Blue or red pill?

[semente]

10 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

It is a good album for testing purposes ,as lesser systems highlight the sibilance on her voice, possibly due to hard limiting with the voice track?

 

If the sibilance is part of the recording then a good system should reproduce it in all its glory.

[adamdea]

13 hours ago, gmgraves said:

 

Lastly, and hopefully entertainingly, It takes practice and experimentation to know how to do both large-scale and intimate well, and believe me I've made a lot of mistakes over the years!

How about getting the cylindrical stereo mike 180 degrees backwards? Making the whole recording with the mike facing the audience with it's back to the music? How about while using a laptop running Audacity to capture a performance, getting interrupted by a well meaning patron who wanted to to talk about recording while I was setting-up? The result? I forgot to point Audacity, in software, toward the FireWire port which was connected to my ADC from my mixer! Halfway through the first number, I noticed that the R & L Vu-meters on Audacity were both registering as if they were receiving a mono signal! A frantic look around showed me what I had done. Audacity was "looking" at the laptop's built-in voice microphone, not at the mixer/ADC via the FireWire port! Luckily, I used a Zoom H2 wired directly to the mixer and set to 24/96, as a backup recorder so all was not lost. The client thought the recording sounded fine, but I knew that it wasn't as good as it would have been had I captured the performance to Audacity on the laptop! Believe me, there have been many more, my friends; many more!

I’m very interested in how you get good results out of stereo. As a matter of interest do you ever slip in a bit of extra ambience, or a spot, or allow them to edit a flub?

[sandyk]

33 minutes ago, semente said:

 

If the sibilance is part of the recording then a good system should reproduce it in all its glory.

 

 Sibilance is further exaggerated when there is low level system noise ,such as with many inferior USB Audio implementations. If it was an analogue recording, then you would be correct.

A peak in the speakers' response around 12-13KHZ will also exaggerate any sibilance.

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, adamdea said:

I hope you won’t mind my saying in turn that your views are plainly down to under-thinking and over-investment.

“If you think about it”... the “perspective” of your mikes is not how humans localise sound (beyond ITDs and ILDs). 

Only by that thinking can we look at how far the stereo process resembles real perception. 

Unfortunately you have trapped yourself in a conceptual straight jacket that by definition stereo captures everything.

 

It’s a shame. You don’t need this self-imposed imprisonment. Stereo is quite good and for most systems it’s all we have. Perhaps, all else being equal purist stereo recordings are probably more reliable than manufactured  ones. Obviously this is not an ineluctable conclusion (once you let go of the argument from word-play). But many non-purist recordings are very good. 

 

But real stereo and 3D stage imaging is my interest. It's the reason I started recording in the first place. Frankly, I can't understand why anyone would want to do it any other way. It's so palpably REAL, and every other way of recording is so phony sounding. My assumption (right or wrong) is that recording engineers have all these toys to play with, and by-the-gods, and by-cheeses, they-re gonna play with them even to the detriment of the recordings they make!

[gmgraves]

20 minutes ago, adamdea said:

I’m very interested in how you get good results out of stereo. As a matter of interest do you ever slip in a bit of extra ambience, or a spot, or allow them to edit a flub?

Sometimes I use spotlight mikes, but they're always subverient to the overall stereo pair. I don't like to, of course, but I have learned how to do it so that no one can tell a spotlight mike was used, it's just that the instrument(s) needing augmenting are now a wee bit louder than they were without the highlighting.

I once purchased an expensive spring reverb unit because the venue that a symphony orchestra I was recoding was so dry., Something had to be done!

As far as edits are concerned to fix gaffs in the playing, the fact that I'm usually recording a live performance, generally precludes that. I have got to do it maybe a handful of times. The most notable was when the orchestra.that I was recording was asked to perform the world premier of Virgil Thompson's "Requiem Mass" and then, send the finished tape to the Pulitzer Committee as the work had been nominated that year for the music prize. I had to do a lot of editing and cleaning up of that performance for sure! No, I don't believe Thompson won, but I heard later that the committee liked the recording!

[gmgraves]

22 hours ago, STC said:

 

We are in this predicament because initially the inventor himself wrongly called it binaural. It is understandable for the confusion since stereo is non existent prior to the invention . 

