Actually he said:
Which is similar. However, he did not say that there is not information that are reliably discerned by two ears and a brain that cannot be picked up and analyzed by other means than an omnidirectional microphone and an analyzer.
By analyzer he was no doubt referring to a simple FFT or other spectrum analyzer.
Means of audio analysis using more than just an omni microphone and a simple spectrum analysis has been around for decades.
For example in 2001 DLC Design released their Perceptual Transfer Function
Measurement System (PTF) which is based on multiple microphones and more sophisticated means of analysis.
I'm a big fan of Toole's but you can draw all kinds of conflicting implications from the body of his work (which everybody should read). For example, no matter how absolutely perfect you may in your arrogance think your hearing is, you can't tell between a system with a slightly elevated treble and one with a slightly depressed bass even though you can easily tell both apart from a system without those EQs. That experiment shows that ears are just ain't no good for certain kinds of evaluation which are trivial for an omni mic.
Funny, the "grown ups" problem - and the one debated in recent posts - is the obverse of what these quotes address. The sound at your chair as picked up by a mic will be profoundly different than than the signal going into your pre-amp*. And it ALWAYS will be in the future too (unless you live in Carnegie Hall).
Therefore since differences will always show up in acoustic testing, the real question is, what aspects of those many differences - such as phase, comb filtering, or tuned-box tubbiness - impair your enjoyment of music (or even just your abstract sense of quality of your system) and what differences don't matter?
I'd say the situation is different when evaluating a single piece of gear like an amplifier. Today, electrical tests can show that the device under test performs way, way better than anything humans can be picky about.... and have been perfect, in that sense, for 30 years or more**.
Ben
*which in turn, is profoundly different than Row H in Carnegie Hall.
** Fisher 400 is about 50 years on
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I agree. Not surprised because I've seen this happen with many other extensive bodies of work.
But, the evidence that I've brought about using more and different mics and non-simplistic analysis is based on the work of many other independent workers.
One irony is that in general the best sounding capture of what a person hears in a concert hall is usually obtained using one or more mics positioned at vastly different locations than the listener.
Ironically and more generally, the satisfaction of sound from the concert hall is best reproduced at home through doing a great amount of cooking in the recording and playback chain.
For example, multi-track close miking of woodwind instruments (or very canny placement of mics when recording purist-style) results in a more "natural" sound (truer to the composer's and listener's purposes) because in a concert hall your mind can focus on instruments in a way impossible in music reproduction without the music recoding giving you a leg-up by means of close miking.
Ben
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Agreed and something that I have implemented many times.
Multimicing and multracking get bad-mouthed by some, but they can be valuable tools when the goal is recreating the concert hall experience vi a recording.
A different benefit can be obtained by remixing legacy multitrack masters - a vast reduction of audible IM in the mixdown. Yet, remasters vastly outnumber new mixes.
You first need to understand the basics of sound reproducing technology which is what the subject of debate is. When sound is reproduced by artificial device, the quality of that device is judged based on the level of fidelity to the reference sound. Closer the better, also known as high fidelity (hi-fi). Once you understand that, the rest of your post will be answered and clarified.
Agreed. If you do the best listening test you can do comparing a certain level of equipment performance to absolutely ideal performance and there is no audible difference, what more has to be done?
When it comes to the performance of recorders, amps and the like, a truly clean, excessively wideband analog source would seem to suffice as a reference.
The issue of preference is far more important when the reproduction is imperfect and we're trying to figure out which imperfections to tolerate.
Actually he said exactly what i wrote. In his paper "The measurement & calibration of sound reproducing system"
He says similar in his book too.
He didn't. Or not that we know of. You'd have to ask him that directly. He is quite accessible.
dave
I suggest that in a debate you don't assume people don't know things (especially basic things). It is actually better if you assume that you are the one who has the difficulty to understand things. Only then you have the chance to look deeper into things (after all, if things are so simple, why have disagreements?).
