Fas42’s Stereo ‘Magic’

[Allan F]

On 10/12/2018 at 3:24 AM, Blackmorec said:

So, can one of Frank’s fettled systems really make bad recordings sound good? In a word no. BUT, BUT...an unfettled system can sure as hell make reasonable recordings sound bad and that’s Frank’s point.

 

An interesting post but, if you have read his posts, Frank has repeatedly insisted that he can make bad recordings sound good. While your above comments about systems may be valid, they are your "point" and not his.

[Allan F]

9 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

The source...every source....is/are monophonic. Our detectors are stereophonic.  Stereophonic detectors detecting mono signals. The stereophic detectors are offset from one another so they detect that mono signal at slightly different locations and distances, allowing the brain to triangulate the position/source of the mono signal(s).  In a stereophonic recording the same mono signal impinges on 2 microphones placed some distance apart, so the mono signal is recorded stereophonically at 2 different positions/times allowing the uptimate production in the brain of a single musical signal with dimensional and locational information, produced by recombining and processing the 2 microphone signals  

 

As far as I can see, we’re saying the same thIng. Aren’t we?

 

A sound source is just that, a source of sound. It is neither monophonic nor stereophonic. Those terms refer to how we capture and reproduce the sound. Stereophonic sound creates the illusion of reproducing the spacial characteristics of the sound source.

[Allan F]

3 hours ago, gmgraves said:

A home audio system, just cannot realistically bring the Boston Symphony into your living room, and I seriously doubt if it ever will.

 

Agreed. Who has the room to bring the Boston Symphony into their living room?

[Allan F]

51 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Good recordings sound like live music played in a real, acoustic space. Bad recordings sound like s__t!...

 

I would agree with the following amendment:

Good recordings sound, as much as possible, like live acoustic instruments played in a real space. As you know, George, this is Harry Pearson's classic definition of "the absolute sound". It is an ideal or goal that is never attained, but the closer the sound of a recording approaches it, the higher its fidelity. And high fidelity is what it's all about!

[Allan F]

19 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Well, of course, I’ll agree with that. Perfection is not attainable in anything. I just didn’t see the need to underline or caption the obvious.😉

 

Well, I'm not sure that it's obvious to you know who. 🙂

[Allan F]

53 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

You must be talking about so-called “pop” music. Totally artificial. I’m not denigrating the music or the listening experience for those who like that -to each his own- but to me, that’s not music. Artificial environments, like studios, give ME no listening pleasure, and neither do multi-miked, multi track (beyond two) recordings. But in these discussions the difference between our points of view, and our wildly different musical tastes mean that we  are often talking at cross purposes.

 

I like many genres of music including and, perhaps, especially "so-called pop music", But I must confess that I don't have a clue of what he is talking about when he speaks of "tuning into each space, one after another, round and round..."

 

BTW, George, pop music is not nearly as unidimensional as you would portray it. In fact, there are a great many good acoustic pop recordings that sound anything but "artificial". Perhaps you have allowed your hatred of electric guitars to dictate your opinion of all pop music. 🙂

[Allan F]

2 hours ago, 4est said:

You guys may be over thinking it. I think he simply means being able to hear the different fills and instrument tracks as sonic "spaces". You know, especially the ones on shitty recordings where you can obviously hear the over dubs and fills pop in and out on. Perhaps those poor recordings he is always raving about?

 

Who knows? If he needs an interpreter, to quote a rather famous cinematic phrase, "What we've got here is failure to communicate". 🙂

[Allan F]

30 minutes ago, fas42 said:

You realise I'm talking 35 years here, of taking this seriously  crucial for premium sound; and if you do this with enough conviction, then even "shitty" recordings become good to listen to.

 

It doesn't matter how long you have been taking this seriously. Nothing, let alone "enough conviction", can make a "shitty" recording sound good. At best, it can be made to sound less objectionable and no more..

[Allan F]

It's not the number of audio shows one has attended that counts, but rather the number of well set up systems that sound good that one has heard at those shows.

[Allan F]

18 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Which is your opinion. For starters, are you only talking about recent, hyper compressed recordings as being so bad - or can you go back to a certain year or so when any earlier material is fine to listen to?

 

It doesn't matter when a bad sounding recording was made. It's still a bad sounding recording and it can't be made to sound good on playback.

[Allan F]

4 hours ago, Jud said:

 

I know this is as far as possible from your cup of tea, but Phil Spector's productions may be an example of recordings that could sound better on some less high fidelity systems. They sounded terrific to me on transistor and car radios as a kid, not so great on some iterations of my audio system, and now they're back to sounding not so bad again (obviously not a wealth of low level detail, but true to the way Spector set up his recording sessions - which it's probably best you don't even try to learn about, George 😄).

 

Which brings up a more general observation. There are many "poor" recordings that sound a lot worse when played on high fidelity, i.e. high resolution systems, because their deficiencies are revealed as a far more obvious part of the listening experience.

[Allan F]

7 hours ago, gmgraves said:

No audio system can fool the “live music test”. There is always “something” that gives away that the music is a reproduction, and not a live event. Maybe some day audio systems will be good enough so there is no difference between live and recorded, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

 

2 hours ago, STC said:

It has been demonstrated many times that you cannot distinguish them when the sound is produced with all the cues in compliance with natural sound. It doesn’t mean they will sound identical but the difference can be so small that under blindfolded you won’t able to tell. 