 

 

We are in this "predicament" because in the late 1950's when stereophonic vinyl records came on the market, it was necessary to come up with a way to differentiate, in the marketplace, between monaural records which had no vertical component to their groove modulation and Westrex 45/45 (stereo) discs which had both vertical and horizontal groove excursion and needed a smaller than a one mil stylus - the norm being a 0.7 mil, although some 0.5 mils were available (this is before the elliptical stylus was developed). If one had a mono rig in those days and accidentally bought and played a stereo record with a mono stylus and cartridge, one play would ruin it! The record industry did two things to solve this problem, they charged a dollar more for the stereo version of any release than they did for the mono version, and they emblazoned the word STEREO in great big letters at the top of the record cover. It didn't matter what the contents were, the actual record was labeled stereo because it required special playback equipment to keep from destroying it! The habit was thus formed of calling anything with two channels, stereo. But it wasn't because the program material was stereo, necessarily, it was because the medium was stereo. Some record companies (like Capitol) would take earlier mono material and "re-channel" it for "stereo" (usually with a comb filter) to get that extra buck! It was not more stereo than today's latest pop hits, but the precedent was set, and it stuck.The convention is obsolete now as all media, whether vinyl, CD, or hi-rez file, is now, by definition, stereo and today's playback equipment doesn't care. 

[gmgraves]

22 hours ago, fas42 said:

"I just have never heard or believe any system can ever be engineered that will convincingly sound like live..."

 

And it's easy to understand why you would think that - very few people achieve it, because it requires everything to be in place; just plugging together a set of components, no matter how "brilliant" they are, is almost guaranteed to not be good enough. I got there by accident - if I had happened to not have been as enthusastic and focused as I was at the time, and the combo wasn't intrinsically good enough to deliver, I would believe as you do, also.

I'm afraid that this is stuff and nonsense. We can never get anything that will convincingly sound like live because it's not possible to record a sound field with microphones that will capture the sheer acoustic energy and presence of a live performance. FAS42 would have you believe that it's there, on the recordings, but you have to have "special knowledge" to know how to retrieve it from your recordings, and it can not be retrieved merely by buying the best components and stringing them together; I.E. you can't "buy" your way to audio epiphany, you have to use what I can only guess are special spells and incantations - and, oh, yes, dress your cables! 

The truth is with all of our sophistication, we simply cannot catch the essence of live music playing in a live space! And honestly, I'm not too sure that we would want to! Do you want the sheer acoustical energy of a symphony orchestra in your living room? Do you realize how loud that would be? Do you have any feel for how many Watts it would take to achieve that sound pressure level? We can't even come close to perfectly re-creating the sound of a single trumpet so that it fools someone into thinking it's real. Never mind larger ensembles. 

[beerandmusic]

7 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

I'm afraid that this is stuff and nonsense. We can never get anything that will convincingly sound like live because it's not possible to record a sound field with microphones that will capture the sheer acoustic energy and presence of a live performance. FAS42 would have you believe that it's there, on the recordings, but you have to have "special knowledge" to know how to retrieve it from your recordings, and it can not be retrieved merely by buying the best components and stringing them together; I.E. you can't "buy" your way to audio epiphany, you have to use what I can only guess are special spells and incantations - and, oh, yes, dress your cables! 

The truth is with all of our sophistication, we simply cannot catch the essence of live music playing in a live space! And honestly, I'm not too sure that we would want to! Do you want the sheer acoustical energy of a symphony orchestra in your living room? Do you realize how loud that would be? Do you have any feel for how many Watts it would take to achieve that sound pressure level? We can't even come close to perfectly re-creating the sound of a single trumpet so that it fools someone into thinking it's real. Never mind larger ensembles. 

 

space, separation, and direction are even more obvious that we will never obtain even remotely close to live

I can't believe anyone would suggest you can obtain "live" fidelity no matter how good your equipment is....especially not at 44.1K (joke).

[gmgraves]

Just now, beerandmusic said:

 

space, separation, and direction are even more obvious that we will never obtain close to live

I can't believe anyone would suggest you can obtain "live" fidelity.

Me either. My only guess is that people who think that they have achieved audio nirvana never get to listen to live music and they have their systems "tweaked" to give what they think they like, rather than what sounds real (possibly because they don't know what REAL actually sounds like). I've run across many people who thought that super-etched highs, brassy midrange and big bass was what real music sounds like. They're wrong, that's what listener fatigue sounds like. But, hey, if one doesn't know any better...

[beerandmusic]

26 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Me either. My only guess is that people who think that they have achieved audio nirvana never get to listen to live music and they have their systems "tweaked" to give what they think they like, rather than what sounds real (possibly because they don't know what REAL actually sounds like). I've run across many people who thought that super-etched highs, brassy midrange and big bass was what real music sounds like. They're wrong, that's what listener fatigue sounds like. But, hey, if one doesn't know any better...

 

IMHO, someone shouldn't even need to experience live music to even realize this.  one can hear more "music" in hearing someone in an adjacent room stirring a fork in a mixing bowl to appreciate what "live" can offer over recorded.  You can percieve distance, directon, height, depth, and sonics far greater than what can be reproduced.

