Step by step surgery

[fas42]

Just read this post,

 

 

Not a bad example of how to listen for aspects in the sound which inform one as to whether progress is being made - in the sense that low level distortion, noise artifacts are better attenuated - this is Blackmorec's "sonic net" getting more out of the way ...

 

#1 - "a purity of tone" - a giveaway that we're getting somewhere; "Liquid" - again a tick.

 

#2 - "not getting peaky" - this is audiophile code for treble that has less distortion; noting that people are frightened to mention the word, "distortion" 😉 - and that they fuss about everything else, in the hope that the distortion becomes less prominent - ummm, the smartest thing to do is to remove the causes of the disturbing artifacts ... problem solved! 🙂

 

"Less full bodied", but, "background vocals were certainly clearer, the piano had more sparkle, and the bass guitar had that stellar growl that I like" ... yes, that's how it works, 😉.

 

#3 - Hendrix: " It was definitely clear! I don't think I had ever heard Jimi's voice that clear in the left channel." - Yes.

 

" the guitar intro did seem a smidge peaky" - umm, you're listening to a Marshall amp - of course it's got bite to it!! Sometimes, instruments aren't meant to be polite, you know ...

 

 

"But how would I know if that's the way it was supposed (to) sound?" - er, it sounds like you're listening to the sound making whatever happening beyond the 'perimeter' of the particular rig; not your particular system's take, version of it - one obvious characteristic is that every track has a uniqueness about it, it changes the 'space' you're listening to, in ever more distinctive ways ... because the idea is to hear what the capture of the event reveals - and not what the addition of the 'makeup' of the system's "sound signature" turns it into, hmmmm 😜.

[fas42]

And another indicative post ...

 

 

Is the Sonore power supply 'magical'? No ... . Is the ultraRendu 'magical'? No ... . What's magical is what's on the recording, and adding the PS was, in this situation,  the critical step that pushed the particular rig into a significantly better zone of overall performance - and the subjective SQ went up dramatically ... this is what is achieved by doing "step surgery", 🙂.

 

Will adding this PS do the same "magic" in another rig? Perhaps, perhaps not - it's always a depends - there are no Rules Set In Concrete! ... Ever ...

 

[fas42]

Okay, the replacement Toshiba laptop has zero bass, with driver openings the size of one's small thumbnail - and initially I thought the audio was going to be generally terrible. But I'm adapting to the sound, and it's improving - this machine had been left unused for ages, so everything has to "recondition" - and the treble is showing promise ... 🙂.

 

It's settled enough for me to think about perhaps playing with audio players - see what that tells me, for this machine. So, ripped Ring, Ring from the ABBA CD I have, and will use that WAV as a test bed ...

 

First up, Groove Music streamer that came with the m/c: pretty awful, quite shrieky, poor separation.

Next, good ol' Windows Media Player, another rock bottom app: somewhat better, the shriekiness is more under control ... this immediately told me that choice of player does matter; so playing with software, including settings, will gain me ground.

 

Now, what about foobar2000? I have not had good results from that up to now, in other PCs - but I'll give the latest version a spin ... downloaded it; hmmm, promising - but far too much fidgeting on the interface: switch all that off, a definite gain there; and final setting change: buffer the entire track into memory ... not bad,not bad - the tambourine is finally starting to sound like it should, nice depth, and layering to the sound elements; voices quite decent.

 

Can I get it better? I'll try Media Monkey, and anything else that inspires me - aim is find the best match for this laptop.

[fas42]

As mentioned on the Stereo Magic thread, I'm using this live clip as well for fine tuning the Toshiba laptop,

 

 

As described there, I'm using the opus audio, the best quality version, for working with - exported to WAV format.

 

Media Monkey sounded pretty mediocre in default form, but tons of things to play with - now got it to a rough par to foobar ... so what does that give me? The "blatt" of the brass now sounds authentic, has plenty of bite; and the percussion has stopped sounding a throwaway - a good sense of space, the echo of the station environment now working - the picture no longer sounds a bit ridiculous, as if it's coming from tiny speakers - which is what it is! Listening at a distance from the laptop, the presentation still holds up.