 

While no audio system can actually pass the "live music test", people have been "fooled" into believing that a system sounded the same, usually in marketing demonstrations. Why Live-versus-Recorded Listening Tests Don't Work

[Allan F]

4 hours ago, kumakuma said:

You are using the word "grok" incorrectly. It means to understand something.

 

Urban Dictionary: grok

It can be used in the sense of "believe in", but not "believe".

 

[Allan F]

 

4 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

I think what is clear here Frank is that if it doesn't have your scent on it, you won't like it. Its called Confirmation bias

 

Or is it, perhaps, a case of Frank's opinions being malodorous?

[Allan F]

11 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Recognizing voices is a survival instinct, and one humans have been cultivating for eons. Recognizing or remembering the sound of a stereo system is not a part of the human survival instincts and not important enough to be coded genetically. Therefore, one really doesn’t have anything to do with the other. Fact is, human long term memory is not really very good at storing the characteristics of music that would allow us to remember what something specifically sounds like.

 

I believe that you may be overgeneralizing, George. One may be deeply impressed by a particular characteristic of the sound produced by a stereo system or recording, such that the presence or absence of that unique characteristic is recognized without difficulty at a later time.

[Allan F]

18 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

I'm probably going to regret asking but what is your definition of "magic sound"?

 

How about sound that creates the false illusion of being of good quality?

[Allan F]

3 hours ago, fas42 said:

Magic" happens when you eliminate a range of disturbing artifacts in the sound - done by soldering, etc.

 

FYI, according to many experts, if done properly crimped connections can be superior to soldered ones. As George says, this should rarely be an issue when dealing with quality components from reputable manufacturers. The "hi-fi" sound that you describe is usually the product of poor basic design choices and not due to ancillary "disturbing artifacts".

[Allan F]

9 hours ago, fas42 said:

How I extract "magic", as one major part of the exercise, is to work through the component and get rid of each such weak point, one by one - this alone transformed the current NAD integrated from something that was really pretty awful, into a unit capable of quite decent sound.

 

The above reminds me of what I overhead from a group of industry types at RMAF a number of years ago. Referring to NAD, they agreed that is stood for "Not Always Down".

[Allan F]

9 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Years ago, I read that NAD originally was formed because the British audio dealers association wanted a “house brand”. so they got together with an unnamed Japanese manufacturer of Mid-Fi equipment and formed NAD - National Audio Dealers. However, their current incarnation doesn’t give that as their origin. Their current “origin story” doesn’t even say what the letters N-A-D stand for!

 

Many years ago, I had a NAD integrated amp that was pretty good for its day before I upgraded to separate Bryston electronics.

[Allan F]

3 hours ago, fas42 said:

...my efforts are directed to doing whatever it takes to evolve a system to reach that higher level of performance ... this is most certainly impossible...

 

Sorry, Frank, but to be consistent with reality the above edit is necessary, although I don't doubt that you have really convinced yourself otherwise.

[Allan F]

32 minutes ago, fas42 said:

The goal is to have a system that doesn't make a recording sound like crap! Note the key inclusion of the word "make" in that sentence - the recording is OK, but the playback doesn't elicit all the positive aspects of the source material.

 

Unless you have spent decades listening to expensive, ambitious rigs make recordings you know well sound like a garbled mess, you probably can't appreciate what's going on - money doesn't solve the problems, but it can certainly blind one to what the true possibilities are.

 

[Allan F]

11 hours ago, Confused said:

In the above scenario, is it possible to tweak / optimize the system such that the lesser quality recordings become more listenable, without compromising the former "state of the art" performance with top quality recordings?  If the answer to this question is yes, then maybe having "there are no bad recordings" as a mindset (not an absolute truth) might be beneficial in terms getting the right approach to system optimisation?

 

You can't have both. A system that is "optimized" is one that will produce the best sound from well recorded music. If you have a highly resolving system capable of producing "state of the art" performance, the simple answer to your question is "No". Ironically, a less resolving or mid-fi system may be more forgiving and be less likely to highlight the negative aspects of a poor recording. Quality components typically avoid tone controls because of the negative effect that they have on the sound. OTOH, tone controls could potentially make those poor recordings sound less objectionable by "dumbing down" the system to the level of the recording.

[Allan F]

17 hours ago, fas42 said:

So-called highly resolving systems nearly always add a good dollop of disturbing distortion...

 

This is complete and utter nonsense. The reason that these systems are able to resolve detail to a greater degree is because they are designed to minimize distortion. Of course, if there is distortion in the recording, they will more faithfully reproduce it. But the system is not the source of the distortion.

[Allan F]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

So I approached Saks about it ...When I told him that his recordings, made with a forest of microphones, did not sound real by any stretch of the term. He answered that he wasn’t looking for real. His recordings sounded BETTER than real. I realized then that there was no changing the man’s mind and that there were a lot of people in the industry who shouldn’t be allowed near a recording setup.

 

Dunno when this occurred, George, but I expect that Harry Pearson would be turning over in his grave if he heard this story.

[Allan F]

4 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

I'm having a hard time understanding what your point is though.

 

Ain't that always the truth?