Blue or red pill?

[fas42]

15 hours ago, beerandmusic 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.

 

Th main consideration is not that the components are superbly engineered, but that the system has no significant weaknesses - the latter cause audible anomalies, all the little telltale signs that immediately flag the sound as being 'fake' - your mind has zero chance of being convinced, . The only solution, at the moment, is to diligently work through the issues, and 'fix' them all - convincing sound then pops out, automatically.

 

The mind is quite happy to be fooled, but it requires a certain standard of quality to accept the illusion; something which is completely out of one's conscious control - I know precisely how a recording should sound, but if I do something which I believe is enough to get me there; but it isn't the answer - then, no cigar. IOW, expectation bias does not help one iota; at least for me, the SQ has to be right - anything less won't be convincing.

[fas42]

11 hours ago, adamdea said:

Now in this respect a purist stereo recording is good. The chances of making something of the information mess are improved from a bad multi mic affair because the very limited spatial information should at least be consistent. But what is recorded and what comes back to the listener is only vaguely like what their ears would have received if they were sittign at the same spot as the mic (and this is assuming a perfect stereo playback system and room).

 

That is the starting point for trying to work out what we experience when listening to the stereo recording and how that may or may not map to the real recorded space.

 

 

The conventional understanding of why "good stereo" works is only part of the story - the other aspect is that the internal digesting of the sound information can throw up a powerfully impressive version of the "real recorded space"(s) - so long as there are not too many contradictions in the sound information!

 

The fact that real world systems nearly always add too much distortion is never mentioned in these theoretical expalantions for "how it works" - An Inconvenient Truth ... but unfortunately, at the heart of the matter ...

[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".

[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.

[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.

[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.

[fas42]

18 minutes ago, STC said:

 

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.  

 

60W per channel, on average sensitivity speakers is enough to get things like piano in the room, at "full frenzy" playing levels, done well - turns out the biggest problem is having enough gain on tap in the chain, to make sure older recordings mastered at low levels can be replayed at realistic volumes.

 

Modern, compressed pop recordings are 'diabolically' loud with only so much power - need to be turned down a lot, otherwise one's ears start ringing ...

[fas42]

24 minutes ago, STC said:

 

While understand you because I spent a good part of my life perfecting stereo, you have not a slightest idea what I am talking about.  I am taking about  loudness level that is arbitrary and subject to the genre which is separately reproduce according  psychoacoustics  and actual concert loudness level or at least closer to that. 

 

Not quite sure what you're saying here - there are known levels of peak loudness experienced by members in an audience of a concert performance, say - and for other situations. A system to be fully capable should be able to generate those SPLs in the room - and 120dB as an absolute peak would be way good enough. Something like 110dB is probably more what I would be happy with, in everyday circumstances.

 

Playing the 'wrong' material at higher levels is deafening - not interested in this, at all.

[fas42]

5 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

 

Do tell! And what microphones do this?  Because I've never seen/heard a pair in more than 30 years of recording, and that includes Neumann U87, AKG414, Sony C37P and C-500, Telefunken ELA-M-270, etc. Not only that but I've never known another recording engineer who has ever found these "magic microphones" of yours either, and I've known a lot of those.

And you're saying that this "set of methods and procedures" makes your system sound so much better than anybody else's system that it transcends the shortcomings of both recordings and other audiophiles' less than Olympian systems? Sounds like spells and incantations to me.

 

You still haven't answered why you think these microphones have a problem - how have you assessed them to be deficient? By listening to a set of monitors, a playback system?

[fas42]

1 hour ago, STC said:

 

As I say, in concert halls, the actual loudness at listeners position is higher than the actual spl of the instrument itself. That loudness is not coming from the direct sound. That also a reason why when someone speaks on stage without a microphone in a concert hall it is still loud and clear even if you sit relatively far away. Either you know this as fact or you don’t. Without you understanding this principle it is hard to explain about actual loudspeakers loudness and actual loudness level at listeners position in concert hall. 

 

Well, there's a  difference between subjective 'loudness', and what a sound meter registers - as regards the latter there is a body of research as to what the levels are that players in the orchestra will hear - in the order of 120 -130dB at peak intensities, depending upon precisely what is being played, and the position of the player. Enough to cause concern for their welfare - but I have not seen anything like those numbers for a position in the audience seats; I recall 110dB being mentioned as the peak level in the front seats, at one point.

