The myth of "The Absolute Sound"

[fas42]

3 hours ago, semente said:

 

This is wrong because speakers are directional (most) and because stereo creates the pahntom images between the two speakers.

 

You must either raise your standards of quality reproduction and/or listen more attentively to live unamplified concerts and recitals.

 

Ummm, how it works, subjectively, is that the stereo speakers completely cease to exist as anything to do with the sound - the "phantom images" are a soundscape that completely take over the environment you're in, which are locked in solidly, well, as if they were on a stage, 😉. The speakers are then merely two lumps of interesting or otherwise furniture in the room, which have nothing to do with what you are hearing - you could be tempted to toss them out the door, because they are mildly annoying to the experience of "seeing" the sound, 😄.

[semente]

29 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

You misunderstand ... I was merely saying ruining the commercial, resell value of some expensive gear would not be an intelligent move.

 

That I agree with.

[STC]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

Yep. The thing that makes conventional stereo playback work, as you have stated many times. I'm just saying that this inner processing can switch into a higher mode of decoding, given the right circumstances.

 

I note that your hearing doesn't allow you to hear some effects, that others can experience. Which very likely means that you will never be able to perceive this illusion - there will always be a percentage of people for whom the 'trick' will never work; it's all to do with how the brain is wired.

In that case my brain works better as I perceive 3D sound with image when listening through a $10 transistor as I can switch to an elevated state of mind. Sometimes, I could do that even without music at all. Just make sure to remember to solder the batteries. Contact is very important. 

[Confused]

12 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Yes, well ... a recording of a poor system playing an aggressive track is certainly pushing the friendship ...

 

A simple rule of thumb - any recording which involves the microphone capture of some sort of audio system outputting through speakers as one of the sound elements needs to consider that sound source as being 'processed' - and all bets are off. At one end of the spectrum, Hendrix 'torturing' his Marshall amp, while singing along - the vocals should sound like a real person; the guitar element is only very vaguely connected with what the 'live' sound of his guitar, unplugged, is like.

Yes of course, however, I think you have misunderstood the nature of the Nirvana track I posted earlier.  (post #47)  So for clarity, this is not a recording of a poor system playing an aggressive track, it is a recording of an early Nirvana rehearsal session, with the recording made by (not played on) a "boombox".  I would say it is definitively a poor recording, but it does have some interest from a historical perspective. 

[marce]

14 hours ago, barrows said:

I suspect that our current understanding of physics would likely have to change to get there, at least as long as transducers have mass, and wires have resistance.  Although nothing is "impossible" ultimately, and our understanding of physics is subject to change!

Not the basics....

[barrows]

2 hours ago, semente said:

 

I agree.

 

I attended a performance of Sa Chen playing Grieg's Piano Concerto and the recording (second video) made in the previous or ensuing days sounds a lot less like what I experienced that the minimalist mic'ed video of the live event (see below). I am talking about the soundscape as well as the timbre and relative balance between the soloist instrument and the different groups which constitute the orchestra.

This is because the producers have spread a dozen of mics all over the stage. (and I wonder if the mixing, EQ'ing and othe processing doesn't affect sound quality as well)

 

Live:

 

 

 

Recording:

 

 

 

The same is true for the other Pentatone recordings of the same orchestra that I own.

And problems such as this are more examples of why there really is no "absolute".  Whether the recording is classical, jazz, rock, or electronica...  Things will sound different with the slightest change in recording technique.  AQ brought up Peter Wilson's recordings, I do have a couple of those and they do seem to be fairly good references for me, but still, I have no precise idea of what the music sounded like live in the room during the sessions.

One thing I have thought about for long time regarding close miking-as the microphones are lossy, and one of the first things they seem to "lose" is transient impact and dynamic "snap", I sometimes think that close miking can compensate for this.  I am often (but not always) disappointed by audiophile style purist recordings precisely because they often appear to be too soft sounding to me compared to real life music.  For example, consider a jazz trio, unamplified in a relatively small space (bar, etc): the amount of impact and presence of the drums and say a trumpet is palpable: it is very rare to hear a distantly miked recording which captures the impact and presence.  I think that closer miking can actually compensate for this loss of impact, and that distant miking is not always the answer.

