Can Bad Recordings sound Good?

[Kal Rubinson]

16 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

My '92 BMW had a speed-adjusted volume. It worked just fine at 120mph. And to reduce road noise, the car would roll up all the windows automatically when exceeding 100mph. Didn't sound distorted at all at those speeds

No doubt but the "distortion" I was referencing is MB system's subjectively random raising and lowering the volume in response to varying noise levels.

[pkane2001]

25 minutes ago, Kal Rubinson said:

No doubt but the "distortion" I was referencing is MB system's subjectively random raising and lowering the volume in response to varying noise levels.

That’s why the adjustment based on vehicle speed is a better way to go, IMO. My (much) newer Jeep has the same option to adjust volume based on speed, but also provides some control over how aggressive this adjustment is.

[Confused]

17 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

 

My '92 BMW had a speed-adjusted volume. It worked just fine at 120mph. And to reduce road noise, the car would roll up all the windows automatically when exceeding 100mph. Didn't sound distorted at all at those speeds

 

Which might be terribly bad news for your dog if he is enjoying having his head out of the window as you accelerate past 99mph.

[NOMBEDES]

I never liked the speed adjusted volume.  I found it distracting.  I STILL have a 2001 Mercedes with this feature.  My wife will not get rid of the damn thing so I can put a nice Porsche in the garage.  My life sucks.

[Kal Rubinson]

3 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

That’s why the adjustment based on vehicle speed is a better way to go, IMO. My (much) newer Jeep has the same option to adjust volume based on speed, but also provides some control over how aggressive this adjustment is.

Hey, a foot-interactive gain control!!

[NOMBEDES]

She don't love me

She loves my automobile

 

ZZ Top

[Audiophile Neuroscience]

On 6/23/2020 at 6:48 AM, Kal Rubinson said:

Hey, a foot-interactive gain control!!

I can see it now, "Newsflash - elderly gentleman described as "audiophile" crashes car through shopping mall. When asked, he explained 'Can't Get No Satisfaction' came on the radio, I musta hit the gas instead of the gain".

[Confused]

I was looking at this Darko video yesterday, see link below.  It occurred to me that his subjective observations Cambridge CXN (V2) streaming DAC are pretty much on topic for this thread.  There are some relevant points throughout the video, but the key section is from about 7 minutes.

 

In summary, he seems to be saying the DAC is a little warm sounding and rounds off the detail, but then goes on to list a whole range of recordings for which these characteristics are desirable, making bad recording sound good if you like.

 

One interesting aspect is that he had the CX2 set up to a Hegel amplifier, such that he could select running the CX2 either digital or analogue out to the Hegel.  So effectively a switchable solution, one DAC (Hegel) for "good" recordings, another DAC (CX2) for "bad" recordings. (or "hard" remasters seemed to be his bad recording category)

 

Maybe a coloured DAC, or a DAC with poor definition?  Garbage in, some garbage does not make it out.  I would be interested to know exactly why this DAC has these characteristics from a specification / measurement perspective.

 

 

[bobbmd]

@Kal Rubinson @pkane2001 @AudiophileNeuroscience rode in my son's TESLA zero-100mph in 4 secs no noise adjustment needed just balls/nerves enough to have him talking directly at me WITHOUT his hands on the wheel and listening to a sweet sound system !

And I downloaded from Archives.org all the DEAD's first time singing in public of all their songs-- depending on the soundboards used for the bootlegs some are awful but what a hoot and to me sound great.

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

This discussion is odd.

 

It is obvious that more transparency may reveal flaws. It is also obvious that less transparency may hide the flaws but also other aspects of the recordings. You can't have both, period. 

 

If there is a way to make bad recordings sound good, chances are it will also make good recordings sound bad (or not as good). 

 

 

[fas42]

24 minutes ago, hopkins said:

This discussion is odd.

 

It is obvious that more transparency may reveal flaws. It is also obvious that less transparency may hide the flaws but also other aspects of the recordings. You can't have both, period. 

