The myth of "The Absolute Sound"

[Summit]

18 hours ago, gmgraves said:

What I see is that you are looking at the question in the wrong light. The seat is not important. 

Like most people, I suspect that you know what a live trumpet sounds like, and you know that when you hear a recording of a trumpet, that it never has the bite or the presence of the real thing. But recreating that sense of realism is the avowed goal of high-fidelity. I’m sure there are many instruments that we all know the live sound of, but few aspects of those instrument’s actual sound make it from our speakers. Now, enough of those sonic signatures exist, even on a cheap table radio, for us to recognize these instruments when we hear them, but they don’t sound real, even on megabuck systems. Whether it’s the microphones used in the recording, or the recording gear or process, most of the time, the realism is not captured. Add to that the distortions added on playback, and the “Fi” we get in our playback is still severely limited. There must be a standard by which to measure our progress, and it can’t be that it “sounds good”. It must be a comparison to the real thing or the entire construct is flawed.

Again, you are looking at this wrong. If the playback chain is accurate to the sound of real instruments, playing in a real space, then it will be accurate to the sound of electronic or electric music as well. It cannot help but be because it means that the playback system is adding nothing and taking away  nothing from the signal it’s fed. The type of music being listened to doesn’t matter. Get the acoustic stuff to sound REAL, and by real, I mean that reproduced is indistinguishable from the actual instrument being reproduced, and all music will be accurate to the original, or absolute sound.

Now, to be honest, here, with what I call “Studio Music” where it is all electronics and over-dubbing and different tracks laid down at different times and often in different venues, the reality is that if you weren’t there at the mix, listening through the same studio monitor speakers in the same room as those who made the mix, you will have no idea how the producers and artists wanted their music to sound. In that case there really is no “Absolute Sound”. That’s why I personally don’t think that this kind of music should be used to evaluate audio gear. If no one has ever heard this performance (because it doesn’t exist outside of the studio), how can one judge the “Fi” of the playback? But, then, that’s just my opinion.

 

On this subject I totally agree with @gmgraves and what he wrote here.

[Summit]

17 hours ago, barrows said:

Sure, but at what distance?  In what room?  Played how?  Which trumpet?  These all can sound very different.  This is my point, that there is no absolute.

 

Agreed.  This again supports the idea of no real absolute.  Since the vast majority of all recordings are made this way, including most classical music and jazz.  Only a very few, so called "audiophile" recordings are made differently, and even many of those are not so "pure".  Even Jared Sack's work with Channel Classics is mixed through a console (albeit in analog) and recorded using many mikes.  Consider Allison Krauss' "Paper Airplane", certainly an audiophile favorite, and then go look on the Internet at the recording details, especially on her voice, the amount of processing applied was quite shocking to me, punching in and out different plug ins multiple times even just on single syllables.

 

The difference you are talking about is real and is of course important as well. The distance you sit from the musicians and the acoustics of the hall all has a great impact on sound, but in a totally different way, if you know what I mean. Obviously if you sit on a really lousy seat far far away it want sound very good, so not a good reference of how good real live sound like.   

[Summit]

16 hours ago, barrows said:

The point I am trying to make is that virtually no one has an "absolute" reference.  Because of the differences in recording technique, instrument sound (one guitar sounding different from another) no one has that reference.  High end systems are already good enough that the differences we are talking about are relatively small.

 

Here is what I feel would be a good (but still not perfect) reference:

 

1.  the individual must be present at the time and place of the recording, it is not enough to "know what a guitar sounds like", one has to know what that guitar sounds like in that recording.

 

2. One would need to hear the recording take place, live in room, unamplified.  Then one would need to verify the difference between the live in room sound, and the recording, and note those differences (because no one can expect the playback system to produce anything more than the recording)-this is important_ the playback system cannot be expected to retrieve information which was not recorded, as that would be an additive coloration.  So really what we are looking for is a perfect playback of the recording, and not the live in room sound.

 

3.  Then one would need to have perfect aural memory: if anyone does a little research on this, it appears that aural memory is rather poor.  Perhaps the research is flawed though, and people who train themselves to do so can achieve better aural memory than the research suggests...

