The myth of "The Absolute Sound"

[Blackmorec]

On 10/5/2019 at 1:54 AM, gmgraves said:

Yeah, Frank is full of it. Always has been for as long as he’s been here. Boom-box speakers and cheap, mid-fi gear soldered together giving better results than real high-end equipment? Proper “playback” systems capable of making even the lousiest recordings* sound good? Gimme a break.

* The reality is that the better the playback system, the LESS tolerant it is of inadequate program material, not the more tolerant!

That's not my reality at all. Whenever I upgrade my system almost all recordings sound better. Typically poor recordings work together with system shortcomings to make the sound poor. You can't change the recording but improving the accuracy, resolution and neutrality of the playback and poor recordings should be enhanced as you've removed playback system shortcomings. If it goes the other way it means that you haven't resolved the playback issues but have rather increased them, or left them undressed while emphasising another aspect in the replay that highlights those shortcomings 

[Blackmorec]

11 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Since, ostensibly, the better the system, the more resolving power it has, it stands to reason that a really good system would recover more from any recording than a poor system. That means that if you play a lousy recording, the higher the Fi of the stereo playing that recording, the more awfulness that system is going elicit from that bad recording. One thing that needs to be made clear, here, I think, is that commercial recordings aren’t made for audiophiles with megabuck systems. They are made to sound decent on the lowest common denominator in playback. Before the advent of the CD, that was the kind of “portable” record player one would find in the bedroom of your average teen-aged girl. It consisted of a cheap record changer, in a vinyl covered wooden box with a luggage handle on one side, a 4-inch speaker, a flea-powered 1-Watt, 2-tube amplifier, a $1 crystal phono cartridge, and they sounded wretched! But most girl children had one, nontheless.

I don’t know what today’s equivalent is (the garden-variety built-in factory car stereo, perhaps?), but you can count on the fact that it’s not a dCS Vivaldi front-end playing through a Pass  pre-amp and power amp driving a pair of Wilson Alexandria XLFs!

Again I completely disagree. When you listen to a poor recording there are 2 elements at work. You listen to the sum of these 2 elements

1. The poor recording, which makes it difficult to unravel the individual musicians’ contributions and therefore difficult to understand and enjoy.

2. A compromised replay system that compounds the confusion and makes it even more difficult to understand. 

If replay systems were perfect, we’d always hear exactly what was on any given recording. The fact that we don’t hear everything is proven by the fact we are still making improvements to replay systems today. All improvements are, are the removal of shortcomings. 

When we make improvements to a system (remove shortcomings) we should be making the music easier to understand and enjoy....all music....good and bad recordings. And if the music is easier to follow and understand, its easier to enjoy, so removing shortcomings from the playback chain should benefit all recordings, good and bad. 

If  ‘improvements’ simply hold a magnifying glass to recording faults, you have not improved your system, rather you have simply compounded its’ shortcomings. 

I have a fairly extensive collection of recordings and ‘favourites’. The number of truly poor recordings is a low, single digit percentage. 

[Blackmorec]

Duplicate

[Blackmorec]

3 minutes ago, semente said:

 

I would add that listening room acoustics also play a significant part in the process of adding confusion to the reproduction of the recorded signal (which is after all the music).

 

But I agree with @gmgraves that it all starts with the capture and it's downhill all the way from then onwards.

Agree 100%. Your room has a major influence which can make even well recorded material sound bad if its ‘out of sorts’ and unsympathetic to music replay. 

[Blackmorec]

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.  

[Blackmorec]

56 minutes ago, Summit said:

 

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.  

I get what you’re saying, i really do. You want the sound of your system not to sound like a trumpet but to sound like it was made by a trumpet. My view is no different....i want instruments to sound real  and if i’m playing a live recording of 4 guys on a stage creating a piece of heaven with a few simple instruments I want it to sound just like that....4 guys, natural acoustic, natural reverb and crowd noise. Heaven!  Yep I want the lot . 😀   Of course it depends on how much of that is actually on the recording. 