 

If there is a way to make bad recordings sound good, chances are it will also make good recordings sound bad (or not as good). 

 

 

 

Not really. The greater the transparency, the more of everything is heard - including flaws. Turns out that the human hearing system finds the structure of the musical event captured vastly more interesting than irrelevant defects - and at a certain standard of playback chain competence the mind automatically discards the meaningless background 'distortion'.

 

It's the same process as for vinyl - a typical reaction when listening to the best LP reproduction is that the "pops and crackles" disappear ... they're still there, but subjectively they have been pushed way into the background.

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

5 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Not really. The greater the transparency, the more of everything is heard - including flaws. Turns out that the human hearing system finds the structure of the musical event captured vastly more interesting than irrelevant defects - and at a certain standard of playback chain competence the mind automatically discards the meaningless background 'distortion'.

 

It's the same process as for vinyl - a typical reaction when listening to the best LP reproduction is that the "pops and crackles" disappear ...they're still there, but subjectively they have been pushed way into the background.

 

I am not sure what your point is. A bad recording can be bad for many reasons, not just pops and crackles, and it is not just about having "irrelevant defects". 

 

It is pretty obvious that our brain is discerning, otherwise we would not be able to understand a conversation in the street or listen to a live album. But so what? 

[gmgraves]

16 minutes ago, hopkins said:

 

I am not sure what your point is. A bad recording can be bad for many reasons, not just pops and crackles, and it is not just about having "irrelevant defects". 

 

It is pretty obvious that our brain is discerning, otherwise we would not be able to understand a conversation in the street or listen to a live album. But so what? 

You have to forgive Frank. (Fas42). He vacillates between The notion that “his” tweaks to a mid-Fi system can make all recordings sound like perfectly recorded master tapes and declaring that there are no bad recordings, just bad playback systems!

[fas42]

3 hours ago, hopkins said:

If there is a way to make bad recordings sound good, chances are it will also make good recordings sound bad (or not as good). 

 

 

 

This is where most audiophiles get it back to front - what happens is that "audiophile good", but threadbare recordings, in terms of the 'texture' content, are revealed to be such ... they become "not as good", because they rely on the playback rig idiosyncrasies to add 'seasoning', " to make them good" - they are a perfect vehicle for playing with such factors as tube rolling, say - exploring how altering the distortion overtones, of the rig rather than the recording, come across.

 

You have to forgive George - he believes only "perfectly recorded" performances can come across OK; that the listener should suffer if anything of a lower standard happens to be played, 😉.

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

This is where most audiophiles get it back to front - what happens is that "audiophile good", but threadbare recordings, in terms of the 'texture' content, are revealed to be such ... they become "not as good", because they rely on the playback rig idiosyncrasies to add 'seasoning', " to make them good" - they are a perfect vehicle for playing with such factors as tube rolling, say - exploring how altering the distortion overtones, of the rig rather than the recording, come across.

 

You have to forgive George - he believes only "perfectly recorded" performances can come across OK; that the listener should suffer if anything of a lower standard happens to be played, 😉.

