Money Pit, but if your interest is in the bling, and excitement of new toys that's fine ... OTOH, if you want sterling reproduction of your recordings then there is another path ...

[fas42]

Wanna be scared ... ... ?

 

 

 

 

[fas42]

And ...

 

 

[fas42]

 

6 hours ago, semente said:

 

Not all of us have the privilege of a dedicated room...

The fact that most treatment stuff is just too ugly to use in a living space doesn't help either.

 

And let's not forget that carefully positioned furniture and decorative stuff does help at mid and higher frequencies.

 

"Dedicated rooms" aren't necessary - a system can be evolved to a level of quality where our hearing systems do all the adjustments necessary, and it always "feels right", no matter how the room is. This means, for example, that someone who is not in the slightest bit interested in audio can stray into the area when the volume is at realistic levels, and not be disturbed or note anything unusual about the sound - to them, also, it feels quite 'natural'.

[fas42]

11 hours ago, marce said:

I don't wear a watch, never have done... Don't like to be reminded how fast Tempus Fugit.

 

Similar here - I gave out on these things about the time  that those first cheap, novelty digital items appeared ... there's always something around to get the job done  - of knowing, The Time.

[fas42]

Fair enough ...

[fas42]

11 hours ago, semente said:

In domestic reproduction of recorded music there's only one kind of fidelity possible: fidelity to the recorded signal.

This I call accurate reproduction, also referred to as "garbage in, garbage out".

 

The technology for recording music and it's domestic playback has some limitations and as such cannot sound like live music.

It takes into account those limitations as a technology, and one can add the room interference into the pot if needed.

 

It's a shame that most people have adopted this belief - because they then exclude themselves from the chance of achieving high levels of satisfaction from their recordings. Yes, there needs to be accurate reproduction - but most of what people term "accurate" falls far short of what's possible; if one knows all the markers of playback getting it wrong in various areas, then this nominal accuracy is nowhere in sight, normally. Only people who are prepared to put the extra effort into thoroughly "debugging" their systems can reap the rewards ...

 

And the rewards are, that the reproduction sounds like live music. It is not exactly the same as what was in front of the microphones, but that's irrelevant - if you're in the presence of live music, and you move around, what your ears are picking up constantly changes, enormously. But it never stops sounding like live music - that live, acoustic "vibe" doesn't suddenly sound like just hifi, because you've moved to the wrong spot ... and that's what playback at a competent level gives you - the live "vibe", no matter where you listen to it.

[fas42]

5 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

You are overlooking the obvious, I think. Unless the recording meets MY criteria for an accurate recording, there is no satisfaction. I don't think I'm alone in that view. Tricked-out studio enhanced recordings might sound good to you and many others, but they don't sound good to me. For instance, there are the products of AIX records and Mark Waldrep. In any recording of a piano of his that I have heard, he puts microphones INSIDE of the grand piano, mounted on a bar that stretches across width of the piano inches above the strings. Now, when was the last time you listened to a grand piano with your head under the piano lid and your ears inches from the strings? I'll stick my neck out on a limb here and say that they answer is probably NEVER. I will admit that it sounds spectacular, with the treble strings all the way on the right side of the room, and the bass strings all the way over on the left side of the room and the mid strings in the center. You get incredible detail, not only from the strings, but from the piano's action. What's the problem? Well to begin with, 12-15 foot-wide pianos don't exist, and a piano, heard from the standpoint of a listener either sitting in a concert environment or scattered around the room of a bar or other night spot where live music is being played, simply doesn't sound like that. This is true of most instruments, when miked up-close or worse "frapped" (picked up by a contact microphone which actually attaches to the body of the instrument itself). Instruments don't sound that way when the space they occupy is miked rather than the instrument itself. Musical instruments weren't designed to listened to at such close quarters and in my opinion never sound right when they are.

On the playback end. Accuracy is much simpler than you state. When the music sounds like it did in the venue where it was recoded, then one has accurate reproduction. You or I can get close to that ideal, but we can never get it perfect for a number of reasons. Because that's true, people tend to concentrate on those aspects of an accurate performance that they particularly value. Some want absolute flat frequency response in their listening room, others go for extremely low audible (as opposed to measurable) distortion, and still others find a palpable recreation of the soundstage to be all important. All of these requirements are mostly the product of the speakers chosen, the way they are set-up and the acoustics of the listening space. It's absolutely that basic. So called "tweaks", in my estimation, do very little if anything to improve these basic tasks of an audio system and mostly just color them, if they actually do anything at all. Buy a decent amplifier with a good reputation for playing well with a wide range of speakers, Find a pair of speakers that float your particular boat and do well, that which is important to you, take the time to set them up properly in your space and pay attention to room acoustics adding treatments where necessary, and front the entire system with the best source components you can find and play real recordings through them, and you will find that you have a system, that while far from perfect, will be very satisfying.  