[semente]

29 minutes ago, barrows said:

And problems such as this are more examples of why there really is no "absolute".  Whether the recording is classical, jazz, rock, or electronica...  Things will sound different with the slightest change in recording technique.  AQ brought up Peter Wilson's recordings, I do have a couple of those and they do seem to be fairly good references for me, but still, I have no precise idea of what the music sounded like live in the room during the sessions.

One thing I have thought about for long time regarding close miking-as the microphones are lossy, and one of the first things they seem to "lose" is transient impact and dynamic "snap", I sometimes think that close miking can compensate for this.  I am often (but not always) disappointed by audiophile style purist recordings precisely because they often appear to be too soft sounding to me compared to real life music.  For example, consider a jazz trio, unamplified in a relatively small space (bar, etc): the amount of impact and presence of the drums and say a trumpet is palpable: it is very rare to hear a distantly miked recording which captures the impact and presence.  I think that closer miking can actually compensate for this loss of impact, and that distant miking is not always the answer.

 

I agree that impact is one of the areas where domestic reproduction of recordings falls short of the live experience.

 

But Mario of PlayClassics' recording of a drum kit does sound close to what one would hear in a club if played back at (almost) realistic levels (the limiting factor is not so much the distant mic'ing but the system's ability to play loud without distortion). We are back at the need to compensate for stereo's shortcomings.

Have you had the chance to listen to his demo suite with the flamenco, the piano and the drums?

 

[gmgraves]

14 hours ago, fas42 said:

Yep, that's what happens ... the 'miracle' is that this can be the case for just about every recording you have,😊

 

 

Permit me to doubt. There are certain things that I listen for in a recording, and believe me, if they ain’t there, they AIN’T THERE and no amount of tweaking one’s playback system will put them there, either! The way you talk, one would think that you could put an acoustically recorded 78rpm shellac record from the 1920’s on your stereo and it would come out of your ghetto-blaster speakers sounding like a state-of-the-art 24-bit/192 KHz digital recording, in stereo, yet!

[gmgraves]

7 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Ummm, how it works, subjectively, is that the stereo speakers completely cease to exist as anything to do with the sound - the "phantom images" are a soundscape that completely take over the environment you're in, which are locked in solidly, well, as if they were on a stage, 😉. The speakers are then merely two lumps of interesting or otherwise furniture in the room, which have nothing to do with what you are hearing - you could be tempted to toss them out the door, because they are mildly annoying to the experience of "seeing" the sound, 😄.

Oh, brother! Would that it were true, and not Frank living in his fantasy world again (still?)!

[Ralf11]

Hey Frank - some bozo just told me I have a "mid-range system" - would you be willing to stop by and re-solder it for me?

[gmgraves]

4 hours ago, semente said:

 

I agree that impact is one of the areas where domestic reproduction of recordings falls short of the live experience.

 

But Mario of PlayClassics' recording of a drum kit does sound close to what one would hear in a club if played back at (almost) realistic levels (the limiting factor is not so much the distant mic'ing but the system's ability to play loud without distortion). We are back at the need to compensate for stereo's shortcomings.

Have you had the chance to listen to his demo suite with the flamenco, the piano and the drums?

 

I have. Mario’s recordings are all excellent because he (A) knows what he is doing, and (B) is not constrained by any shackles imposed by a “corporate sound”, or a need to tailor a sound to any particular market or clientele. Mario makes recordings that sound as much like real music playing in a real space as is technically possible, because he can and that’s the sound he wants. 

[semente]

Years ago I came upon this interesting piece of writing at the website of Audio Tekne. The translation is somewhat fruity and difficult at times but I think that it makes sane points.