 

Still a rough edge to possibly finesse away, when listening very closely to a speaker - will this happen? 😲

[fas42]

Working with Media Monkey, MM, at the moment - with the Ring, Ring track. The speakers on this laptop are so tiny that you can't hear anything below 200Hz - confirmed by running some frequency sweeps in Audacity. Which means that the treble has to be very clean, for the sound to be acceptable - plenty of HF action in this track, as John Dyson is keen to point out 😉, so this makes this track excellent for the fine tuning ...

 

And the same factors work for the Toshiba as did previously with the HP - simplify, simply, simplify. Pure battery doesn't work, because the current drain causes too much noise;the power adapter has to be running ... getting rid of plugged in cables helps a bit, but a major win is having the screen shut down.

 

What am I gaining? The vocals are steadily losing the remaining screechiness, when listening closely, and the ambience information starts to build - still not there yet, but plenty of things remain to play with.

 

What's the point of doing this, again? As yet another example that even the most basic, cheap set of electronics responds to tweaking - going from AM standard fare, to being perfectly acceptable given the constraints. Using the right audio track makes it trivially easy to hear the alteration in SQ as things are tried - the sound of this laptop is far less than the previous HP unit, having much poorer bass, and maximum volume is quite a bit lower; but it is still easy to hear distortion anomalies being present or not in the sound.

 

Doing this "step by step surgery" is a form of training, to make one's ears sensitive to the sound being 'wrong' - the procedure translates directly to being relevant to getting the most out of the most ambitious, expensive rigs.

[fas42]

Playing with a few more things - this Windows 10 is a mongrel; if you shut down processes, and hardware functioning, it uses this as an excuse to go off and fool around with the hard disk, etc ... the fan revviing up is the giveaway that it's trying to thrash the CPU; so part of this exercise will be doing a controlled HAL shutdown (2001 reference, for the one or two who don't know ... 😜), prior to playing.

 

Up to getting good layering on Ring, Ring; the percussion on the right is next to me, the vocals are way back; very good separation of all the sounds, almost zero unpleasantness, or shriekiness, to any element

[fas42]

All right ... I had to beat Windows 10 around the head a bit, but I've got it to stop fidgeting incessantly - about 5 services had to be given the boot; and this was not a trivial exercise. Which means that I get a solid run of 0% CPU usage over many, many minutes - the other plus is that the fan is not going off into a feverish fit, at odd moments.

 

Of course the machine is still ticking over - where's the decimal when you need one, 😉? - but things are now more consistent, to better do comparisons.

[fas42]

Those sort of things are around 🙂 - no, part of the exercise could be to see that once a decent standard was achieved, what then, say, was the most critical factor in maintaining that, by switching various tweaks off and back on again, one after the other.

[fas42]

57 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Quite literally one of the silliest posts I’ve seen from Frank yet. Cable elevators, really??!! Pray tell me, exactly how do they work? IOW, what do they do? What’s the electromagnetic mechanism that causes speaker cables to, in some way, interact with the floor under them to alter the signal on it’s way from the power amplifier to the speakers? I must have missed that class in graduate school when they discussed that particular phenomenon.🤣  

 

The point, as I have stated many times, is to reduce static effects. For me. Triboelectric behaviour is one of the nasty ones in the audio game - my first good rig had this in spades, and I didn't realise what was going on at the time. This led to huge frustration - and me giving away serious audio for many, many years ... everything's a learning, George 😜.

 

Many of the rounds with the local audio mate down the road were digging carefully through the physical layout of everything - I would walk in, to hear edgy, 'wrong' sound; and we would experiment with reorganising various bits, to gain much ground.

 

Typical symptoms are, that anything with strong treble, which is complex, just doesn't work - the 'live' quality is not happening, and you switch off what's playing, fast.