 

I'll let the recordings speak for themselves ... if they do silly things to "enhance" the sound, then I can live with that - it just probably means I won't play it that often, because of the poor choices made. As a general rule, "audiophile" recordings, or ones from specialist recording crowds are my least listened to efforts - because, they sound like they have been gamed to suit the people who want their rigs to impress the listeners. I much prefer CDs ordinaire - much more interesting!

 

On the playback side, in the digital source world, it's quite hard to achieve true transparency - " extremely low audible (as opposed to measurable) distortion". Flat FR is of very low importance; "palpable recreation of the soundstage" comes automatically, when "extremely low distortion" is realised.

 

Nearly everyone doesn't know how to achieve true transparency ... so, they compromise: they largely follow your set of suggestions and end up with a system that to my ears is a long way from satisfactory; far too many obvious issues - and I could never live with such.

[fas42]

2 hours ago, STC said:

 

No. I am talking about recording the essence of the original sound as close to original. 

 

By placing your speakers correctly in a proper room it should sound like how you hear them far away. 

 

And also, in most concert halls the piano is not faced straight or backwards. It is usually placed side ways or in between. 

 

Now the orientation of the piano  position will surely will sound different but in a concert hall they seemed not to make a difference. That not because the piano is emitting all the strings sound from one single spot but the sound that arrives your ears no longer have lost the localization cues due to other factors. 

 

 

 

Piano sound varies enormously, depending upon how it was recorded. Every variation can be heard, from stark a few feet away from you, to swimming in a massive pool of reverberation, to being trapped in a small space way, way back, a half mile away from you. However, in every case it should still always sound like the "real thing" - just like a genuine piano never sounds fake, no matter how you happen to catch the sounds of it being played.

 

Amusingly, next door is a Yamaha grand, deep in the heart of the house, and a young chap with Aspbergers plays this with consummate skill for hours on end - hey, I reckon it sounds pretty real ...

[fas42]

On 07/02/2018 at 4:24 AM, gmgraves said:

How can you automatically recreate the soundstage when it isn't on the recording because very recordings are real stereo?

 

 

So when a person's stereo system achieve's a state of neutral transparency where recordings sound like the original performance when it was being recorded (as much as is possible), that's not true transparency? As far as I can see, the only way for a recording/playback cycle to be any more transparent, is for it to literally become a sonic "hologram" of the original performance and that's not possible with our current technology.

 

The soundstage is created either from what the microphones picked in the recording space for the particular situation, or how it was artificially enhanced - our hearing system interprets the clues, and "throws up" an illusion that matches that information. When a system is working well enough there just aren't any recordings that don't provide some sense of 3D space, IME.

 

Yes, neutral transparency is possible, meaning that the playback system provides no clues to its operation - but, I find this extremely rare: if I walk up to a speaker on most systems it's trivially easy to hear the drivers working, being the source of the sound.

[fas42]

14 minutes ago, STC said:

 

But I am just referring to how Mark Waldrep is trying to capture the sound of the piano.

 

 

Okay, "spectacular" piano sound may appeal to some people - and offend others; I have heard numerous pianos being played in the flesh over the years, and have stuck my head under the lid now and again to see what the sense of it is - it's just another dimension to what the instrument is, and I'm fine with that. Overall, what concerns me is whether the sound is 'wrong' or not, irrespective of what the recording chappy was trying to do - the anomalies due to the playback rig not being up to it annoy me far, far more than the perspectives chosen for the recording, by whoever.