 

Subjectively, how "loud" something is varies enormously - this is mentioned regularly in audio forums; and I'm certainly aware how much it alters depending upon the quality level of the playback. I normally use the term "intensity" to express the sensation of the sound being like a physical force, impacting upon the body - you could call it, volume with clarity.

[fas42]

29 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Yes, they are deficient - all of them. Every mike sounds different. That means that at the very least, most of them are wrong and in reality, they all are! If they were all correct and perfect, they'd all sound the same. They sound different for pretty much the same reason that speakers and phonograph cartridges all sound different: They are not perfect transducers - none of them are! It's not possible to make a perfect transducer - the laws of physics see to that. 

Perhaps you don't know this but the reason why most recording studios have lots of different brands and models and vintages of microphones around is simply because they all sound different. You'll hear an engineer say, "I'm going to put the U87 on the vocalist because it makes her voice sound less chesty." or "I'm going to use the Schoeps on the piano, because it's a good mike for bringing out the character of the Steinway." In other words, they take advantage of the different characteristics of the different microphones. If all microphones were perfect, and thus sounded the same, they could use the same mikes on everything. 

 

Okay, they all sound different - but that doesn't mean they can't capture the qualities that live sound impresses us with. Violins of different ages, by different makers, all vary in their tonality - but they all still sound like "real" violins - the sound changes, but is not degraded so that it no longer sounds "real".

 

Same thing with recordings - the better the system, the more the character of how it was made, the equipment used, is clearly evident in the presentation - if one chooses to focus on that. But that does not interfere with the sense of what you are hearing as being 'live music' - an analogy in the visual field might be watching a stage production, where every night a different set of hands, and decisions were being made as to how the lighting was done, what 'colours' were used to emphasise the stage action; at no point would anyone in the audience think it was only a bunch of robots on stage, pretending to be human actors .

[fas42]

16 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

 If someone is interested in ambience retrieval, that's fine. Just because it's not my area of interest doesn't mean that it shouldn't be someone else's! 

 

STC deliberately processes the signal to emphasise the ambience content, or actively alters it to create a certain space. Which is perfectly valid as an exercise in getting the most from the listening - I have found that the ambience detail in recordings, as is, is good enough for to maximising listening pleasure, if one goes to the effort of refining the playback as straight stereo.

 

The retrieval of the ambience just automatically follows, the way I go about things - you can't just say, "I don't want any of that ambience nonsense!!" - it's part of the package ... .

[fas42]

8 minutes ago, STC said:

 

If you sing at 80db in open field and compared the same sound in bathroom, you will perceive the 80dB is louder in bathroom compared to open field. 

 

Your voice and your position have have not changed between those two venue and yet your perceive difference loudness level and most likely would perceive the sound in the bathroom to be more pleasing to you. 

 

The same principle applies in concert hall.  You perceive it being louder because of reverberations late reflection arriving your ears from various points which makes the subjectively louder. There are many papers explaning this.  

 

So where is the 80dB measured? In the open field the fall off in level is very fast; in the bathroom it will be largely uniform, from the echos contributing to the whole.

 

Okay, you have now used the term "subjectively louder" - and I would agree. The sound is 'richer', more immersive in the experience ... and this is what happens with convincing playback: the volume control is not touched, whatsoever, but the sense of what you hear has expanded - you're getting, Big Sound ...

[fas42]

4 minutes ago, STC said:

 

Thats not exactly true. The original sound in the playback is not altered in anyway. The front speakers still play the same sound. It is more like having about several more two channels system each playing different reverberation. You need not disturb the existing front speakers setup or signal in anyway. They remain pure. 

 

Yes, the front remains pure, but you have enhanced what the listener hears by adding in extra versions of that signal, into the listening area - from the POV of the audience, the signal has been altered.

 

As regards the other confusion in communication, what you call "loudness" I would call "apparent size of the presentation" ...

[fas42]

18 minutes ago, STC said:

 

 

Sorry to be pedantic. The literature on this subject refers to that as loudness so please don’t add more confusion by making up your own terminology. Is there any reason why you refuse to accept the term loudness as referred in various papers on this subject matter?

 

No prob's ... if the papers are using that term I'm happy to go with that. The problem arises when some, like me, think that specific dBs are being discussed - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness mentions the problem.

[fas42]

8 hours ago, STC said:

Now you know why the claim of hearing 3D sound with just ordinary two speakers stereo setup without the aid of ambient speakers is ludicrous. Ambience must come from direction other than from where the direct sound originated. 