 

4.  Then that recording could be used as a reasonable reference, but still given the problems above, one can see it is still not "absolute"

 

Some kind of "average" understanding of instrument sounds is not accurate enough, as high end systems are already good enough that these differences are rather small.  The differences in sound caused by recording techniques, different instruments, and styles of playing are much larger than the inaccuracies in our playback systems.

 

I have no problem with the concept of "The Absolute Sound" as a goal (as stated in the first post) my point is that in practice it is virtually impossible to actually apply in system evaluation, giving the problems above, even with a "decent" reference.  In practice, this concept is so flawed as to be meaningless for nearly all audiophiles. 

 

No need to have heard a specific live session or a particular instrument to know if it sounds like in real life, it never does.  The absolute reference is not to a specific live session, it is to how it sound live as opposite to recorded.

 

I have heard many SOTA systems and as good as they can be they never fool me to think that it is real musicians that sing and play real instrument on a real stage. The delta between a recorded session and a live session is too big. If it’s only one person that sing and play a guitar on a really good recording played true a SOTA audio system in an acoustically good treated room it can get close, but and this is a big but, the more complex the music is and the more musicians that are playing on stage the bigger the delta between a live and reproduced music gets.

 

Physically it is not possible for a one mic and transducer to capture and reproduce many instrument at the same time without the sound wave of one instrument interfere with the sound waves of the other instruments.

[Summit]

1 hour ago, Blackmorec said:

I really don’t understand this obsession with the Absolute Sound.

For a start, unless the same precise goal is shared by the recording fraternity, the goal is meaningless since its mainly the recording and not the playback that achieves the goal. 

 

Then there’s the fact that even the most avid concert goer is only going to hear a small fraction of his/her recording collection live and then in all likelihood in a different venue with a different orchestra and conductor, so this obsession with the original is pretty futile as we only seldom get to hear the original.  

 

Finally, the recorded live event is going to be reproduced in an altogether different venue and as we all know, all venues have their individual sound signatures, which is going to impact and alter what we hear. 

 

For me, what i want is that my music sounds like real musicians performing rhythmically together, playing instruments with a highly detailed timbral identity. I want their notes to have perfect timing, shape, form and decay. I would like instruments and voices to occupy their own discreet space (size, width, depth, height) and have highly accurate tonal qualities and I want to fully share in the rhythmic joy, beauty, pathos, drama or whatever emotion the piece evokes. 

From the above, from a hi-if standpoint you can tick off things like PRaT, accuracy, neutrality, sound stage with accurate imaging, and focus, atmosphere, listener involvement and ability to suspend disbelieve. Given that almost all recordings have been altered and adjusted by sound engineers and producers I don’t really give a toss whether it sounds like something I’ve never heard.....I’m far more concerned that it sounds beautiful, with the ability to wrap me round its little finger and keep me effortlessly engaged and focused entirely on the music.  Many, many recordings I listen to have been substantially altered...that’s fine, because when its good, I enjoy the recording/mixing engineers’ artistic skills as much as I enjoy the music. Imagine a huge 3 dimensional space with a variety of instruments filling it and moving around within it, adding movement to their  timbral spectrum is very often a major attribute in the music’s ability to enthral and thrill.  

 

If by Absolute Sound we would mean the sound of real musicians playing real instrument on a stage I can totally understand the "obsession" with the Absolute Sound. I mean why would we spend a lot of time and hard earned money, furnish the listening room and read all reviews and forum posts if not for that?

 

It’s no coincidence that people in general like and prefer the sound of real instrument played live, because otherwise we would have developed instrument that sounded different. If people would have liked to have trumpets that sounded warmer/cooler/dryer/fuller or softer we would have made and use trumpets that sound so. Likewise have we, over many century ,made churches and other buildings there live music played by real musicians sound particularly good. And it doesn’t end there, we have and are still composes music with a verity of many different instrument and voices with their unique sound to create a soundscape made of different tones, harmonics and rhythmic. To me Absolute Sound is real and the very reference of which I try to mimic/reproduce my audio system to sound like at home. I know that I will never get it to 100 % with recorded music, but the closer the better.