[fas42]

13 hours ago, semente said:

 

 

And everything includes one's imagination, audiophilia's most underrated component. 

 

A key aspect of imagination is that it's an active behaviour - the conscious mind is deliberately 'conjuring' up mental pictures, a determined, focused activity - it requires energy to exercise such, and to maintain it.

 

The convincing sound I talk about just ... is ... irrespective of whether you plunk yourself dead centre between the speakers and focus like crazy, or completely ignore it, or start talking to someone in the next room, or go outside and do some gardening. It never fails to pass any litmus test - main reason is that all the clues that it's 'fake' are below audibility, and the unconscious mind has nothing to grab on to, to spoil the illusion.

 

IOW, the apparent illusion is both active and passive - just like how sounds work in the "real world".

[beerandmusic]

19 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

A key aspect of imagination is that it's an active behaviour - the conscious mind is deliberately 'conjuring' up mental pictures, a determined, focused activity - it requires energy to exercise such, and to maintain it.

 

The convincing sound I talk about just ... is ... irrespective of whether you plunk yourself dead centre between the speakers and focus like crazy, or completely ignore it, or start talking to someone in the next room, or go outside and do some gardening. It never fails to pass any litmus test - main reason is that all the clues that it's 'fake' are below audibility, and the unconscious mind has nothing to grab on to, to spoil the illusion.

 

IOW, the apparent illusion is both active and passive - just like how sounds work in the "real world".

 

I can only accept this if 4 Way Window Pane is part of the formula....but then a boom box will work too....in the real world, no system will ever come close to reproducing the live.

[Ralf11]

the unconscious mind is continually 'conjuring' up mental pictures

[sandyk]

8 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

the unconscious mind is continually 'conjuring' up mental pictures

Quote

https://www.verywellmind.com › Psychology › Theories › Cognitive Psychology

1. Cached

May 30, 2016 - In Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality, the unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict.

 

[fas42]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

I'm afraid that this is stuff and nonsense. We can never get anything that will convincingly sound like live because it's not possible to record a sound field with microphones that will capture the sheer acoustic energy and presence of a live performance. FAS42 would have you believe that it's there, on the recordings, but you have to have "special knowledge" to know how to retrieve it from your recordings, and it can not be retrieved merely by buying the best components and stringing them together; I.E. you can't "buy" your way to audio epiphany, you have to use what I can only guess are special spells and incantations - and, oh, yes, dress your cables! 

The truth is with all of our sophistication, we simply cannot catch the essence of live music playing in a live space! And honestly, I'm not too sure that we would want to! Do you want the sheer acoustical energy of a symphony orchestra in your living room? Do you realize how loud that would be? Do you have any feel for how many Watts it would take to achieve that sound pressure level? We can't even come close to perfectly re-creating the sound of a single trumpet so that it fools someone into thinking it's real. Never mind larger ensembles. 

 

Microphones do "capture the sheer acoustic energy and presence of a live performance" - and the answer is not "special spells and incantations" - the 'magic' is being able, firstly, to know when a system is audibly below par; and, secondly, have a set of methods and procedures to follow to hopefully circumvent the issues.

 

Dressing cables sounds silly, to many people, but the unfortunate truth is that just enough interference results from not thinking about these possibilities - because the materials used in cabling have characteristics which overlap into the electrical area - and from long, "painful" experience I know that if I don't worry about these matters then I don't get the results I want.

 

The "essence of live music playing" doesn't need loudness - a competent system "gets it right" even at whisper levels - it just sounds like it's happening a lot further away, in the same way that live acoustic music comes across when it's at some distance.

 

Sibilance is an easy learning path to being able to "hear" distortion - when it irritates, sounds unnatural, that's a clear marker to the setup having issues. IOW, it's not the recording - it's the playback of such which is where the problems are.

[STC]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

Me either. My only guess is that people who think that they have achieved audio nirvana never get to listen to live music and they have their systems "tweaked" to give what they think they like, rather than what sounds real (possibly because they don't know what REAL actually sounds like). I've run across many people who thought that super-etched highs, brassy midrange and big bass was what real music sounds like. They're wrong, that's what listener fatigue sounds like. But, hey, if one doesn't know any better...

 

This is so true.  I have attended to so many setups where they make ludicrous claims about reaching reaching audio nirvana and also contrary assertion by many others that it wasn’t possible with playback to achieve live playback with stereo, or even multi channel although they are far more closer to realism than stereo.  Many would argue otherwise that 5.1 material cannot be better than stereo but almost all of the would only have compared with their AV setup to the high end stereo sound. 

