Sanity Check

[AudioDoctor]

12 minutes ago, rando said:

Ha, why did I think you lived in Australia?  And had a penchant for Sven & Ole jokes you picked up on MPR.    

 

CUV came about because, predominantly, sub five and half foot women started insisting on daily driving large pickups and SUV's.  In the physical world that meant putting the seat full forward and looking through more than over a near fully vertically adjusted wheel.  So in event of a latte and texting distracted crash.  The absurdly ill fitting seatbelt severed what was left of their head off after the steering wheel mounted airbag turned it into paste.  In a similar but very different manner than the bottom of the wheel did to their internal organs.  

 

I must have some damned good eye site, I can see downtown St Paul and MPR from where I am right now!

 

edit: I have no idea what the Aussie equivalent of a Sven & Ole joke would be.

 

Women do like sitting up high so they can see everything.  I think we can all agree a gruesome death is not deserved for that.

[Ralf11]

https://www.google.com/search?q=lucas+prince+of+darkness&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjuzvLdqpDZAhVdGGMKHfJzA1YQ_AUICygC&biw=1231&bih=709

[Ralf11]

35 minutes ago, AudioDoctor said:

...They buy them in an effort to reduce how hurt they get in the inevitable accident they will get into by not paying any attention at all to the road.  ...

 

I thought it was to avoid looking like a soccer mom in a mini-Van?

[AudioDoctor]

But, is this guy really having such a bad day?

[AudioDoctor]

Just now, Ralf11 said:

 

I thought it was to avoid looking like a soccer mom in a mini-Van?

 

Is it better to look like a Soccer Mom in an SUV?

[Fluffytime]

1 minute ago, AudioDoctor said:

But, is this guy really having such a bad day?

 

I'd rather be helping them push than ride the bike.

 

*cough*

[AudioDoctor]

I cant help but laugh at that.  I have no retort.

[Fluffytime]

Just now, AudioDoctor said:

I cant help but laugh at that.  I have no retort.

 

I'm just saying...

[rando]

3 minutes ago, AudioDoctor said:

Women do like sitting up high so they can see everything.  I think we can all agree a gruesome death is not deserved for that.

 

No, it was a mass panic safety issue that got very quickly solved in time for the next model year by fitting power rising seats and belt adjusters standard in most of those vehicles.  Once they really looked at it the side curtain air bags turned that last ride into a medieval torture device under an alarming number of circumstances near what I described. 

 

It is truly fascinating how different the outcome of a bad yet below highway speed crash is in a modern vehicle vs one of a vintage barely new enough to have shoulder belts fitted and of similar size.  Outside the now corrected circumstance I described involving people of smaller stature. 

[AudioDoctor]

5 minutes ago, rando said:

 

No, it was a mass panic safety issue that got very quickly solved in time for the next model year by fitting power rising seats and belt adjusters standard in most of those vehicles.  Once they really looked at it the side curtain air bags turned that last ride into a medieval torture device under an alarming number of circumstances near what I described. 

 

It is truly fascinating how different the outcome of a bad yet below highway speed crash is in a modern vehicle vs one of a vintage barely new enough to have shoulder belts fitted and of similar size.  Outside the now corrected circumstance I described involving people of smaller stature. 

 

During the time I have been practicing, roughly 14 years not counting residency, the amount of safety devices and safety engineered into cars has increased quite a bit. It has had noticeable impact on the types and severity of injuries from car accidents to properly restrained individuals of all sizes.  If your Kid isn't properly buckled into a properly secured car seat, then all bets are off.

[Ralf11]

Do they have ATVs up there?

[elcorso]

2 hours 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.  

 

Maybe Mark Waldrep likes to be closer to the music! 

 

Roch

[rando]

2 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

Do they have ATVs up there?

 

Only the majority of the US industry.  Snowmobiles as well.

[elcorso]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

I think you'll find that Lucas Electrics is out of business as of August 1996. Gotta hand it to them though, they ignored decades of complaints, and built 1920's vintage car electrics till the very last! I actually think that they made distributor caps and rotors out of compressed cow (or was it sheep?) dung.

 

Good old news!

 

Anyway I'm out of electric mods on engines since car computers and sensors are hard to cheat. I do some mods on the exhaust and in the intake now to increase the power / efficiency because I enjoy the power / acceleration.