[fas42]

15 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Yes, you have stated it many times, but that doesn’t make it a real thing. Audio manufacturing companies do this all the time, and some audiophiles as well. Like cable ads where they talk about characteristics that are real at 100 MHz, but they intimate in their advertising that things like skin effect and extreme high frequency roll off occur at audio frequencies (on everybody’s cables, but their own of course). There is no data that supports the notion that triboelectric effects has any effect on speaker cables. After all, speaker cable’s jackets are not made of styrofoam, and static electricity and alternating audio current are different types of electricity. There is no research that even suggests that it’s possible that one can affect the other.

While it is true that signal cables and power cables can, under certain circumstances, radiate interference, it likely doesn’t affect the sound of a stereo system in any measurable or audible way. 

 

The experience that I've had, over and over again, is that it does matter - if I don't take it into account, I lose a lot of the SQ that matters - so these days I do this sort of thing automatically, it's part of standard housekeeping with any rig that I have input on. Yes, the precise why is hard to define; in part because the literature on this is so bare - I've tried to track down anything meaningful a number of times, and the number of articles that are useful are in the low, single digits 🙂.

 

One of the more likely scenarios, and this is pure speculation on my part, is that there is constant, low level static discharge occurring within the parts of the cable - and that this is causing a type of HF noise to be generated, and transferred to the conductors; just enough to impact the circuitry to which the cables are attached. Being careful with the cables, and the often mentioned "burning in" is enough to make the issue go away, in most cases.

 

Doesn't have to be styrofoam - anything where plastic of any variety is used could be suspect - my modus operandi is to assume that there could be a problem, until I clearly demonstrate to myself that there's nothing to it, for a particular setup.

 

Quote

Define “just doesn’t work”! Define “live” quality!

 

As mentioned earlier, take a recording "with strong treble, which is complex" - this should be very rich, intense, bowl you over with good vibes, highly satisfying listening - if it sounds messy, congested, something you can only take in small doses, where you're glad when it's over - then it's "not working".

 

"Live quality" means that it sends the same type of signals to your brain as one gets when listening to the real thing - stand on the footpath as a marching band in full roar walks past, right next to you; there's a quality to the sound that nearly all hifi rigs have wet dreams about ... that's why one has to address aspects like static behaviours, IME.

 

[fas42]

18 minutes ago, Racerxnet said:

 

You are having a wet dream about your laptops competency.

 

MAK

 

You seem to have great trouble understanding the concept, in this thread ... which is, to identify what is lacking in the SQ, and then try to do something about it. Strangely enough, this is how one learns to gain control in other things, such as one's life, and the environment in which one lives - to be able to understand where there is something not quite right, and then be smart about trying things, to resolve what troubles you.

 

If you're poor, you could a) rob a bank, b) live in a fantasy country where there is always a magic machine that dispenses wads of money, so that you could surround yourself with toys that placate you, or c) learn a skill or profession or develop a business, such that other people will provide you with an income that is adequate to your needs ... your call ...

[fas42]

12 minutes ago, Racerxnet said:

 

Frank,

 

I have No problem understanding that a stooge with a laptop thinks everything else High End is incompetent. That's your take, not mine.

 

Your take is that this is about a laptop - and you don't seem to comprehend that this is merely something I've been curious about, and experimented with, in the last couple of years ... there is a whole suite of activity in audio having nothing to do with computers, for decades prior.

 

Quote

 

I have done very well in life and hope you have as well.

I've owned 2 businesses which provided quite well for me, and affords some of the finer things in life.

How about that Frank!

 

 

Good to hear, and thanks. Unfortunately, I'm not a natural business man - I'm an ideas person, and have always been that way - and that translated to not being that 'comfortable', these days; for a number of reasons.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, kumakuma said:

 

Someone recently told me that it is important to be able to understand where there is something not quite right, and then be smart about trying things, to resolve what troubles you.

 

Could a good example of this be a person always being a smart arse, and never realising that it's somewhat offensive; and wondering why people react in a negative manner to their behaviour ... ?