You better believe it! There is no excuse, in this day and age, for poor recordings. It’s not rocket science. The industry knows how to make great recordings. The equipment to do so exists, all recording organizations have the equipment to do so, and it isn’t even very expensive to make recordings that will knock the socks off of most overproduced and poor sounding recordings turned-out by the major labels. Yet most audiophiles spend more time and money on things that do nothing real to improve their systems, when the greatest improvement to the sound of their system can be had  merely by them seekIng out and purchasIng great sounding recordings and complaining to the record companies when they get an incompetently made recording. This is harder for pop music buyers, of course. Because they have to take whatever their favorite performers put out, good or bad, and grin and bear the bad. While classical music aficionados like me can search for the best sounding performance of, say, Beethoven’s symphonies (Herbert Von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic recorded via an MS stereo microphone setup and recorded between 1958 and 1962 for all nine symphonies on Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft) or the best sounding recording of Copland’s Third Symphony (The London Symphony, conducted by the composer; recorded by Bert Whyte with a simple stereo pair in 1959 for the Everest label). Neither of these are the “audiophile recordings“ that Frank complains about constantly. But people still buy them because they sound more like music than most of the more contemporary versions out there that were recorded with 80 microphones and laid down on the same numbers of tracks (whether analog or digital). People still buy 60 year-old Mercury Living Presence recordings, and RCA Red Seals for similar reasons. Even though they aren’t as realistic sounding as the true stereo recordings mentioned above, they were still made with a relatively simple methodology by people who were passionate about getting the best, high-fidelity sound possible. They didn’t have multitrack equipment then (three track recorders were the most multitrack that existed then), and as it turns out, that was a blessing in disguise. But if a rocker’s favorite Hendrix album sounds like sh_t*, well he or she is stuck with it.

 

*Not saying that it does, I wouldn’t know. I just chose Hendrix as an example of the point I was making.

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

8 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

This is where most audiophiles get it back to front - what happens is that "audiophile good", but threadbare recordings, in terms of the 'texture' content, are revealed to be such ... they become "not as good", because they rely on the playback rig idiosyncrasies to add 'seasoning', " to make them good" - they are a perfect vehicle for playing with such factors as tube rolling, say - exploring how altering the distortion overtones, of the rig rather than the recording, come across.

 

So anytime the playback chain adds or substracts (or generally alters) we don't have fidelity, and that can change our perception of the recording. Great, we agree on something. 19 pages in a thread for this ?

[fas42]

5 minutes ago, hopkins said:

 

So anytime the playback chain adds or substracts (or generally alters) we don't have fidelity, and that can change our perception of the recording. Great, we agree on something. 19 pages in a thread for this ?

 

Where the gray areas are, is determining whether what we hear has something added or subtracted, or not ... some say, the price of the rig largely determines this - others say, it ain't necessarily so ... 🙂.

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

Just now, fas42 said:

 

Where the gray areas are, is determining whether what we hear has something added or subtracted, or not ... some say, the price of the rig largely determines this - others say, it ain't necessarily so ... 🙂.

 

Sure, but hat is an entirely different question.

[fas42]

Looks like a new question should be asked,

 

 

😉

[Bill Brown]

Beautifully said, George.  And fantastic examples given- all of which are in my library

 

Bill

[Teresa]

17 hours ago, fas42 said:

Not really. The greater the transparency, the more of everything is heard - including flaws. Turns out that the human hearing system finds the structure of the musical event captured vastly more interesting than irrelevant defects - and at a certain standard of playback chain competence the mind automatically discards the meaningless background 'distortion'.

 

It's the same process as for vinyl - a typical reaction when listening to the best LP reproduction is that the "pops and crackles" disappear ... they're still there, but subjectively they have been pushed way into the background.

 

This never worked for me, my ear / brain system is not able disregard such flaws. This is why in pre-digital days I listened to music on prerecorded reel-to-reel and audiophile cassettes.

 

However, in the 1990's I bought a SOTA Comet turntable with an Alpha-Genesis 1000II line-contact moving coil cartridge. A line-contact stylus plays the bottom of the groove and thus most surface imperfections, such as light scratches, are disregarded, thus not audible. Surface noise on the best audiophile LPs was inaudible with speakers and only slightly audible with headphones. OTOH surface noise on non-audiophile LPs was quite noticeable and very distracting from the music although not as severe as with more standard profile styluses.

 

However, even with the line-contact stylus deep scratches as very audible and my ear / brain system cannot disregard this. My brain cannot disregard audible pops and crackles thus destroying the music al illusion for me.

 

14 hours ago, fas42 said:

...This is where most audiophiles get it back to front - what happens is that "audiophile good", but threadbare recordings, in terms of the 'texture' content, are revealed to be such ... they become "not as good", because they rely on the playback rig idiosyncrasies to add 'seasoning', " to make them good" - they are a perfect vehicle for playing with such factors as tube rolling, say - exploring how altering the distortion overtones, of the rig rather than the recording, come across.

