Measurements & Sound Quality

[fas42]

4 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

"Put on a shitty CD, listen to what's wrong with your system, and then fix it" isn't a method for improving SQ.

 

It is, actually. The "poor" CD ruthlessly reveals the failings of the playback, because the combination of the recording content and the weaknesses in the chain make it extremely obvious - a "stress test". Then, changing various conditions while playing reveals the likely location - does changing the volume alter the misbehaviour? Does altering the level of electrical interference alter the situation? Does refreshing some connection in the rig change the SQ? Does varying how the components sit in position cause anything noticeable ... bit by bit you're learning where the chain is vulnerable.

 

With this knowledge in hand you're in a very good position to try some "fixes", and see what that gains.

[fas42]

43 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

I rest my case.

 

 

Which tells me it gonna take a while still for audio to climb out of the hole it's in ... in the meantime, we will need things like Pass's amplifiers to 'mellow' the sound - like in the good ol' days, when they piled on perfumes to, ahem, obviate the need to take a bath on some sort of regular basis ...

[fas42]

It's what you're used to - the weather, I mean. A couple of days after Christmas it's going to be over 40C, just down the road - take that!

[fas42]

5 hours ago, kumakuma said:

 

I don't agree with the premise of your argument.

 

Things have never been better for audiophiles with great SQ even from entry level equipment and all the music we could ever need available at the click of a mouse.

 

 

 

Access to music is excellent, yes. The low cost gear is extremely well sorted in raw form, yes. But the number of rigs that can produce convincing sound are just as sparse as ever - I don't bother going anywhere hifi shops , etc, because I would emerge with deep depression, from the sorry state of the 'SOTA' ...

[fas42]

44 minutes ago, jabbr said:

 

That’s the crux of the question here. What electrically correlates with “sterile” or “clinical” or “lifelike” “live” etc?

 

The same thing that will always dictate the perceived quality - what distortion artifacts are still audible, that haven't been excised by whatever means one wants to use. Since these anomalies are bordeline detectable by conventional means, and are dependent on a whole, complex web of weaknesses in any particular rig, there will never be an easy answer ...

[fas42]

And best wishes to you!

 

Ummm, everything that makes or breaks an audio rig's sound is electrical - just because one can't display a particular behaviour in a beautiful, sterile, lab environment way doesn't mean it's not there... .

 

Sometimes, the world is a bit chaotic - one learns to live with that.

[fas42]

50 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

No.  In fact, the most important problems are mechanical, not electrical.  Dome breakup, friction, pistonic movement, diffraction, etc. all related to speakers.  Then there are the problems at the other end of the chain - again transducers.

 

That's the normal wisdom. And I would have believed that totally, 35 years ago ... but then things changed  ...

 

Every experience since has confirmed the opposite - all the nominal misbehaviours of the transducers matter not one whit, if the electricals are working right. Will the best transducers make a difference? Yes, indeed, but all their advantages will be completely undone, if a few tiny parts of the electrical chain are playing up. In the subjective sense.

 

Why this occurs appears to be because one's hearing system can easily adapt to those "mechanical imperfections" - but struggles with the nature of the electrical ones.

[fas42]

41 minutes ago, jabbr said:

Our ability to measure small voltages is terrific. Pretty much any electrical description is measurable with proper equipment and technique. By electrical description, I mean a mathematical description framed in units of electromagnetic physics.

 

Randomly chaotic electrical activity is noise.

@Ralf11 equated this to prose: http://wisdomofchopra.com/

 

Merry Christmas to you too Deepak!

 

We will be able to measure this stuff, down the track. But we don't do now.

 

The chaotic aspect is that the mechanisms for generating audible anomalies are not 'nicely' behaved, much of the time. They're time dependent, volume dependent, temperature dependent, humidity dependent, movement dependent, the list goes on - the mix is complex enough to be called "chaotic" - the best solution is to make a rig extremely "robust", so nothing one does to vary anything causes any noticeable change ... doable, but far from trivial.

[fas42]

11 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

it isn't "wisdom" it is fact

 

see also esl's post just above yours

 

 

 

Why we notice transducer changes so easily, normally, is because their 'faults' intermodulate with the electrical ones - every tiny alteration then alters the audibility to some degree, of the electrical issues - so, we say, speakers matter! Remove the electrical flaws, and that audible variation disappears - all the speakers then just sound like the recording - as it should be.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, jabbr said:

 

Yeah I mean that if this were as simple as frequency response etc, then would be a solved problem ...

 

It's not a solved problem because almost no-one is looking in the right areas - the obsession with conventional measurements will doom all ongoing efforts to get answers, for decades most likely.