 

People are making the business of creating an immersive, "3D" experience very complicated here, with the fancy microphone setups, and scores of speakers - the 2 speakers does it, because one's mind fills in the extra "dimensions", to match the clues in the recording. Whether technically there is 3D sound, to me is irrelevant, because the experience matches what I hear in real life - it's as good as the "real thing".

 

Again, it's all about the SQ - not the arrangement, or positioning, or dispersion of the speakers. I can make any system of mine that is presenting convincing, holographic sound fields to drop back, degrade to tedious, 2D, conventional stereo sound - simply by undoing a couple of critical tweaks in the playback chain. The difference between the two modes is remarkable - because the mind flicks over an internal switch, deciding whether to be fooled, or not to be.

[fas42]

3 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Real stereo sound is never 2D by definition. It always has width, depth and height. OTOH, pan-potted studio produced two-channel sound is always 2D because it only has width (i.e. right to left placement). 

 

You're determined that only recording techniques such as you use can allow a sense of space and realism to pervade the playback. Luckily, you're completely wrong! "Palpable and exciting" is the nature of all recordings - and it only requires a certain standard of replay for that experience to be had. The reason the reproduction has to be of a very high standard is that the ear/brain needs all the cues to be in place "to get the message" - and unless the recording methodology went to some effort to deliberately reinforce those clues, as your way of recording does, then the inadequacy of normal playback blurs the critical information. Meaning, 2D sound - the mind can't make sense of what it needs to, and just interprets what it hears as being a flat projection.

 

Pop productions are the most miraculous of all - they can go from a confused cacophony to an extremely rich, complex, immersive 3D world - depending upon how creative the producer was, what ideas he had. Very few people ever appreciate the fascinating tapestries of sound that exist on "ordinary" recordings - because their systems are not up to resolving what's there.

[fas42]

8 minutes ago, semente said:

 

Your optimism is only matched by that of my wife's late grandfather who lived to be 104. 

 

Not optimistic, pragmatic ... when I first heard competent replay, I was bowled over by the experience - this is bloody amazing!!!, I thought. Most respectable recordings did well - but I had a good stack of 'duds' which I presumed could never deliver a better presentation.

 

Well, I was wrong ... over the years I kept learning what needed to be considered, and experimenting with new ideas on optimising - and lo and behold, some of the duds suddenly came good - but not others. And then further down the track some more moved to the good pile ... . Eventually I got the message, - and just gave myself a motto, "There's no such thing as a bad recording!" - and that's been a very reliable guide.

[fas42]

24 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Thankfully one of us can hear (hint: it isn't you ). Because you can't get accurate soundstage from multi-mike/multi-channel productions. It isn't captured and it's not there. And no attempt has even been made by the recording engineers/ producers to capture that information. They aren't even looking for that kind of effect! It's that simple.

 

 

Yes, they're not looking to create such an effect - they're after a certain sound, and they use various production methods to give an overall impact; the result is that a whole lot of information is embedded in the track, which on competent replay all makes sense - the mind can unscramble what's going on; and it's a delight to the ears.

 

I think sometimes the creators get a buzz from inserting Easter eggs, a sort of private whim, which "only they know about" - I'm thinking here of some "Crystal Shop CDs" I picked up - full of synthesizer noodling for meditation, etc; buried deep in the tracks, at very low levels, far in the distance, are short bursts of interesting "things" happening - like an animal suddenly scurrying from one burrow to another, in a seemingly empty landscape. So, these "incredibly boring throwaways" are now fascinating to listen to, waiting for the next "animal" to pop its head up.

 

Quote

Gee, you must access to pop recordings that no one else has, because I certainly have never heard a modern pop recording that wasn't so overproduced that it sounds like shit!. I have heard such recordings that weren't awful , but that's just damning with faint praise.

 

Depends what you call modern - my favourites are from decades ago. Yes, the recent "Top 40" stuff is severely overcooked, but I listen for the musical ideas which the makers can't help but put in - I'm tuning into everything that the young crowd ignores; because the creativity is always there, if you listen for it.

[fas42]

41 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

 Any recording that has a large amount of obvious audible peak level clipping, as can also be verified by a Sound Editing program IS a bad recording !

 

Peak level clipping is a whole interesting area of discussion in its own right - there are so many ways to "cook" a recording, to make it "impossible" to listen to - and obvious, visual clipping may be a culprit here, or it may not. Modern production techniques can squash everything hard against the top - but technically never does the signal ever clip - I have also seen very ordinary tracks, with good dynamic range, which regularly clip through the piece; the clipping in the latter is so transient that well done playback completely masks the event.