[fas42]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

If you think that triboelectric effect has any influence on the signal carried by speaker cables, it’s called your imagination. 

 

Not on the signal as seen by speakers, perhaps - but the output stage of the amplifier may be sensitive to HF noise ... I spent a few years exploring some of the issues in output stages of typical class AB amps, using Spice simulations - and it's obvious why it's hard to get this area working properly ...

 

The reality is that I do have to worry about speaker cables on my rigs - the local audio friend and I have spent many, many hours considering what he could do in this area - and he's always gained from trying things.

 

Quote

In my experience that’s the fault of the recording or the production of same. Good recordings don’t have “messy, congested” highs!

 

Ahh, you haven't heard the "magic" that happens when a system gets into a good enough zone - the same friend above has a good collection of "terror tracks", from his albums, that we use to assess where he's at - on a "bad day" these are completely unlistenable to; on a good one, these rise up ever so high, become quite superb listening experiences, 🙂.

 

Quote

Not only is that not possible for a number of reasons, but it likely never will be possible. The best we can hope for is that a state-of-the-art system is accurate to the recording. We can get damn close to that, and my system, playing recordings that I have made, achieves that quite easily. Does it sound like the real thing? Of course not, because the real thing can’t even be captured, much less reproduced.

 

 

Umm, I heard a Bryston rig that I never laid a hand on deliver those sorts of sounds, some years ago too ... it replayed the punch of a drum kit, with ease.

 

Yes, SOTA must be accurate to the recording. But most people never hear how good those recordings are, ever.

 

You have a belief that the sounds of the real thing can't be captured ... all I can say is, Not bloody likely! 😜

[fas42]

4 hours ago, Speedskater said:

Let's leave triboelectric & microphonic cable problems to hand held mics and musical instruments, where they can be a challenge.

 

Most things I found to matter in the audio game were from personal experience - not from reading fetish articles, 🙂. I slowly built up an awareness that how I dealt with cables affected the sound, and kept trying things - there were moments where I thought I had gone quite mad 🤩; because I did something completely trivial and 'meaningless' with how a cable was situated, and lost a good chunk of the SQ. Going around the circle a few times, a pattern emerged, and I could count on knowing the right move to make, next time.

 

The "why" it can have such an audible effect is still somewhat mysterious - no-one is taking it seriously, and no-one is doing the right type of measuring - but the real point is that one can make this nuisance completely go away, by taking simple measures. Similar to how industry in general has to worry about static discharge being a pain in the bum ...

[fas42]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

That’s right. It’s not bloody likely that the real thing will ever be captured!  Too many physics and human problems. No microphone diaphragm can ever accelerate or stop as fast as the music can, because diaphragms have mass - much less than in the past, but still, they are not massless. Most microphones are colored, and they need to be absolutely flat in frequency response from subsonics all the way to supersonics. None are or are likely to be. They also need to be totally free of all distortion, in fact, the entire recording chain needs to be totally free of any distortion. Also, recording engineers need to know how to optimally place a stereo pair for perfect pick-up, and most don’t even try because a literal facsimile of the actual sound field is not even what the recording personnel are trying to do! That’s the “human” part of the equation.

 

That's nonsense, George, and you should realise that ... 😜

 

Air vibrating is physics, and a microphone relies on good ol', simple principles to make it work ... if it can register the frequencies that the human ear is sensitive to, then everything that matters will be captured.

 

To repeat, I have been amazed at times how much information is there in the oldest, most primitive recordings - the nuances are there, the clues about the acoustics have been caught - I have had many 100 year old recordings pumping out at maximum volume, and all the vibe of what happened, back then, in the recording space comes through with full force ... quite remarkable ...