 

The stereo system is a tool for listening to music. Therefore, the foundation which judges sound are returning to the musical starting point first. Please remember the music note written to 5 lines on the score.
Since the sound of La of C major is the frequency of 440Hz, the sound on the two octaves up is not a very high sound, and it is 1760Hz in frequency.
It cannot sing to us as a very high frequency sound. There are not much the sound that we consider high and low frequency sound.
The result as, there is a speaker system with the tweeter's crossover at 5KHz. Please think about the sound in question, if the sound of the tweeter is heard. However, as for the tweeter, please understand that it is necessary to reproduce the atmosphere, tone by a harmonic component.

"The right sound that has a right scale and the tone of a musical instrument (voice), is audibly correct."

An easy method to judge the right sound is enlarging. And the sound is the sound which is not noisy and is not fatiguing. When the sound of two stereo systems is auditioned, the first is noisy and fatiguing which get us get tired, -the system is bad. The reason is high distortion with many odd harmonics and strong stimulation. A good sound is a natural sound in which the transients of the sound and the balance of reverberation are ready. The depth and S/N ratio are good, the sound is of a great delicacy, and at last the music is able to listen to

" Let's listen to music, without hearing sound. "
A musical sound heard in a concert hall is not powerful as we are creating it.

The market of the stereo became big with the advance of a sharp transistor amplifier around 1972. Development of the stereo market was built with blinded by love of gain and the act which precede trade. Consequently, people forgot to listen to original (live) music and then became so that many people have enjoyed sound (effect sound). Furthermore in the street, people without knowing anything about the real sound became in the situation of doing the evaluation of sound.

"Let's listen to music and again, it turns to a starting point. '

When many people listen the sound that has a peak in the treble caused by distortion, they will misunderstand it as good treble sound. The sound of cymbal and a violin can be heard altered. It may be the sound that has a peak. A natural sound approaching a real sound is not unexpected conscious to us, and we are made to feel it nonchalant. Moreover, many people believe that good sound is the one that jumps out from the rear. Therefore, even if the sound of an accompaniment musical instrument orientates many people away from a singer's voice, they do not doubt. Isn't the heard sound of leveled up tweeter? Because, there is no such high frequency sound on a score that it considers. Therefore, if you are listening to the sound of a tweeter, please suspect that level of the tweeter is too high. It is the beginning of an unnatural sound. Such a case is applicable also to the region of bass sound. When people listen to bass sound region that have a peak, many of them misunderstand it as force in the sound of bass drum and furthermore, the bass sound is thought rich along the region of bass sound? And don't many people misunderstand the region of mid sound that is thick and a swelling, as rich music nature? Don't many people regard the sound as a good sound without noticing such an unexpected phenomenon?

" The real abundant sound of music nature, which is not altered freely, and is not peculiar sound, is a natural sound with little distortion." Please choose good software (the live recording of the aria, vocal music and opera is safe) to make an audition.

If the sound is made tonally different by each the audio equipment, sound does not grow into a natural sound with the equipment with which musicality was balanced by force.

Please find the right balance of sound once again by listen to music.

Expression which judges tone quality is, improve from in volume to quality, and it is a method of better. A tone quality expression is not an abstract expression if said that the region of bass and treble sound in a loud sound.

"It is expression which clarifies the scale of the note on a score and the tone of a musical instrument which takes charge of the part sounds correctly."

" First of all, let's return on how to listen to our own sound and the method of judgment for start "

The sound is good only by hearing it, not from talk only or by looking at the audio equipment-- please do not judge it as bad. After actually hearing the sound, it is important to carry out the right judgment.

[Jud]

17 hours ago, STC said:

Then how come scientists and professional violinists were so incompetent? 
 

But Claudia Fritz (a scientist who studies instrument acoustics) and Joseph Curtin (a violin-maker) may have discovered the real secret to a Stradivarius’s sound: nothing at all.

The duo asked professional violinists to play new violins, and old ones by Stradivari and Guarneri. They couldn’t tell the difference between the two groups. One of the new violins even emerged as the most commonly preferred instrument.