 

You have to forgive George - he believes only "perfectly recorded" performances can come across OK; that the listener should suffer if anything of a lower standard happens to be played, 😉.

 

The goal of an audiophile system is to get as close as possible to the "the sound of actual acoustic instruments playing in a real space." What Harry Pearson termed the absolute sound. It is not and never has been about adding audio seasonings, instead it is about bringing a system closer to the absolute sound.

 

I have 462 audiophile and other naturally engineered recordings and I dare you to find a single one that is threadbare. Most audiophile recording's goal is to bring listeners closer to the sound of real music.

 

Lastly, just because your brain is able to reject all the grossness in poor recordings, it does not follow that everyone else's brains can do the same. I, for one, do not have the creative imagination you do in order to reject flaws in recordings or performances. 

 

I agree with nearly everything George has stated in this tread. You really should reread his posts for the truth.

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

14 hours ago, gmgraves said:

You better believe it! There is no excuse, in this day and age, for poor recordings. It’s not rocket science. The industry knows how to make great recordings. The equipment to do so exists, all recording organizations have the equipment to do so, and it isn’t even very expensive to make recordings that will knock the socks off of most overproduced and poor sounding recordings turned-out by the major labels. Yet most audiophiles spend more time and money on things that do nothing real to improve their systems, when the greatest improvement to the sound of their system can be had  merely by them seekIng out and purchasIng great sounding recordings and complaining to the record companies when they get an incompetently made recording. This is harder for pop music buyers, of course. Because they have to take whatever their favorite performers put out, good or bad, and grin and bear the bad. While classical music aficionados like me can search for the best sounding performance of, say, Beethoven’s symphonies (Herbert Von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic recorded via an MS stereo microphone setup and recorded between 1958 and 1962 for all nine symphonies on Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft) or the best sounding recording of Copland’s Third Symphony (The London Symphony, conducted by the composer; recorded by Bert Whyte with a simple stereo pair in 1959 for the Everest label). Neither of these are the “audiophile recordings“ that Frank complains about constantly. But people still buy them because they sound more like music than most of the more contemporary versions out there that were recorded with 80 microphones and laid down on the same numbers of tracks (whether analog or digital). People still buy 60 year-old Mercury Living Presence recordings, and RCA Red Seals for similar reasons. Even though they aren’t as realistic sounding as the true stereo recordings mentioned above, they were still made with a relatively simple methodology by people who were passionate about getting the best, high-fidelity sound possible. They didn’t have multitrack equipment then (three track recorders were the most multitrack that existed then), and as it turns out, that was a blessing in disguise. But if a rocker’s favorite Hendrix album sounds like sh_t*, well he or she is stuck with it.

 

*Not saying that it does, I wouldn’t know. I just chose Hendrix as an example of the point I was making.

 

One caveat: interpretation is just as important as composition. So if your favorite performance of a given work has the best recording quality, then you are indeed lucky. Otherwise, you just have to live with what you have.

 

For example, if you are a fan of Sviatoslav Richter, then you have to deal with a lot of pretty poor recordings (often live, as he did not like studio recordings). It is what it is

 

Personally, recordings have to be pretty bad for me not to play them (or just once out of curiosity). For example, there are some unique jazz jam sessions recorded in the 40s in people's appartments with a basic tape recorder that are abysmal, but aside for those, i'll take a badly recorded performance of  a great artist anyday over a great recording of an uninteresting performance. Good recording quality is a bonus. 

 

 

 

 

[gmgraves]

55 minutes ago, hopkins said:

 

One caveat: interpretation is just as important as composition. So if your favorite performance of a given work has the best recording quality, then you are indeed lucky. Otherwise, you just have to live with what you have.