 

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

And you are right again, in that I haven’t heard the “magic”. I also don’t believe in the tooth fairy (although I had an algebra teacher in high-school that I wasn’t too sure about), Santa Claus, or the concept of honest politicians! My reference system sounds like music, in so far as that’s possible. I’m a realist, that level of accuracy is basically what I feel that high-fidelity is all about. It’s pure technology. I’m not a neurotic audiophile grasping at straws (like cable elevators, cryogenically  treated tubes, $10K speaker cables, battery biased interconnects and USB cables, audiophile quality equipment fuses, phonograph record de-magnetizers, and other endless audio mouse-milk) in a futile effort to try to fool myself into thinking that such nonsense expenditures will make a positive difference in the sound of my system. There’s is no magic, just sound engineering practices. 

 

Yes, sound engineering practices do matter ... what kills the "magic" is that last little weakness that someone didn't 'respect'.

 

Why I can speak so 'authoratively' about this is that I got the magic by complete fluke the first time - and it bowled me over, by the sheer specialness of the change - there was no going back from that moment on; how the world worked was forever changed, for me.

[fas42]

6 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

So you would have us believe that recording is easy but playback is hard?

 

Yes. All the microphone has to do is produce an electrical signal, in a very simple mechanical to electrical contrivance, and then pass then on to some type of recording mechanism - a USB microphone is a perfect example of how easy, how compact that can be.

 

Playback requires the manipulation of very large amounts, in comparison, of electrical energy - and that where things get unstuck ...

 

[fas42]

9 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

You have fallen into the intellectual trap described in this article:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

 

 

No. I can listen to an ancient recording on a normal setup, and it sounds truly awful - a cartoon, nothing to do with real musicians, a Disney nonsense - the difference when it is replayed well is quite dramatic.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

When you make asinine proclamations such as this, Frank, that we see how tenuous a grasp you have on these subjects, and it’s a perfect illustration of why your preaching has so little credibility here.

 

No need to be unpleasant, George - there are others around here who are quite capable of providing that element ...

 

Because you have done lots of recording, you think you have a strong grasp of what's required also on the playback side - your experiences of playback are "how the universe works" ... luckily, the universe is a bit bigger than one individual's thinking, and there are others quite happy to fill in where necessary, to move knowledge forward.

 

You see, I have heard rigs that deliver the qualities that are so precious, necessary to creating the liveness in music - that have had nothing to do with me. So the behaviour exists, out there, whether I live or die - my opinions count for nought, ultimately; true high quality SQ will rise up, eventually - irrespective of what I say.

 

My 'preaching' is to try and speed up - my way - that arrival of competent sound being everywhere - it bugs me hearing Yet Another Pretentious Rig sounding awful, getting the playback of some recording I know well so, so wrong.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

 

That’s irrelevant. As long as the finest audio equipment in the world can’t fool the most discerning ears with the best, state-of-the-art recordings into believing that they are listening to a live (not reproduced) performance, then a perfect capture and reproduction has not occurred. Not only are we not their yet, we never will get there. It’s a matter of half-steps to the wall. If each step is half the stride of the previous step. You will never reach that wall! 

 

 

Just to answer that point ... the 'miracle' is that brain is able to compensate once a certain quality is reached - it "fills the gaps". This is what blew me away the first time I heard it happening - no matter how aware I was of everything going on, no matter how certain I was that this was obviously pure illusion - the illusion either worked - or it didn't work ... depending upon the SQ,

 

This is why "half-steps" are irrelevant - miniscule, microsteps, up to the critical distance - then, bang! Two full steps beyond the wall - so to speak ...

[fas42]

Yesterday was a bad day on the home front 😲 - things were more difficult than usual, things were breaking down, or playing up ...including the power adapter on the laptop! It had been making noises, and then completely died, at the end of the day - batteries will only last so long, so responses may not be too prompt, for a bit ...

[fas42]

14 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Sorry about that, I didn’t mean to sound unpleasant. But, I was pointing out that when you say things that show a distinct lack of depth in your knowledge about the subjects you are discussing, it underminds your credibility. Had I gone back and read what I wrote before posting it, I would have seen that my text came off sounding mean-spirited. I did not intend that.

 

Thanks for that, George, 👍.