Floyd said:
Floyd talked bout directions and times, which I believe are micing and phase issues in sound reproduction, which you relevantly responded with multi-micing techniques...
But when he said "analyzer", or precisely "analytical", I saw the issue as the brain being more analytical than any analyzer. Notice how with many analyzers, we are presented with numbers and charts, and it is the brain who does the final work: to analyze (often to connect between more than one measurement products).
You can measure or be presented with an impulse response (for example), but what is it that you see exactly in an impulse response?? Same thing with other measurement products!
Regarding tools measuring everything, yes, but who do the analysis? How? When you design an amplifier, what is your threshold for THD of 2 Volts 1 kHz sinusoidal input? What is your threshold for phase margin? A bit harder (but often mentioned by Dave), what is your threshold for FFT spectrum?
You are repeating yourself. I already asked you about the audible sound that cannot be measured and you've cited none so far despite your claim "Lots". How about it now?
don't you mean "the illusion of soundstage/image"?
which in most commercial recordings is "painted on" by the mixing/mastering engineers from the multiple individual performer close miced feeds
and any "ambience" positioned microphone stubs - in the rare case where the performers are in a real space together, playing together
and as you well know - basically decent electronics designed for accuracy simply has never been shown to hurt the soundstage illusion
which in most commercial recordings is "painted on" by the mixing/mastering engineers from the multiple individual performer close miced feeds
and any "ambience" positioned microphone stubs - in the rare case where the performers are in a real space together, playing together
and as you well know - basically decent electronics designed for accuracy simply has never been shown to hurt the soundstage illusion
One can talk i guess, but i guess that doesn't mean you hear. Image/soundstage is lots all by itself.
dave
how the "soundsage" illusion is manipulated, created in the mixing/mastering is directly relevant - read Katz, Moulton, others on the techniques used at the mixing console and look up the tech specs on pan pots, delays, differing reverb, level and EQ used
then you can put a limit on electronic reproduction accuracy needed to preserve the intentional soundstage illusion painting processing
then you can put a limit on electronic reproduction accuracy needed to preserve the intentional soundstage illusion painting processing
Those examples don't have names so it is hard to describe them...
1) Some people couldn't hear anything (deaf)
2) Some people could hear some thing but not everything
3) Some people could hear some fuzzy thing but couldn't describe or understand it (or he made wrong guesses).
4) Some people could hear some fuzzy thing, and could describe what it is or how it is created or how to recreate it.
The problem with communicating the above is of course, there must exist the "fuzzy thing" first, it must not be an imagination or illusion.
Up until here, are you following or not? Trust me, we wont be here if we were deaf (or blind, but that's not the point).
So, what it is all about is as simple as correlating between what we hear and what we measure. So tell me, what do you know about "damping" as is measured by "damping factor". What is it trying to relate with, sound-wise? Was it successful? Why?
despite your fondness for the formulation it actually isn't very intellectually deep - isn't particularly relevant
since you are discussing how well a perceptual illusion can be "measured" - when the essence of a perceptual illusion is that it is entirely constructed in our brain
micing/mixing/mastering practice is in many dimensions art and craft
might as well ask for "a measurement" of 3D depth in a Impressionist Painting
similar to the role of optics, eye rod/cone spectral response, Physical Acoustics can tell us a bit about real sound waves, what are the differences from their wave radiation characteristics and locations interacting with the environment and our HRTF, what reaches our eardrums
Psychoacoustics tells us a bit about our spatial/directional resolution - we're not at all performing at the physical limits inherent in the Physical Acoustics - human hearing is put to shame by any number of other animal's directional hearing ability
put together with speaker and room influences and the known levels of the processing that does get applied for panning, other intentional soundstage illusion processing manipulations...
..."not broken" electronics, DACs, Amplifiers cause variations in channel frequency and phase response orders of magnitude less than the smallest change used by the sound engineers when manipulating the soundstage illusion