[Blackmorec]

4 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Not as confused as Frank is. A bad recording cannot be made good with even the best playback system in the world. One might like a performance so much that one “puts-up with” the bad recording to hear the good performance.

I would say that that very much depends on what the recording shortcomings are and how the system may be helping to make them worse. 

[Blackmorec]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Well, of course. There are so many ways that a recording can be fouled up, and depending upon what the individual listener has seized upon as being important to him in playback, he/she might not even care about certain characteristics being wrong in a given recording. For, instance, a person who does not care about soundstage might not even notice that a certain recording or recordings image poorly, and therefore will find such recordings perfectly acceptable.

Let’s take that recording as an example. Sounds on a recording, especially those with close frequency specta are separated for the listener by frequency, time and position. When certain elements like positional information are missing, closely related sounds start to interfere with one another and the one with greater amplitude will tend to dominate and mask the lower amplitude instrument. When the lower amplitude signal is not heard separately its heard as part of the higher amplitude signal, basically as distortion. Play that recording through a system that does not image well and the recording will sound veiled and the tonal accuracy distorted by the unresolved low amplitude signal. 

 

Play that same recording through a system that is able to tease out more positional information and that same recording will sound less blurred and less distorted as the listener will hear both high and low amplitude signals separately and therefore more clearly. 

[Blackmorec]

7 hours ago, gmgraves said:

My experience with thousands of records and CDs, SACDS, Blu-Rays, downloads and streams is that if it isn’t on the recording (and most of the time, it isn’t) no amount of “teasing” will pull from the recording, that which isn’t there.

And my experience is uniformly that our capabilities in recording are currently far better than our abilities in retrieval, which is why we can continuously make upgrades to the replay system based on the same recordings.

The point is, and why a lot of recordings sound bad is that they contain detail that has been masked, either by noise, lack of resolution, lack of detail preservation, crosstalk etc etc. So its not that the information is missing, just that its a challenge to hear due to shortcomings in both recording (possibly) or replay (certainly). 

 

I’ve noticed that you have a great many preferences when it comes to the type of material you like to listen to i.e what to you constitutes a great recording. Typically this high degree of selectiveness is because only a few recordings truly make musical sense on the replay system you have chosen and continue to evolve. You say “no amount of teasing will pull from the recording that which isn’t there”  

Lets examine that statement by asking the questions, ‘why can’t you hear it’ and ‘how do you know it isn’t there’. When you replay a recording and some fine detail is lacking, there are always 2 possible reasons why...it isn’t there, or, just as valid, it isn’t recovered or is masked by the replay system.  How do you tell which one? The simple answer is, you can’t, at least not definitively because we have no reference;  no means to measure musical content attributes against a known standard. 

In mass spectrometry, whenever we managed to find a new decade of sensitivity and resolution, we also found a whole bunch of new compounds....low concentration physiological proteins for example, that had been hiding in both the electrical noise and the chemical noise of the system. As soon as those 2 sources of noise were reduced, new information became visible. No different with recordings....removing noise reduces confusion and makes stuff easier to hear more clearly. An example...I have a Michael Franks recording Birchfield Nines...nothing particularly special. I’ve had that recording for years and I listen to it periodically to judge how my system has progressed. Yesterday was the first listen in maybe a year and I have made some significant upgrades in that period. Did I hear a difference? Absolutely!  In that year I’ve replaced all SMPSs in my network with high quality LPSs, added some super quiet network cabling and a superior server with better clocks and power supplies. So how did Michael sound? Far better...like you’d hope a remastered recording would sound, but rarely does. The music was far more transparent and detailed, some hidden reverb emerged that i’ve never heard before, the recording was far better spatially delineated and focused. Instruments sounded more real....for example guitar notes don’t just sound like a guitar....they sound like they’re coming from a guitar.....very different!  Michael’s voice was far more detailed...not in an analytical way but in a way that reveals far more of the natural sounds of singing, making him seem much more present, more real. The decay of notes was better as was the precision of the timing. All those improvements moved the recording on from what i would judge as good to what I now consider excellent, the difference lying in the information that was previously unrecovered or masked by the replay system.  If OK recordings can move to excellent, then there’s no reason why poor recordings can’t move to OK when the missing detail and information is better revealed.  

