My best demo albums

[semente]

On 8/9/2018 at 9:15 AM, Blackmorec said:

Imagine that next week you are getting a visit from a couple of Hi-Fi News editors

 

I'm sure they wouldn't come for free... To get even, I'd bore them to death with a CD I have of music from Laos or perhaps I'd just download a High Res version of a Jean-Michel Jarre album.

[semente]

5 hours ago, TubeLover said:

I didn't think I had implied that they were. But it certainly possible that they can be. I do own the original cd and could certainly buy a track to check things out, as you noted. I just got excited about the new remastering when I heard a portion of a radio interview where Holly Cole talked about the new remasterings capturing a purer sound for these recordings than she had heard before. Of course, as we know, singers and/or musicians are not always even the best judges of their own music in this regard.

 

5 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

 Let's hope they do better than the one I showed, which was supposed to be "Holly Cole - Temptation (Studio Master, Official Digital Download 24Bit 96Khz) It was a blatant rip off from the SACD master , as can be seen from it's noise profile, and with no content to even 22KHZ !

 

I am very fond of Tom Waits' music and I bougth Holly Cole's album after reading about it in a newspaper review.

Found it over-stylised and emotionally a bit dead. It reminded me of unavoidable torture sessions with Krells & Pigeons & Barbies of audio shows.

Demo music allright, but couldn't listen to it for pleasure and ended up selling it...

 

I do have maybe a handful of audiophile recordings which I use for evaluation purposes (one of them is of two loudspeaker designers talking in an anechoic chamber) but long gone is the time when I used to listen ad nauseam to the same three or five audiophile-approved tracks trying to indentify changes that resulted from all the fruitless fiddling and tweaking.

How nice it feels to be free...

[semente]

For a show off piece I suggest playing this vibrant jazz track LOUD, though beware that when it comes to system performance it'll sort the men from the boys ? (video not available in Europe for some reason):

 

 

 

Europeans can listen here:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56KtmUqQIYk

 

[semente]

23 hours ago, semente said:

I do have maybe a handful of audiophile recordings which I use for evaluation purposes (one of them is of two loudspeaker designers talking in an anechoic chamber) but long gone is the time when I used to listen ad nauseam to the same three or five audiophile-approved tracks trying to indentify changes that resulted from all the fruitless fiddling and tweaking.

 

10 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

This is equivalent to testing a car's handling by driving it in a straight line down a perfectly made highway - ummm, how many ways can one say, Duummb ...

 

First, let's make a distinction between Demo Tracks and Performance Assessment Tracks.

In my view they serve different purposes.

 

I use the Demo Tracks to show-off my system's capabilities. Impressive and exciting sound, captivating music.

 

Objective or if you prefer observationist sound assessment through listening (as opposed to tasting which is driven by preference and enjoyment) is a comparison between what we are listening to and our database, our past experience of both live and reproduced sound.

 

Thus Performance Assessment Tracks are used to evaluate, amongst other things, tonal balance (frequency response), low-level information retrieval ability (noise), capacity to cope with sonic complexity (intermodulation), naturalness and realism (transient response, absence of harmonic and of distortion in general).

Now, to accurately assess all those qualities you need excellent recordings, those which are able to portray the sound of instruments and vocals as they're listened from the audience, those which capture cues of the space where the original event was performed.

 

The recording of two voices in an anechoic chamber is important because humans are most sensitive to the sound human voice.

 

Orchestral and choral music is difficult to reproduce because of it's complexity (you can have a hundred instruments and as many voices playing different things simultaneously) and extreme dynamic swings. A large orchestra of the late romantic period will include a large variety of acoustic instruments and this provides the oportunity to evaluate how the system reproduces the timbre of those instruments. Unlike amplified gigs, with classical music one can actually compare one's listening experience of live performances with what our system is reproducing. And unlike rock or pop and a lot of jazz, classical music is recorded in venues with natural acoustic reverberance which is also a good measure for realism. Finally, unlike most pop and rock, classical music is not just about percussive or syncopated sounds - there's a lot of legato sound, notes connected to each other, the use of the bow instead of the finger - and this makes it easier to determine low-level resolution and tonal balance.
 

So we disagree. Good, or should I write excellent, recordings are paramount to evaluate performace from an observationist perspective.

The funny thing is that a system which performs well in the aspects which I mentioned will make Billie Holiday's old mono recordings, or Callas', Casals', etc. sound much better because one can listen to more of the recorded signal, in spite of all their problems.

 

I do agree that Krells & Pigeons & Barbies & Bubbles will make any system sound reasonably good. That is why they are so popular in shows... I don't find them useful to evaluate performance.

[semente]

10 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

I was just reminded of one that was practically worn out by us, from repeated playing ...

 

At solid volume levels, this is magical stuff - huge spaces, tremendous impact; there is so much going on ... I remember listening to this at an audiophile's home with huge, very heavy speakers, Krell amplifier - it sounded a disasterous mess, miles from getting anything right ...

 

 

I won't go into the artistic merits or their absence f JMJ's music.

 

But from a sonic perspective, as I've described in my previous post where I defined observationist sound assessment through listening, using his music to evaluate sound is like using Nemo to evaluate video instead of a National Geographic documentary...

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7 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

 

The conflicts in what you are saying are right there - Jarre is "difficult to reproduce because of its complexity (you can have (multiple) voices playing different things simultaneously) and extreme dynamic swings"; if a rig can "handle" Zoolook then reproducing orchestral and choral with a " hundred instruments and as many voices" is a pushover - the 'grandeur' of what you hear from those two different styles of music is of the same order, no matter what one may think of the 'artistic merit'.

 

I confess my ignorance regarding JMJ's music, having probably heard just a couple of tracks back in the day. But if I remember correctly his vocals would have been recorded in a studio and probaly close-, multi-mic'ed. He was also very fond of the synthesiser. If this is true, then I think you have missed some of my points.

 

We've agreed before that we have different goals and expectations: I strive for an as flat and wide as possible frequency response, both of which seem secondary to you.

I also don't believe that you can achieve the loudness levels you have reported with a pair of small budget standmounts without producing high levels of some types of distortions which I'd find very objectionable.

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1 hour ago, fas42 said:

if Jarre albums 'work'

 

How can you tell if Jarre's albums work?

It's all synthetic sound and special effects which have no resemblance with anything that one can experience live and use as a gauge for comparison... Surely your assessment will be driven by your taste, by your (pre)conception of what it should sound like.

 

You can strive to extract as much information as possible from the recording, and this will be audible, but you won't be able to determine, for instance, if the tonal balance is reasonably natural or realistic. But I have already assumed long ago that this is not a priority for you.

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1 hour ago, fas42 said:

To repeat, the speakers are not the problem - budget standmounts in a competent rig have no problem delivering the intensity of live sound; this has been verified by me many times over. Also, the audio friend down the road is using tiny, tiny Tannoys - the midrange/bass driver is barely bigger than the tweeter; the limitations there are the chain prior to the speaker, as is usually the case.

 

Well, I am way past that level, my rig is already so competent and my expectations so high that I cannot live with the compromises of toy speakers. If you can't perceive the theoretical and audible limitations of small standmounts then I'm affraid we are playing in different leagues and any attempt at debating these issues will be as barren as a mule...

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1 hour ago, fas42 said:

FR has also shown to be of a low order of importance - if the quality is there, the mind compensates beautifully, for variations; exposure to a full blown DEQX demo indicated no benefit to getting the FR "right" - the flaws in the playback were still obvious.

 

FR imbalance is a flaw in the playback. It is you who have chose to give it a low order of importance.