 

The fact that the human ear is very sensitive to qualities in the sound "that don't make sense" is largely ignored, and because the causes of these anomalies are a whole lot of little, 'rubbishy' weaknesses in the overall integrity of the system, it's never considered important to deal with as a subject in its own right - the Porsche with a single tyre that's gone out of balance will always irritate intensely, and until the simple exercise of getting it rebalanced is done, all the money spent to improve the car's appeal otherwise will be largely wasted.

[fas42]

Yes, "sharp transients" are a giveaway - a competent rig has this in spades, as a subjective 'hit'. Recordings deliver a continuing delight of sound missiles - conventional playback, in comparison, is just boring, boring, boring ...

[fas42]

20 minutes ago, esldude said:

I think some of it comes down to the deficiencies of stereo in general.  And such recordings are close miked.  It sounds much like listening really close, but you normally don't listen that close. It can't sound live in totality. So some inaccuracies may seem more live.  But again I don't know. 

 

It comes down to the deficiencies of average quality playback, actually. When a setup one is optimising is on the edge of the zone of the necessary competence, it will keep slipping in and out of a subjective experience of a live sound presentation - make a move in the right direction, the 'liveness' lifts strongly; the wrong direction, it drops back to 'hifi' sound.

 

If a full measure has been achieved, then the liveness aspect is never lost, no matter how loud it gets, nor how close one is to the speakers.

[fas42]

If your rig can fully express the attack of a piano key being struck hard, then everything's fine. Not talking about smoochy music here, this is Chopin or Liszt, in full flight. The transients are still miles within the capability of a playback chain; there is nothing 'magical' about them.

 

The 25 year old Yamaha keyboard we have here perfectly displays the difference between competence, and lack of such, to do transients: if not switched on in ages, and cold, the piano sound is dreadful, the transient attack is a sick joke. But give the beast a good thrashing for a couple of days, and its tonality fully awakens. The quality transits to 'convincing', and one could easily fool someone in the next room. Not a single thing in the environment changes; merely, the internal circuitry is fully 're-energised', and is now working correctly.

[fas42]

Spatial audio is not complicated at all - give the brain enough information, and it does all the necessary end processing, effortlessly. The subjective divide is caused by the playback needing to be of a, very high, standard, so that there are no "giveaways" in what the ears can pick up.

 

A very easy test is to just listen to a YouTube clip of a supposedly high performance rig working - if one can easily hear the 'fakeness' of the SQ via that 'tainted' pathway, then listening in the flesh is guaranteed to be no better - the anomalies will be even more obvious, and the mind dismisses it, "as just hifi" ...

[fas42]

Tsl, tsk, the reading skills need to be topped up a bit, Paul  ... I've noted many times, on CA, why all these technical crutches people have devised to get stereo to sparkle, in the spatial sense, work - they ferret out, and highlight the spatial cues that already exist in the recording, or, add some good guesses at to what's needed - voila, spacious, immersive sound, to various degrees of success.

 

So, the "specific information needed" are auditory cues that always make sense. Our analytical brains have a so-so grasp on these; but they already exist in the recordings, at subtle levels, perfectly formed by the conditions in which the sound elements were captured.

 

All one has to do is to stop the playback rig from tromping all over this data; dithering it into a useless soup of auditory chaos.

[fas42]

Gotta luv the scientific crowd ... unless one can regurgitate the very latest research findings on a particular topic, "you're not saying anything!".

 

Let's just say understanding precisely how human hearing processes incoming data, to make sense of the world, is an extremely active research field ... right now. If you want numbers, for the sake of numbers, then you'll need to hunt them down yourself ...

[fas42]

1 minute ago, pkane2001 said:

 

I understand, Frank. I was just curious if you had something specific to share.

 

 

Sorry, I appear to have misunderstood your intent ... the key thing that I've taken away from all my exposure to rigs working at varying degrees of clarity is that there is an absolutely critical level of "transparency" needed for the spatial information embedded in the recording to be properly decoded by the listening mind. If a system happens, at that point in time, to fall below that standard, then the spatial integrity of the presentation will be quite mediocre; but manage by any means to get above that required, and the recording space(s) "open up".

 

As an example most would understand, it's as if you had two adjacent but aurally separate rooms, one with a stereo rig, the other with a MCH setup equivalent in playback quality; put on the 'same' recording in the two rooms, the MCH one has the decoded information working well, through the extra speakers - well synchronised in time. And you can step, as you like, between the two rooms - that's how 'dramatic' the apparent difference is.