[Blackmorec]

9 hours ago, STC said:

How would a blind person fit in this description? 
 

In audio reproduction, there are two concepts involved. “ You are here” and “ You are there”.  A typical audiophile soloist or small ensemble falls in “You are here” category. Your playback should produce the illusion that they are in your room. For large ensemble, you cannot create the “ they are here” feel because your room acoustics would not be able to produce the feel. In those circumstances, the Ideal playback should able to generate “ You are there” feel. 
 

No playback system could do the two jobs adequately without you changing the playback method. Some audiophiles, have different setups in different room which excel in one genre over the other. This is where the reconstruction via multi channels aspects comes in. 
 

It is strange that the staunchest proponent of double blind tests failed to ask themselves on what basis they are insisting that a recording ( and that too with a single stereo microphone) were identical to the live event?  Can they do a quick A/B switching between live and recording to confirm their observation?

 

We are wired to decode sound to provide information. Even the most absurd and meaningless noise can be decoded to have some previously known word or rhythm. 
 

The best we  could do is to recognize a sound whether it is , say ,a real piano or does it sound fake. I could swear that my Fisher minicombo sounded real enough when I was 15 year. I swear I heard a person was in my room in my previous setup. All these were true until you hear another better  system and able to compare them side by side. Until then let the debate continue because for most there are nothing much they could do with their system and this kind of debates provides some self assurance.   

 

[Blackmorec]

34 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Experience tells me where the problem lies. For instance, my experience tells me that a Mercury Living Presence recording might sound good, but it will never image correctly because spaced omnidirectional mikes cannot capture a stereo sound field. Another example would be multi-miked, multi-channel recordings. They will never sound like music. A string section sounds like massed strings because the sound of the individual violins mix together in the air between the orchestra and the audience’s ears. If each violin is close miked with a mike per instrument or a mike per a group of violins, they get electronically mixed in the studio, and end up sounding like a dozen or so individual violins, but they will never sound like a string section. This is every kind of wrong. Record companies got away with it because many listeners simply don’t give a damn, and as I’ve said before, commercial recordings are not made for audiophiles, they are made for the lowest common denominator in listening environments.

Hi GM, I see now where your and my ways diverge. You are looking for perfect recording to play on your system. I am looking for a system that makes every recording sound as great as possible .

The other difference is that while you’re judging each recording to see if it fits your mental model of what a perfect recording should sound like, I’m just plain old boogieing along with some fantastic music, without doing any mental comparisons or judgements. My system simply grabs me by the neurons and fills my head with glorious music.  My only criteria is how much I’m enjoying what I’m hearing and if the answer is = or > a lot, i’m good.  I go to quite a few live concerts....they are very different to what I’m doing at home. For example at a concert I never close my eyes...at home my eyes are always shut.  The experience of being in the presence of and listening to the Vienna Philmarmonic is Soooo different to listening to the VP via a recording that comparison is frankly meaningless. What isn’t worthless is that I want to enjoy both immensely...the recording for the great music and performances and the concert for the whole anticipation,  spectacle and afterglow.  

 

BTW, I don’t think the sound engineer has yet been born who would close mike every violin in an orchestra. That’s simply misuse of the technique; although I do take your point....overdo it and multiple miking can really spoil the pudding. 

 

Watch a conductor on his podium. While he’s conducting what do you notice?  He swivels his head a lot. That’s to align his ears with a particular instrument he wants to focus on in that moment.  What does the audience all do when a soloist starts to play? They turn their heads towards the soloist.  They centre the soloist in their vision, which has the effect of balancing the input to both ears so they get maximum focus and clarity. Given that I’ve yet to see microphones installed in animated heads, how would you go about reproducing what the conductor and the audience hear? Using a single microphone is not going to deliver any of the focus and intensity that a pair of animated ears is going to pick up, so the risk is the music sounds slightly dull and uninteresting. Using multiple microphones at least gives some control over maximising focus, intensity and s/n. 

