Article: Realism vs Accuracy For Audiophiles | Part 2: The Real Sounds Of Live Music

[Jud]

3 hours ago, bluesman said:

 I just love my watches, instruments, audio systems etc for what they do for me.  Anything beyond that is gravy.

 

Amen.

 

I've mentioned before a record collector friend years ago in Miami who would not open the shrink wrap on his albums since they would lose a tremendous amount of value as collectibles.  This being Miami, humidity had penetrated tiny holes in the shrink wrap of nearly all the records and caused the cardboard inside to swell against the plastic, bending the cardboard and severely warping the records inside to the extent that they certainly must have been unplayable.  But they were supposedly worth quite a bit of money as collectible "recordings."  I didn't (still don't) see the point.  My recordings (vinyl and otherwise) exist to be played.

[Jud]

28 minutes ago, ARQuint said:

 

Part 2 is, if anything, more spectacular than Part 1. It illuminates the recording arts, the art of listening, and to me—the meaning of the audiophile pursuit.

 

It got me thinking again about a project I started a few years back, and have mentioned here once before. In 1998, the Chicago-based rare instrument dealer Bein & Fushi was responsible for the project of gathering in one place 30 of the world's most prized violins—15 Stradivaris and 15 Guarnieris. The instruments were photographed and each one played by the American virtuoso Elmar Oliveira. He was recorded by Mark Levinson (as well as by Jerry Bruck, though I don't know if that version ever saw the light of day.) The result was a beautiful 13" x 13" book that came with three CDs. There weren't very many copies produced but I reviewed it for TAS over 20 years ago and was permitted to keep mine. The assemblage of violins, by the way, was valued at roughly $100 million; I can only imagine what the value of the 30 instruments would be now, and what it cost to insure the undertaking back in 1998.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Makers-Stradivari-Guarneri-Oliveira/dp/0966174208

 

Oliveira was recorded in a broad range of repertoire, but one of the three CDs was devoted to him playing the opening minute of the Sibelius violin concerto (unaccompanied, of course) on all 30 instruments. As my system improved, I became increasingly interested in whether listeners of various stripes could learn to tell the difference between a Strad and a Guarneri—and how they would do it. So I made a FLAC file of 12 of the 30 iterations of the Sibelius excerpt and—after letting the test subjects listen to several examples "sighted"— arranged them in random order and asked them to identify the instrument they were hearing as either an S or a G.

 

My "n" was/is small, but most test subjects to date haven't done better than guessing. There were three exceptions, though. Two were violinists—a middle-aged female and another woman who was in her 90s. The third was a good friend who would be proud to be called an audiophile, though he certainly knows a lot about music and we attend classical concerts together. He got a perfect score—12/12 instruments correctly identified. No one else came close.

 

I asked the audiophile friend then, and again yesterday, how he did it. Did he have a set of descriptors that he used to characterize each example, devised from listening to the "sighted" examples. I referred him to Bluesman's article and he answered me a few hours ago:

 

"… the heuristic I used was probably not very precisely defined (“list-y”) or calibrated. I’d say it was an attempt to infer from the known references a timbral signature, a kind of holistic “sound.” The best way I could describe it would be that the Strads seemed to speak quicker, to project power more quickly on attack, and the Guarneris seemed to have a mellower/warmer tone and to reach full power fractionally more gradually. After reading Bluesman’s piece and the comments, I’m inclined to hypothesize that both qualities might have to do with differences in the relative strengths/shapes of the fundamental and harmonic series between instruments from each maker."

 

I feel that this helps vindicate—if any vindication was necessary—the manner in which we address ourselves to recordings and to gear. It's how we characterize the success of engineers and manufacturers, beyond a strictly emotional response to what we're hearing. There's a language, a lexicon, that may sound unnecessarily effete to the uninitiated and there is, of course, no requirement that you be able to explain why a given recording or piece of audio equipment seems "realistic" and gets your juices flowing like the real thing does. But many enthusiasts find this an essential part of what we do as audiophiles.

 

Were there also people who did much worse than guessing?

[Jud]

3 hours ago, ARQuint said:

 

There were.

 

I found 13 answer sheets, and these were the results:

 3/12 correct

 4/12

 5/12

 6/12

 6/12

 6/12

 7/12

 7/12

 8/12

 8/12

 9/12       (violinist)

 9/12       (violinist)

 12/12     (audiophile)

 

I don't pretend that this goes much beyond "anecdotal" but one other part of the experiment was interesting to me. The subjects were actually presented with two differently randomized series of files, the first encoded as 16-bit FLAC and the second as 145 kbps MP3. My "star"—the audiophile who got 12/12 correct with FLAC—got just 7/12 right with the MP3 trial.

 

Maybe you remember, Jud, I'd mentioned the idea of an online version of the trial. Originally, my thought was to do this via the TAS website but as the site is no longer "interactive" (a good thing, IMO, given the frequency of childish and totally OT posts) maybe we could do it here, if Chris was on board. Any interest?

 

Andy

 

One other question before deciding whether I'd be up for listening: To the extent possible, are the selections volume matched?

[Jud]

 

50 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I’ve increased my level of enjoyment in this wonderful hobby in many ways, including education. I sat with a musician once while playing some of my favorite music. I asked him about what I heard and thought I heard. He educated me each time. It was an experience I’ll never forget and one I’d love to duplicate over and over. 

 

Thank you kindly for the setup, I've been wanting to do this for ever so long. 🙂

 

Have a listen and see whether you can get Miles' little musical joke in this cookin' blues. (Musicians like @bluesman should get it very quickly, so no fair spoiling it for everyone else!)

