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Article: Making Memories In Santa Monica


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Interesting how there's the concept that it's impossible to capture how well a rig is working - what happens with a "low resolution" capture is that the misdemeanours of the playback are quite easily picked up, and come through loud and clear on even something like a YouTube clip. It's the absence of any anomalies in clip playback, that one is unable to detect any giveaways that the SQ is not optimum that tell the story - not, that suddenly say your laptop speakers sound, absolutely fabulous, 😉.

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1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I don't want to go off into the weeds, but there's no way to know if the bad sound quality is from the terrible A to D converter in the phone doing the recording or the terrible codec used by YouTube etc... 

 

These days, the A/D converters in phones are actually very good - it's almost impossible for a manufacturer to buy a chip that doesn't have excellent specs, compared to say the 1980's, no matter how cheap. The microphone is something else, but should do an acceptable job except for the extreme frequencies. For YouTube, one can retrieve the Opus encoding if one wants to, which gives the full 20k BW, and entirely satisfactory encoding.

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30 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

When considering the best audio systems in the world, I don’t think “a decent job” will do. 

 

Again, we're not using the recording to determine how excellent the playback is, as in that somehow the quality of the experience can be be conveyed via the smartphone, video clip route. Rather, it has sufficient quality to pick up the faults of the playback; it's trivially easy to find YouTube videos recorded on someone's phone of very expensive rigs making a complete mess of some recording - when the playback of a 'difficult' track comes across with its integrity intact, in a casual recording, then it's a good sign that the system is working well.

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49 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

This is faulty logic. 
 

You also can’t tell the impact of the largest part of the system, the room. 

 

Why is it faulty? Let's say you have group of musical friends over, and they decide to jam in your lounge, listening room - and you decide to record the event, on your smartphone - for posterity, 😉. And you decide to put it up on YouTube, to share - would anyone viewing it have the slightest doubt that the audio was the "real thing"; if you said, actually the sound was just coming from a hifi system, and the people in the video were just miming to the sound they heard - would you have any chance of convincing anyone of that?

 

I see the goal of replay to duplicate the quality that live acoustic sound in a space presents, and which can easily be sensed even in a relatively poor quality, amateur recording.

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12 minutes ago, botrytis said:

 

It is totally faulty since how the room affects the acoustics in not recorded by a youtube video. Only in person does that happen.

 

You WILL NEVER duplicate that live acoustic sound in space. Sorry, no, one microphone does not do it and one that is mediocre at best.

 

What's recorded by a microphone are the soundwaves at a particular point in space. Which is how everything works, whether recording some live event, or the playback of an audio system. The closer the accuracy of the playback to replicating the energy of what's on the recording, the more convincing will be what is captured by the microphone, irrespective of whether the the microphone is literally only inches away from the speaker drivers, or on the other side of a cavernous room - in the latter case, the acoustics of the room add to the sound, but don't detract from the experience - take a real piano ... it always sounds like a piano, whether you are leaning against the side of it, or listening from 20 feet away - it never fails to be convincing.

 

That's what can be achieved by a competent setup - the playback of say a piano never alerts the listener to it being, "fake". How the microphone picks up the sound is not relevant to how capable the replay is - but it can certainly pick up the giveaways that something is not quite right with the SQ.

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5 hours ago, stevebythebay said:

Glad you were able to hear these speakers with electronics that do justice to what they can offer.  I'd heard them nearly a year ago, at a launch type event, using a reputable amp/preamp in a large room, with a dCS stack, etc.  Sounded bombastic and brutal to my ears.  Then, within the past few months, I heard them in the same room with the same setup but with with another preamp and amps and the difference was significantly better.  Far more musical and engaging.  This tells me a lot about these speakers, and in fact all well made speakers - upstream components are critical to successful sound reproduction.

 

Which is the way it always works ... It's The System, Stupid 😉. The weakest link of the setup will always dominate, as far as getting the best SQ. 'Revealing' speakers will merely reveal every tiny deficiency in the chain prior to that point, and may be a very bad move if the work hasn't been done to sort things earlier in the path.

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