[fas42]

10 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

... Secondly, I want real stereo. I want to hear not just left/right separation, but I want to hear front-to-back layering and image height. If you've ever attended a symphony performance, you have doubtless noticed that when the triangle player, way back on stage left, buried in the percussion section, strikes the triangle, the sound seems to "float" in the air, above the left side of the orchestra. I delight in hearing that effect emerge from my Martin-Logans and float over the left side of the orchestral image. Real stereo can do that because those phase cues are captured, and a good system can reproduce that. I can't get a recording to sound like an actual real performance, no recording can do that,  (but the 24/96 piano recordings from our CA Spanish Friend (who's name I can't remember), especially the Debussy with Angel Cabrera on The PlayClassics Label comes damn close!), but I can get a real stereo soundstage out of most any recording situation. I'll be happy with that, and leave realistic ambience reproduction for the next life (unless I come back as a banana slug, of course  )!

 

Yes, the presentation of that triangle is a good example of how competent playback works - the sound element has its own space; in fact, the recording space has its own identity, in its "silence" - say on an orchestral recording, where there is an introductory 'silence', you can hear, "see" the hall in front of you - before a note is played. All the background mutterings of real spaces is picked by the microphones, and is preserved, intact, on the recordings.

 

And this happens on pop recordings as well - live albums, some of the famous ones; Hot August Night by Neil Diamond is fabulous in this regard, conjure up a huge canopy of space which extends beautifully to frame the performance.

[fas42]

16 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Quite so. To get that result though, one has to understand both how humans hear and perceive sound intellectually, and how microphones pick-up sound. The difference between them and the engineer's understanding of those differences are, in my experience, The difference between a lifelike recreation of a musical event in your listening room and just some over-produced, loud and obnoxious cacophony of sound that only superficially resembles a performance. 

 

You're not giving the human hearing system enough 'respect', in terms of what it is capable of - yes, poor reproduction of many, many recordings will yield a "loud and obnoxious cacophony of sound that only superficially resembles a performance" - but that's because the picture is confused by the playback adding yet another layer of muddling, by blurring, discarding or otherwise distorting the vital clues and cues that our ear/brains need to unscramble the complexity of what's in the recording. I have heard the two extremes of presentation: "loud and obnoxious cacophony" and, a marvellous recreation of a complex sound field - of the same recording! The only difference was that in the first that the playback was inadequate; in the second, the SQ was now of a sufficient quality "for everything to make sense" - what I call, competent playback.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

Oh contrare, Tweek breath ! I give the human hearing system plenty of respect. The human ear/brain can do things that  microphones can't do, like pick a set of sonic parameters out of an environment full of sounds and concentrate on them. Microphones "hear" everything within their pickup pattern, indiscriminately. If I want the microphone to focus on something particular, I have to use more microphones and perhaps sonic baffles to isolate that sound. The human ear, can, in a concert situation, for instance, allow the listener to move closer to the music or further away simply by shifting his/her attention! Microphones can't do that. And the "best seat in the house" isn't the same for people and microphones. For a microphone capture to sound like the best seat in the house, I have to place the microphones much closer to the ensemble than that. The reason? A human in the "best seat" can ignore people coughing, rattling programs, shuffling feet and other extraneous noises, the microphone can't. The human might not even remember, afterwards, that these noises occurred because he/she was intently listening. Microphones can't do that, so I have to place them in such a way that minimizes (or better yet, eliminates) such extraneous noise. Oh no, my friend Human hearing is a very high-order machine for listening to music. 

 

A good sign! ... We're getting closer ...

 

Consider for one second, perfect microphone, perfect speakers - on the two sides of a formidable wall. On the microphone side is a musical ensemble of some sort, playing in a good acoustical space; on the other side, the speakers and you. The microphone passes what it hears to you, via some perfect amplification, and the speakers, to you - it is a perfect conduit; it's as if that formidable wall is not there at all ...

 

Now the premise of most is that microphones and speakers are so rough, so imperfect, that a real world conduit like this would be a miserable failure ... but, the tantalising truth is otherwise: the microphones pick up enough, and the speakers reproduce enough, for the ear/brain to get what's going on - and focus as desired, .

 

You see, microphones don't have to hear like humans - all that's necessary is "to pass it on", in enough detail. The fact that you never hear the replay like hearing the performance in the flesh, is because the state of the playback rig is not quite good enough - irrespective of your opinion of it, and what its specs say.

[fas42]

What the human hearing system can't do is compensate for too much damage done to the sound after being picked up by the microphones - typically, this happens in the playback chain. Our hearing gives up, and it's just a rowdy mess, unlistenable to - the interesting thing is that there is a very precise point of quality where the brain groks the whole - a switch goes on, and it "all makes sense". Unfortunately, this switch is a very hard taskmaster ... wanting the 'illusion' to happen, and throwing lot and lots of irrelevant and unnnecessary goodies at the situation doesn't help very much at all.