 

Quote

The sound that you think is “magic” is largely dictated by your own taste in sound and in the type of music to which you listen. I have heard systems that consist of good quality gear, and when playing the owner’s 60’s or 70’s pop or rock* sounds a lot like a live rock concert of the era.

 

It's "magic" because it conveys the energy, the spirit of what live music making is like. An album of pop rock doesn't sound like a "live rock concert of the era" - it actually sounds like a carefully crafted, meticulously assembled sound creation, full of musical ideas, and quite fascinating to follow, seeing how the structure of the song progresses - IOW, what would have been heard if you had been in the recording studio, at the time, 😉. A very good example of this is "Machine Head", by Deep Purple - this can be such a satisfying album to listen to, because the expression of the musical ideas in it is done so skillfully.

 

Quote

 

That’s what the system’s owners want, because they use “their music” to help them relieve their teen years, and other than that, they have no interest in accuracy for accuracy’s sake. These same systems, when asked to reproduce a Beethoven Symphony or a Miles Davis jazz track, sound like unmitigated excrement in spite of the fact that the equipment is high quality. The owner picked that combination to achieve his or her vision of what they want their music to sound like! An audiophile with an eclectic musical taste who knows what live music really sounds like is going to build a system that is accurate enough so that good program material, irrespective of genre, is going to sound as much like real music as technology and individual budgets will allow. 

 

A competent setup can shift from one genre to the next - and nail each one perfectly. As per your last statement ... this is achievable, and if "taken to the limit" will always deliver - on every recording.

 

Quote

Bottom line is that what you think is “magic” is what YOU think is magic, and may not be anyone else’s idea of what a system should sound like at all!😉

 

The system should sound like nothing ... it has zero qualities in itself, all it is is a conduit for the recording to come through. Very rarely I come across a rig that achieves this - I can put on a recording, and it sounds precisely what it should sound like - the musical event itself "is there", the rig has shuffled to the side, into the shadows, 🙂.

 

[fas42]

5 hours ago, gmgraves said:

The difference between the willing suspension of disbelief and a delusion can be a very small thing. Let’s say that a delusion is an unwilling suspension of disbelief! In a movie theatre, you know that what you are watching is not real. But, I suspect that in Frank’s case, he actually believes that his fretting over his playback tweaks makes his system sound so good that even bad recordings sound real to him. His admission that his “imagination” “fills-in the blanks” tells me that this imagining of reality is a delusion.

 

You see, this is the fascinating thing about the auditory illusion that's possible - conscious awareness that you are obviously being fooled makes not one iota of a difference - the infamous McGurk effect is a perfect example of this, which is usually used to discredit audiophile 'fantasies': the listening brain refuses to accept what it hears as being correct, and supplies another interpretation. And this is what occurs with "magic" presentation - the mind completely compensates for the usually mentioned technical issues; the illusion is total.

 

35 years ago I had a rig that would slip from one mode to the other, back and forth, back and forth, for as long as I wanted to play this game. I was able to 'study' it happening, for days, weeks, months - this was as solid as being sure that when you get out of the bed in the morning, that your legs know what to do when your feet hit the floor.

 

The 'delusion' is, that this type of convincing playback is impossible, because half-hearted studies proclaim that they know everything about how human hearing works, 😜.

[fas42]

Consider this ... I get a recording, lop everything off under 200Hz, and then play it very, very softly over a supposedly high end rig - and then go up and listen very closely to the midrange driver of one speaker. In what way will it sound radically different from what I hear on this laptop that I'm tweaking at the moment ... and why?

[fas42]

7 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

This is where you are deluding yourself, Frank. No offense, but you keep making the mistake of not completing the sentence. I.E. that it “sounds precisely what it should sound like” To you!

 

So you think it's important that a system should sound like something definite, that it has a personality that intrudes into the playback of everything you put on?

 

To you, it's "wrong thinking" that I can take a track, and play it on two completely different setups - and that it "sounds the same" each time - yes?