[Blackmorec]

Hi STC,

I think the expression is ‘They are here’ where the performers sound like they’re in your room and ‘You are there’ where it sounds like you’ve been transported to the original venue. 

 

Both require that the artistes are very well reproduced because in both cases they are ‘heard to be present either in your room or theirs. 

 

In my opinion, ‘They are here’ is what I get from recordings that do a stellar job with the artistes but capture no venue information like reverb, audience noises etc. In such a case there’s no acoustic information to create the impression of a venue, so by omission of any other information they sound like they’re playing in my room. 

However, as soon as there’s any venue acoustics information reproduced my room is replaced by the impression created by the venue. 

 

‘You are there’ are the recordings I very much prefer. The very best are able to create a very accurate sonic picture of the venue, with the right reverb and decay times to indicate walls and ceilings, with audience noises and air with a texture and atmosphere. Typically the venue thus created will have very different dimensions to your listening room and listening to such recordings often feels like a sudden change in reality....you’re in a different space, with a different acoustic, there’s an audience present and there are musicians playing great music.  This can be especially weird  at the beginning of a listening session when you go from zero to -14dB in a heartbeat. 

 

Where this whole thing breaks down, is when your room has a strong sonic identity of its own, which will tend to dominate proceedings and create mainly ‘They are here’  performances, with the replay room dominating the acoustics you hear.  You’ll know if this is the case, because most recordings will lack a unique sonic venue in which the performance happens and all recordings will sound like they were recorded in a similar venue. 

The other way this breaks down is when your system loses a lot of subtle information about the venue’s acoustics, so cannot create that sonic ‘space’ 

[Blackmorec]

39 minutes ago, Blackmorec said:

is when your system loses a lot of subtle information about the venue’s acoustics, so cannot create the impression of sonic ‘space’ in your mind. 

Just a clarification on what is actually creating the sonic space. 

[Blackmorec]

1 hour ago, barrows said:

Yes, this is where I am at as well.  And much of the reason for the original posting of the topic.  While nice in concept, and a worthy goal, the ideal of the "Absolute Sound" does not really exist as a reliable reference in practice, and the best we can really do is make our systems sound as enjoyable as possible, playing all the types and recordings of the music we love.

As a music lover and audiophile, which statement would we most like as our hi-if goal statement?

• I want my system to sound like the mental memory model I have for how live music should sound? Or
• I want my system to make me ecstatically happy each time I listen to it? 

For me, Statement 1 has me comparing my system to a mental memory of live music and hopefully ticking all the boxes. Sounds like it would involve quite a lot of analytical listening which really isn’t my cup of tea. 

To achieve Goal 2 all I have to do is lay back and bask in the glory of the music 

Both lead to upgrading and improving the system to achieve either goal and both should end up with a really good system that makes their user happy in terms of meeting their goal. For me its just that I find it tiresome being in constant comparison mode....’does this sound like live’ judgements.

Personally I just want to sit back and enjoy the music without judgements, just appreciation and joy

[Blackmorec]

5 minutes ago, Albrecht said:

Right...

We listen to recordings on our home stereo, - which are an "interpretation." When I was recording and producing my band's songs, - our focus was on doing what we needed to enhance the "song," - not to make the song sound like how we would play it live on stage. We never had 1/2 of the studio tools on stage that we would have available in the studio.

Every CD is at least, (minimum), 5 different generations of what those instruments sounded like when we played them standing in front of the amplifiers, going to the 2" rough-mix tape.

Finally, - don't know what your local Opera/Classical music venue acoustics are like. But I can tell you that the San Francisco OPERA house is a pile of SHITE for acoustics. I have never heard any "live event" at the SF Opera sound "good." What a garbage dump. The acoustics of recordings of Opera sound sooooo much better than that nightmare.  And, - you don't get half-dead old housewives coughing and clapping and yelling "WOOT" at the most inappropriate times. Every Opera performance has a mic-ed PA, - and again, - I don't know about other places, - but the SF Opera PA is complete SHITE, - filled with noise, hissing, crackling, and over-driven "hot-to-tape" noise....

My God Albrecht, what a post! I nearly pissed myself