 

Careful. When I read one such study, the loudest instrument was preferred. Without controlling for loudness, all bets are off.

[lucretius]

2 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

Hey Frank - some bozo just told me I have a "mid-range system" - would you be willing to stop by and re-solder it for me?

Did GUTB stop by?

[esldude]

40 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Careful. When I read one such study, the loudest instrument was preferred. Without controlling for loudness, all bets are off.

Yes, and one of the myths, apparently not so, is the old Italian violins "project more forcefully" in a hall.  I do believe the winning violin was carbon fiber, and likely much louder.   Dare I mention carbon fiber is an environmental problem versus wooden instruments. 🤐

[Jud]

1 minute ago, esldude said:

Yes, and one of the myths, apparently not so, is the old Italian violins "project more forcefully" in a hall.  I do believe the winning violin was carbon fiber, and likely much louder.   Dare I mention carbon fiber is an environmental problem versus wooden instruments. 🤐

 

Dang, and I like Formula 1.

[esldude]

11 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Dang, and I like Formula 1.

I prefer MotoGP. 

[STC]

51 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Careful. When I read one such study, the loudest instrument was preferred. Without controlling for loudness, all bets are off.

That is another quote that often used by objectivists without knowing when the loudest instruments or speakers preferred.   A loudest instrument is preferred when everything else is equal. Most of my samples/demos were deliberately set at about 3dB different to ensure that loudness was not the criteria for preference. 
 

Anyway, the experiment I quoted was whether the players could recognize the so called sound characteristics of the violin. There was another example where a speaker manufacturer who couldn’t identify his own speakers despite pages of reviews by audiophiles who claimed that this particular brand had its own sound signature. 

[Jud]

22 hours ago, semente said:

I could be wrong but it looks to me like @Jud could be trying to downplay the importance of tonal accuracy in a recording or playback system.

 

Not precisely, any more than I'd want to downplay the importance of color accuracy across the spectrum in a television monitor.

 

Let's go step by step, being careful not to extrapolate too far:

 

1 - barrows said there wasn't in practicality such a thing as an absolute sound, because you wouldn't know the exact sound of, for example, an acoustic guitar as it was played live in the studio, nor of room effects or whatever else changed the mic feed from that live sound.

 

2 - Several people said they'd know whether or not the sound of an acoustic guitar was "off" in their systems due to familiarity and experience with the sound of that instrument through playing and/or listening.

 

3 - I brought up an experiment where college music students confused violins for oboes, flutes for saxes or trombones, etc., because the inharmonic portions of the instruments' sounds - the initial attack, and the ultimate release - had been removed.

 

4 - There are two points to #3:

 

-- First, the presence or absence of a characteristic attack and release is a very large difference indeed. I'm not sure I've ever heard a system so lo-fi that it cut those out of the sound. We can expect any reasonable high end system to reproduce characteristic attacks and releases. So to the extent two acoustic guitars, let's say, differ in characteristic attack and release, telling them apart may not be that difficult. And since any reasonable high end system ought to reproduce those differences, this would not be a way to distinguish one high end system from another, or tell whether you were hearing the "absolute sound" of a recorded acoustic guitar.

 

-- Second, since we can't use distinctions in reproducing attack and release to differentiate among high end systems, what about the rest of the note - the harmonic portion? Well, even music students hearing instruments many hours per week experienced a lot of difficulty just telling an oboe from a violin using that part of the note, so what hope is there that you would be able to distinguish two high end systems rendering very close to identical reproductions of that harmonic portion, or tell whether one brought you closer to the "absolute sound" of a particular acoustic guitar?

 

Thus, the importance of the experiment is not in any sort of general notion that overall tonal accuracy isn't important for various purposes concerning your enjoyment of accurate sound from your system. Its importance lies in demonstrating one very specific thing: What many folks here intuitively thought in reaction to barrows' initial post - that subtle differences in things like overall tonal accuracy will allow one to distinguish by ear whether one system renders an acoustic guitar closer to the absolute than another - is almost certainly not possible.