[fas42]

As an interesting aside, the new Dutch & Dutch 8c speakers have it "all in one box", and the work has been done by the engineers to get the package optimised to a high level. The reactions of buyers tell the story - this is 'competent' sound, or extremely close to it.

[fas42]

37 minutes ago, mansr said:

The recording conveys only a small amount of the spatial information we are able to pick up in person. This is not because our ears are in any way superior. It is merely because two speakers can never recreate the full sound field of the original event.

 

And what is the evidence that such is the case? Is the assumption there that the human hearing system is too limited in its capabilities, to be able to recreate a reasonable similarity to the original event as an internal 'picture', with the clues derived from audio playback?

[fas42]

5 minutes ago, semente said:

Listening to 2 channel stereo requires a certain degree of abstraction but not more than looking at a photograph or watching TV. I don't need 3D to enjoy a film or a documentary, in fact my experiences with 3D video were quite negative: the 3D-ness detracted from the realism and other, to me more important, aspects of image quality were negatively affected.

For me, music is sound, accurate spatial reproduction is a secondary, almost superfluous, effect.

 

The comparison with video is relevant, because it was determined some time ago that very high quality visual replay actually could throw an internal processing switch - the mind/body accepts that what it is looking at is real, and the person can't stop themselves reacting to the situation as a real world scenario that they are involved in - for example, the film shows the viewer being in a car out of control careering down a hill - an audience member could literally suffer a heart attack ...

 

I've found that this happens with sound projection - the illusion is accepted; and spatial perspectives come as part of the package, automatically.

[fas42]

4 minutes ago, mansr said:

It's simple physics. The clues you speak of are just not there.

 

How can you be sure the clues aren't there?

[fas42]

2 minutes ago, mansr said:

Because they weren't recorded.

 

IME the clues are recorded - but less than stellar playback conceals, blurs the critical information. Where is the evidence that the information is not actually present, as you claim?

[fas42]

The ear/brain reacts to all the acoustic information it picks up in the natural world around it, and has very little trouble distinguishing various sound sources, and locating them in the 3D world around oneself - all the tiny clues are present, and from a lifetime of hearing experience can make smart guesses, attribute the sounds from certain sources. The acoustic information is minute - right at this very minute there's a group of birds outside, cockatoos, wheeling around and sitting in trees - the doors are closed, the sound is coming through glass - but I can pinpoint where those birds are, with ease; and whether they're coming or going. Now, how clever is our hearing system to be able to do that so easily, with such "poor information" as I'm getting?

 

That information is on the recording to a sufficent degree for our brains to make sense of it - it's been endless times that I've listened to recordings I know well on other systems - and on them the particular audio world on the recording has shrunk down to a miserable cardboard cutout of what's actually there - I might as well have ear protection muffs on, in terms of what I'm getting from that playback ...

[fas42]

12 minutes ago, STC said:

 

Let’s be realistic. We are talking about music. How to have a better listening experience for music. I am not talking about recreating a real virtual sound machine which serves no purpose for this hobby although it works far better when implemented along 5.1 multichannel. 

 

...

 

No no need for the crazy sphere. Just get the Smyth Realizer. Btw, how old is the research?

 

No need for crazy spheres, or clever headphone playback. Two speakers can do what the Smyth device does, only better - as an example, you can leave the room, and come back in - and that experience matches how it would work with a "live show".

[fas42]

17 minutes ago, STC said:

 

Have you tried the Smyth? A properly setup 5.1 SACD with true multi channel recording will win hands down over a two channel stereo. 

 

No, but I recognise the qualities described by the people who've tried them - well sorted multi channel will likely add to the experience, but I have never felt the need for the "extra" - well done stereo is so satisfying that the appetite is just not there for it.

[fas42]

9 minutes ago, mansr said:

Whatever drugs you are smoking, can I have some?

 

The huge advantage I have over many people is that I "know", am 100% certain about, how good the reproduction can be - so even if I hear it done at a much less level I can "span the gap", and still get a buzz from the replay. Like listening to something you know on a bad car radio. This will never happen for someone who has not experienced the replay working that well - their "inner knowledge" can't add the necessary filler.

 

Everyone can get to that place, if they really want to - but they need to use the right approaches to sorting out their gear - most of the ways talked about are never going to be "good enough".