 

Look around for someone dedicated in perfecting 5.1 sound reproduction for music and then make the comparison. 

 

You cannot hear live like playback without  getting the second part of the equation which is the room reverberation correct. Room RT is a separate element that cannot be recorded in full and must be reproduced separately.  An organ will sound better in church where the RT exceeds way above 2 seconds than in most concert hall.  A quartet or studio recordings will sound better in a small concert hall than a big one unless they could bring down the ceiling to compensate the the direct sound level on a big concert room. 

 

Our hearing is binaural and realism can only achieved if the reproduction confirms to binaural reproduction. I said reproduction which not necessarily must be binaural recordings.  Stereo is not binaural and it is an exercise in futility to try to achieve realism with stereo. It cannot be done. 

[fas42]

1 hour ago, beerandmusic said:

 

I can only accept this if 4 Way Window Pane is part of the formula....but then a boom box will work too....in the real world, no system will ever come close to reproducing the live.

 

Playback never gets it exactly right - but there is a certain height of the hurdle that SQ has to be able to jump across. A hurdle is the right analogy: below that, it's complete failure to make the grade; above that, success! Jumping even higher over the hurdle is a solid plus, but the nature of what is gained is far less dramatic.

[ShawnC]

Has date been set for when this listening session will begin?  There have been numerous side stories to this initial thread, not sure if it's worth following anymore.

[fas42]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Me either. My only guess is that people who think that they have achieved audio nirvana never get to listen to live music and they have their systems "tweaked" to give what they think they like, rather than what sounds real (possibly because they don't know what REAL actually sounds like). I've run across many people who thought that super-etched highs, brassy midrange and big bass was what real music sounds like. They're wrong, that's what listener fatigue sounds like. But, hey, if one doesn't know any better...

 

The hifi nuts "don't get it" - a good compliment is when I'm running the system as loud as it can go, without entering distortion territory,  and other people are completely oblivious to the volume - at this time the sound has 'intensity', all the transients, all the bite is there; without unnaturally drawing attention to itself.

[mansr]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Do you want the sheer acoustical energy of a symphony orchestra in your living room? Do you realize how loud that would be? Do you have any feel for how many Watts it would take to achieve that sound pressure level?

An orchestral performance can reach 100 dB or so. Suppose our speakers have a (low) sensitivity of 82 dB at 1 W and 1 m. If we are listening at a (long) distance of 4 m, this drops by 24 dB, ignoring room reflections, leaving us 42 dB short of the target. This means we need 128 W (7 doublings of 6 dB) to reach 100 dB at the listening position. And that's just one channel. Just about any selection of amp and speakers can deliver this. In practice, we are usually closer to the speakers (at least in European coffin apartments), and reflections mean the decay isn't actually quadratic with distance. I'd say you're unlikely to ever exceed 80 W per channel.

[mansr]

19 minutes ago, ShawnC said:

Has date been set for when this listening session will begin? 

Mid/late March.

[STC]

25 minutes ago, mansr said:

An orchestral performance can reach 100 dB or so. Suppose our speakers have a (low) sensitivity of 82 dB at 1 W and 1 m. If we are listening at a (long) distance of 4 m, this drops by 24 dB, ignoring room reflections, leaving us 42 dB short of the target. This means we need 128 W (7 doublings of 6 dB) to reach 100 dB at the listening position. And that's just one channel. Just about any selection of amp and speakers can deliver this. In practice, we are usually closer to the speakers (at least in European coffin apartments), and reflections mean the decay isn't actually quadratic with distance. I'd say you're unlikely to ever exceed 80 W per channel.

 

Loudness that we perceive also dependent on the reverberation level.  In a proper setup with system possible of concert level of over 100dB peaks, you need more than 80W.  I think at the  peak of crescendo I used to clip the 500W amplifier.  With another 10 amplifiers for ambient, I believe I need another 500W.  That only at the peaks.  

[Ralf11]

time it for the Ides of March

[mansr]

14 minutes ago, STC said:

Loudness that we perceive also dependent on the reverberation level.

How would that require more power than anechoic conditions?

 

14 minutes ago, STC said:

In a proper setup with system possible of concert level of over 100dB peaks, you need more than 80W.  I think at the  peak of crescendo I used to clip the 500W amplifier.  With another 10 amplifiers for ambient, I believe I need another 500W.  That only at the peaks.  

In that case, your peaks are far above 100 dB. It's simple maths. Even allowing for typical speaker impedance variation with frequency, you wouldn't need more than double the nominal power.

[mansr]

15 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

time it for the Ides of March

Not possible, unfortunately.