[Jud]

18 minutes ago, STC said:

A loudest instrument is preferred when everything else is equal.

 

You can eliminate everything after "preferred." We prefer louder, period. So in fact it is the reverse: Only when loudness is equal can everything else be fairly evaluated.

 

18 minutes ago, STC said:

Anyway, the experiment I quoted was whether the players could recognize the so called sound characteristics of the violin.

 

As noted in my response to your first quote, loudness trumps everything. The overwhelming likelihood is that the players chose in the order of loudness, equating what they thought sounded best - i.e., the loudest violin - to the best reputed instrument, the Strad.

[fas42]

10 hours ago, Confused said:

Yes of course, however, I think you have misunderstood the nature of the Nirvana track I posted earlier.  (post #47)  So for clarity, this is not a recording of a poor system playing an aggressive track, it is a recording of an early Nirvana rehearsal session, with the recording made by (not played on) a "boombox".  I would say it is definitively a poor recording, but it does have some interest from a historical perspective. 

 

Fair enough. I have something similar, a CD of recordings of groups participating in a rock band competition, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoadley's_Battle_of_the_Sounds, made by members of the audience using whatever they had at hand. You want rough? This is such in spades ... well below AM radio quality in most cases, purely historical documenting you might say .

 

Yet, even here the 'miracle' can happen - the before is close to grotesque; the after starts to come together, and the energy of the wet behind the ears band, trying their hardest, starts to, yes, "connect" ...

[fas42]

10 hours ago, STC said:

In that case my brain works better as I perceive 3D sound with image when listening through a $10 transistor as I can switch to an elevated state of mind. Sometimes, I could do that even without music at all. Just make sure to remember to solder the batteries. Contact is very important. 

 

Which is why nearly everyone in the audio game never quite gets there ... do planes fall out of the sky because the best pilot wasn't in command, the engines weren't big enough, or the hostesses weren't in sexy enough uniforms ... or because some worker neglected to check some little item, because the pressure was on to finish what he was doing?

 

The sad truth is, that unless one truly understands that point then one is likely to go round and round and round in circles ...

[fas42]

4 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

Hey Frank - some bozo just told me I have a "mid-range system" - would you be willing to stop by and re-solder it for me?

 

Depends ... what's the pay rate? ... 😊

[STC]

46 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

You can eliminate everything after "preferred." We prefer louder, period. So in fact it is the reverse: Only when loudness is equal can everything else be fairly evaluated.

 

 

As noted in my response to your first quote, loudness trumps everything. The overwhelming likelihood is that the players chose in the order of loudness, equating what they thought sounded best - i.e., the loudest violin - to the best reputed instrument, the Strad.

Which paper are you referring to?  
 

Human prefer louder sound but that is a qualified statement. Going by your argument, violinists preferred Stradivarius because they were louder than all other violins?  😂 😂 😂 

[fas42]

8 hours ago, barrows said:

 

One thing I have thought about for long time regarding close miking-as the microphones are lossy, and one of the first things they seem to "lose" is transient impact and dynamic "snap", I sometimes think that close miking can compensate for this.  I am often (but not always) disappointed by audiophile style purist recordings precisely because they often appear to be too soft sounding to me compared to real life music.  For example, consider a jazz trio, unamplified in a relatively small space (bar, etc): the amount of impact and presence of the drums and say a trumpet is palpable: it is very rare to hear a distantly miked recording which captures the impact and presence.  I think that closer miking can actually compensate for this loss of impact, and that distant miking is not always the answer.

 

Okay, this is a big giveaway ... loss of "transient impact", lack of "dynamic snap" is all about the playback chain. Not microphones, or how they are used ... a subpar playback will be dull, boring to listen to - then just be blown away by how the intensity of the music making is restored, completely, by a rig in the zone ... on the very same recording.