 

 

[Jud]

9 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I don’t get it :~)

I'll let it go for a bit to see if anyone else comes up with it. If not, I'll happily let the cat out of the bag in a while.

[Jud]

OK, time for the reveal - skip to the second last paragraph if you're impatient, or you can humor me for a bit and follow along.

 

Pretty much every blues ever has 4 beats to the bar.  The lyrics have that iambic "foot" thing going (ba-DUM ba-DUM), which is the rhythm of Shakespeare (he wrote in iambic pentameter - 5 iambic "feet" to a line), so you can put on the blues, break out the Shakespeare, and they work perfectly together.  I remember Leonard Bernstein singing Macbeth to the blues on an old recording.

 

Because blues is the foundation of rock, you'll find the same there.  You can listen to any rock station, classic, alternative, whatever you like, for days or weeks and never hear anything but 4 beats to the bar (excepting the occasional run of triplets, as in Simon and Garfunkel's 59th Street Bridge Song, a/k/a "Feelin' Groovy").

 

There are small variations on this with big effects, like reggae's emphasis on the one and the three instead of the two and the four, or James Brown creating an entire funk industry with "on the one."  And then there is the inverse, big changes that almost pass unnoticed, like Dave Brubeck seemingly just playing along normally until you realize "Take Five" is actually a pun and that song is 5 beats to the bar.

 

If you want to get away from the tyranny of 4 beats to the bar, you can go to jazz, or, perhaps counterintuitively, some hip-hop, which can be incredibly creative rhythmically, different rhythmic lines running around and through each other.  (Though yes, some hip-hop stays strictly with 4 beats also.)

 

Now, Miles - "Red China Blues" is an example of what I was talking about with Brubeck, big changes that can easily pass unnoticed.  How many beats to the bar?  Listen, and you'll notice it's 6.  A blues that is very nearly in waltz time.  (Waltzes are 3 beats to the bar.)  Miles is saying "You think *you're* cool?  I'm playing a blues in g*ddamn *6* and making it *cook*, motherf**ker!"

 

(BTW @bluesman, I agree about the quality of the album.  Not one of his better efforts overall.  I bought it because he was coming back from one of his periodic illness/addiction bouts, and I wanted to hear what he was doing.)

[Jud]

8 hours ago, ARQuint said:

 

Interesting question. The 30 instruments were recorded one after another over 2 days, using the same recording set-up. When I measure the average level from the listening position for each one minute Sibelius excerpt, mostly they are pretty close—but some are a few dB different. This is to be expected.  Oliveira is playing 30 different instruments and some are "louder" than others: the "size" of the sound is an important characteristic of each individual violin—and why one player might decide to pay 5 million for one Stradivarius but not for another. I think it would be a big mistake to adjust the volume of each violin to the same level - that would be distorting an inherent quality of each instrument.

 

Yes, it would (or it might simply be how he played the instrument on the day - he's not a robot).

 

But loudness variation (even an average of 1dB) creates a big problem. There was a listening test here years ago where a file that had its average level increased 1dB was the runaway winner. And if you look at the stories about blind competitions where carbon fiber violins beat Stradivarii, guess what you find? Loudest wins.

 

So that's a problem in a blind test.  I don't know what a Strad or a Guarnerius sounds like, so if asked to distinguish, the first thing my ear-brain will fasten on is loudness differences.

 

I suppose we could try with equalized and non-equalized volume and see what the results are?

[Jud]

56 minutes ago, bluesman said:

I suspect you’re basing your concern on a legendary study showing that listeners (whose knowledge, skill, and experience at listening to music were neither described nor standardized in cohorts) consistently preferred the “SQ” of the louder of paired exposures to the same program through the same equipment (to which they were blinded) at levels averaging 1 dB difference between them.

 

No, I was referring very specifically to a listening test conducted right here at AS (CA in those days), where the owner of the BIS label provided a file of a very nicely recorded choral work in a variety of resolutions from mp3 to Redbook to 24/96 (don't recall if 24/192 was included), and people were asked to indicate a preference.  Resolutions were not indicated on the files, which were simply letter-designated ("A" through "H," maybe? It was a while ago), and people with DACs that had resolution indicators were asked to close their eyes or whatever else they needed to do.  The kicker is that a 16/44.1 file had its loudness raised by exactly 1dB, unknown to the testers, of which I was one.

 

The interesting thing is that 1dB wasn't enough to make it obvious that a change in loudness had taken place, and when I listened, that version of the file impressed me subjectively as more "open" and "clear," not "louder."  I chose it as the best sounding, along with the overwhelming majority of other listeners here on CA/AS.

[Jud]

5 minutes ago, bluesman said:

Knowing which is which and preferring one to the other are both irrelevant and are not being questioned.

 

It will be interesting to see how well listeners will be able to separate those conscious or subconscious impressions from the given task of distinguishing the alternatives.

[Jud]

30 minutes ago, bluesman said:

I humbly suggest that being able to identify instrument A from instrument B in a forced choice trial is easier than it is to identify power cable A from power cable B.

 

In another blind test here, I once got 5 of 5 correct picking the directionality (according or opposite to the little arrow on the cable jacket) of a pair of analog RCA cables!

 

Of course it was a random guess that happened to work (and no, unfortunately it's never happened with the lottery). But it was fun imagining the test-maker's momentary reaction before he realized it must have been random chance. 🙂