 

Roch

[Spacehound]

10 hours ago, elcorso said:

 

Range Rovers used to be an extraordinary four wheeler. Soft enough not to break you spine but strong and powerful.  Very nice car here in the Rainforest.  But... after their introduction in the American market it turned a luxury car, insane prices with the largest failure rate ever seen!

 

I owned a 1980 German built.

 

Now I love my Toyota Tacoma.

 

Roch

You are absolutely correct.

 

When the Range Rover first came out it was not too expensive, rather 'utilitarian' inside but roomy and quite comfortable,, had only two doors (for maximum rigidity, even though it was a 'hatchback with a third door on the back for the sheep),  and a  license-built Buick V8 for good performance and  of known reliability.

 

Then they spoilt it....

[AudioDoctor]

23 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

Do they have ATVs up there?

 

I think some brand of Snow Mobiles are built right here in MN.

[STC]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

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.

 

 

Isn't the width depends on your speakers spread?  If your speakers are 6ft apart than the piano will be more or less 6ft wide. If it is 12 then you get 12ft piano. No?

 

No system is ever going to sound as good as in concert hall. We do not have the space. The space will give you the nice 1.5 to 2.5 seconds reverberation which is difficult to be reproduced in our small listening room. The sound of instuments as heard by us encompasses both direct and a lots of omnidirectional reverberation.

[Ralf11]

8 minutes ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

I think some brand of Snow Mobiles are built right here in MN.

 

There's your ER funding, right there...

[Fluffytime]

40 minutes ago, elcorso said:

 

Maybe Mark Waldrep likes to be closer to the music! 

 

Roch

 

Maybe Mark Waldrep is just like GUTB.

 

Fluffy

[AudioDoctor]

14 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

There's your ER funding, right there...

 

Arctic Cat has been sold, but it still based here I guess.

 

www.startribune.com/longtime-minnesota-snowmobile-maker-arctic-cat-sold-for-247m/411748026/

[gmgraves]

15 hours ago, fas42 said:

"palpable recreation of the soundstage" comes automatically, when "extremely low distortion" is realised.

 

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

 

15 hours ago, fas42 said:

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.

 

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.

[Thuaveta]

13 hours ago, STC said:

No system is ever going to sound as good as in concert hall. We do not have the space. The space will give you the nice 1.5 to 2.5 seconds reverberation which is difficult to be reproduced in our small listening room. The sound of instuments as heard by us encompasses both direct and a lots of omnidirectional reverberation.

 

just to be really pedantic, "ever" is a long time, and, hopefully, @flak might disagree with it being used... 

[Spacehound]

15 minutes ago, 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.

Soundstage is a product of microphony in tube amplifiers either in the studio or your home

[gmgraves]

13 hours ago, elcorso said:

 

Maybe Mark Waldrep likes to be closer to the music! 

 

Roch

 

Yes, he has told me as much. He thinks that kind of recording sounds "better than real". But I say he's every kind of wrong here. When our technology doesn't allow us to achieve anything close to real, shouldn't that be the recording engineers primary goal? To strive at making each recording sound closer and closer to the real thing rather than running off on some "cartoon" tangent where every recording is overproduced to the point of being a burlesque of the musical event? It is possible to get it "satisfyingly realistic" sounding. Now, I think that Ray Kimble's cables are mouse milk, and of no value, but when he was making recordings with his IsoMike principle they sounded like music! 4 mikes were used; two to mike the stage space where the performers were playing, and two facing the back of the hall to capture the ambience. The is the kind of forward movement in the art and science of recording that I'm talking about. Pianos are the right size, and sound like concert grands, string ensembles image so well, that you can close your eyes and see where each instrument is located in three dimensional space before you. If every recording were given the care and attention to recreating the performance venue as perfectly as possible, we'd be living in the "golden age" of stereo instead of the "age of dross"!  

[flak]

17 minutes ago, Thuaveta said:

 

just to be really pedantic, "ever" is a long time, and, hopefully, @flak might disagree with it being used... 

 

Yes Thuaveta

 

Stereo recording and playback have limitations that are discussed here:

https://www.dirac.com/dirac-blog/stereophonic-system-phantom-sources

but, as you say, "ever" is a long time and there is room for improvement in the future, for example:

https://www.dirac.com/dirac-blog/perfect-sound-system-with-3d-sound-reproduction

 

Flavio