 

For example, if you are a fan of Sviatoslav Richter, then you have to deal with a lot of pretty poor recordings (often live, as he did not like studio recordings). It is what it is

 

Personally, recordings have to be pretty bad for me not to play them (or just once out of curiosity). For example, there are some unique jazz jam sessions recorded in the 40s in people's appartments with a basic tape recorder that are abysmal, but aside for those, i'll take a badly recorded performance of  a great artist anyday over a great recording of an uninteresting performance. Good recording quality is a bonus. 

 

 

 

 

What you say is true of recordings of any single performer or group, irrespective of genre. And I am a fan of Sviatoslav Richter. I have his performance with Von Karajan of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto #1 in b minor. It was made in the early 1960s by DGG. Luckily, they were still using MS miking, and the recording sounds very good. OTOH, if the Richter was a bad sounding recording of the Tchaikovsky 1st, there are others by other first class pianists, so you will find a decent sounding one of a good performance.

[gmgraves]

8 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Where the gray areas are, is determining whether what we hear has something added or subtracted, or not ... some say, the price of the rig largely determines this - others say, it ain't necessarily so ... 🙂.

This has little or nothing to do with the playback rig, per se. The assumption here, on this forum, is that everybody here has a decent sounding system with at least pretensions of being high-end. Why do I say that? Because people who listen to music on the radio, or on a ghetto blaster or ear buds on a cheap Android phone via MP3 most likely are not very concerned about recording quality, and the difference between a great sounding recording and a poor one would be lost on said listeners anyway!

[fas42]

6 hours ago, Teresa said:

 

This never worked for me, my ear / brain system is not able disregard such flaws. This is why in pre-digital days I listened to music on prerecorded reel-to-reel and audiophile cassettes.

 

However, in the 1990's I bought a SOTA Comet turntable with an Alpha-Genesis 1000II line-contact moving coil cartridge. A line-contact stylus plays the bottom of the groove and thus most surface imperfections, such as light scratches, are disregarded, thus not audible. Surface noise on the best audiophile LPs was inaudible with speakers and only slightly audible with headphones. OTOH surface noise on non-audiophile LPs was quite noticeable and very distracting from the music although not as severe as with more standard profile styluses.

 

However, even with the line-contact stylus deep scratches as very audible and my ear / brain system cannot disregard this. My brain cannot disregard audible pops and crackles thus destroying the music al illusion for me.

 

Teresa, I'm aware that people's brains work differently, and that some people can't easily, unconsciously discard audible defects in what they hear - to put it in another perspective, these are highly likely to be people who don't enjoy the benefits of the Cocktail Party Effect - meaning that if another conversation was simultaneously occurring in a room while they talking to a person, that they would find this highly stressful to deal with.

 

6 hours ago, Teresa said:

 

 

The goal of an audiophile system is to get as close as possible to the "the sound of actual acoustic instruments playing in a real space." What Harry Pearson termed the absolute sound. It is not and never has been about adding audio seasonings, instead it is about bringing a system closer to the absolute sound.

 

I have 462 audiophile and other naturally engineered recordings and I dare you to find a single one that is threadbare. Most audiophile recording's goal is to bring listeners closer to the sound of real music.

 

They will be the sound of acoustic instruments in a real space - but to me they can be threadbare ... for me, at times it is akin to listening in an anechoic chamber - the 'seasoning' of extra texturing that automatically occurs in real life music making is noticeably missing.

 

6 hours ago, Teresa said:

 

Lastly, just because your brain is able to reject all the grossness in poor recordings, it does not follow that everyone else's brains can do the same. I, for one, do not have the creative imagination you do in order to reject flaws in recordings or performances. 

 

I agree with nearly everything George has stated in this tread. You really should reread his posts for the truth.

 

I am unable to reject the grossness in poor rigs ... unfortunately, 😝.  It takes too much effort in applying creative imagination to reject the obvious flaws in the reproduction - so, I aim to to eliminate these, leaving my poor brain to only have to deal with those from the recording itself ... each person will always have their own take on The Truth, 😉.