 

Whether the clipping, or compression is "audible", or disturbingly unpleasant to hear, depends enormously on the playback rig - in the worst cases, the damage can be repaired so that the listening doesn't suffer.

[fas42]

49 minutes ago, Ralph Glasgal said:

I should probably not get into this, but there are some real technical psychoacoustic issues here, not just myths, which STC has so ably hinted at.  Remember however that stereo is also an art form and thus does not have to be realistic in the concert hall sense.  So here I will discuss only the realism issues.

 

In a concert hall if a trumpet is at stage left you will hear a time difference at the ears of about 700 microseconds and a level difference of maybe 7 dB  So let us assume a perfect mic and recording media have captured these values exactly including perfect frequency response, perfect resolution, and exact sound level.  Now we play this back without error through perfect amplifiers and two perfect speakers set 60 degrees apart.  Well, apart from the fact that there is no proof in physics or psychoacoustics that this angle is correct, we can easily prove that it has a lot of real defects and distortions.  First the 700 microsecond time difference recorded is reduced to about 220 microseconds so that side trumpet is now in the middle of the violins.  The original level difference is likewise reduced at the ears by half since both ears easily hear both speakers.  No matter where a sound was originally located, the pinna see only the pattern produced by sound sources at 30 degrees, not the almost 90 that the trumpet produced in the hall.  I could go on about all reverb now being frontal, the peaks and dips in the frequency response, central bass doubling, but enough.

 

So these realism issues cannot be corrected by any mic technique since the problem is mostly one of reproduction and not predictable since listening angles vary so much as does head size.  However, if you get into the subjective art form realm, then you can tweak recordings to make up for one 60 degree defect or another.  But it is tough to get two human beings to agree on which tweak sounds more realistic or purer or whatever.  See www.ambiophonics.org for endless papers and tutorials on this subject and how to fix the problem if you want binaural (normal hearing) realism.

 

 

 

Which hints at why the arguments that the physical procedure in recording is so important, are not in fact so relevant - when I hear convincing sound from a system it's seems completely impossible that my brain should perceive this illusion, by the usual logic ... yet, it happens. My inner auditory 'smarts' have worked it all out, unconsciously, and compensate beautifully for everything that's "wrong" - the only way I can switch it off is by deliberately lowering the SQ - this very neatly packs the sound back into the speakers, where it belongs ... .

[fas42]

13 hours ago, STC said:

With stereo playback, we can only perceive the soundstage and phantom image if we hold our head steady facing the mid point of the two speakers. If we rotate our head towards the phantom location the phantom image shifts sending a confusing perceptive to our brain of the actual location.

  

 

When I achieve what I call convincing sound, this no longer follows - the phantom images are solidly locked into the location for which the recording has encoded the acoustic cues, and one can do whatever one likes in the hearing space, like moving one's head, or moving physically around. This is what makes the illusion so dramatic, because the perception always remains consistent with what one hears with live performers.

 

I have no interest at all in the head in a vice, sweet spot way of listening - terribly artificial, and very unsatisfying ... I need to be able to go about other activities while listening, and still get the full hit of the music while doing so.

[fas42]

4 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Easy enough. Any pop recording made after they started making pop/rock albums using multi-track techniques and releasing them as "stereo" records. No, Chubby Checker's "The Twist" doesn't qualify! 

 

Speaking of which, Checker's "(Do) the Hucklebuck" is a favourite of mine! Fabulous driving drumming in this track, it's high energy impact of the first order - replay of this at a high SQ gets me every time, a huge adrenalin rush ...

[fas42]

6 hours ago, adamdea said:

I was under the impression though that the reason speakers don't give rise to the in the head problem was that the hass effect dominates in terms of the general sense of direction. 

Once again I find myself marvelling that stereo works at all. 

 

Stereo is easy! Getting convincing, "holographic" presentation is a whole order or two more amazing - it shows how adept our brain is at making sense of what it hears, when the clues are not too confused ... it wants to fully reconcile what it hears, and will do so if given enough assistance.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

The joke was that Checker's "The Twist" album was not recorded in stereo.

 

Recordings being in sterero is way overrated  - whether something older is in mono; or pure left or right speaker; or fully accomplished stereophonic presentation, that doesn't get in the way of my enjoying what they have to offer - if I can "hear" what's going on with each musical element in the whole, that does for me ...