Or vice-versa. Either way, yeah. Lots more live music. Since everyone strives for "being there", might as well just, um, be there?
Yeah, hifi won't ever get the "being there" thing completely right until they can include the drunk guy repeatedly standing up in front of you and yelling at a rock concert, the lady four seats away coughing through most of a string quartet, and a waiting line to get into your own bathroom
E.g.Or better yet, since there's money to burn, make "there" "here." Better behaved audience and better food and beverages.
Perhaps a healthy mix? Haha. I like the ambiance every once in a while of the concert scene.
The last several live music events I've attended were very disappointing as to quality of sound - bad acoustics, bad sound reinforcement systems, and bad seating positions (limited by the thinness of my wallet).
Things would have been better at live classical music events, where the environments are engineered for good acoustics, and no sound reinforcement system is used, but my musical tastes have leaned away from classical music for a long time.
So the tragic fact is that recorded music on my home Hi-Fi system usually sounds better than most live music does.
Not that my home system is anything that would cause admiring whistles on this forum. For many years now, I've been using small near-field monitors (speaker systems intended for mixing music) for all my listening. Compared to some of the garbage sold for home theatre use these days, it's much easier to find relatively accurate and neutral-sounding near-field monitors. You just have to go to a musical instrument store, rather than an electronics chain store, and you may have to deal with the fact that most monitors are now active speakers, and want line-level inputs.
Not only do decent monitor speakers tend to be flatter and more accurate, near-field listening reduces the problems introduced by room reflections, too. When your ears are closer to the speakers, the ratio of direct to reflected sound goes up, so the reflections cause less damage.
I added a small Velodyne subwoofer to make up for the greatest weakness of my relatively small near-field speakers - the lack of deep bass.
But I'm very much in the "good enough" camp when it comes to Hi-Fi. Sure, I can hear limitations in my speaker system - but it doesn't bother me enough to splash out the vast amount of cash it would take to make an audible improvement.
Getting back to snake-oil: for years now, I've seen a lot of advertising for Polk loudspeakers. Some years ago, I bought a pair of Polk speakers, relatively tall columns intended to stand on both sides of your TV for the front stereo channels. They sounded so horrid that they went back to the store for a refund the very next day. Boomy one-note bass, recessed midrange, very little high treble - ugh!
-Gnobuddy
Things would have been better at live classical music events, where the environments are engineered for good acoustics, and no sound reinforcement system is used, but my musical tastes have leaned away from classical music for a long time.
So the tragic fact is that recorded music on my home Hi-Fi system usually sounds better than most live music does.
Not that my home system is anything that would cause admiring whistles on this forum. For many years now, I've been using small near-field monitors (speaker systems intended for mixing music) for all my listening. Compared to some of the garbage sold for home theatre use these days, it's much easier to find relatively accurate and neutral-sounding near-field monitors. You just have to go to a musical instrument store, rather than an electronics chain store, and you may have to deal with the fact that most monitors are now active speakers, and want line-level inputs.
Not only do decent monitor speakers tend to be flatter and more accurate, near-field listening reduces the problems introduced by room reflections, too. When your ears are closer to the speakers, the ratio of direct to reflected sound goes up, so the reflections cause less damage.
I added a small Velodyne subwoofer to make up for the greatest weakness of my relatively small near-field speakers - the lack of deep bass.
But I'm very much in the "good enough" camp when it comes to Hi-Fi. Sure, I can hear limitations in my speaker system - but it doesn't bother me enough to splash out the vast amount of cash it would take to make an audible improvement.
Getting back to snake-oil: for years now, I've seen a lot of advertising for Polk loudspeakers. Some years ago, I bought a pair of Polk speakers, relatively tall columns intended to stand on both sides of your TV for the front stereo channels. They sounded so horrid that they went back to the store for a refund the very next day. Boomy one-note bass, recessed midrange, very little high treble - ugh!
-Gnobuddy
I met the bloke in person, didn't notice any of your stereotype descriptions.
I'm not impressed by Polk either .Last year i purchased a pair of Tsx 110's but with virtually zero Hi-Fi stores left here in the UK with the exception of the odd " high end " ones i bought them "blind" .
Read the reviews which were positive , good specs etc and visually appealing .
When they arrived wired them up to one of my "old" amps and a cd player in a spare bedroom and left a cd on repeat for 24 hours to break them in.
Next day hooked them up to their intended system and sat down to do some serious listening .
After several hours and trying with various amps cables and positioning my conclusion was that i should have saved time and just set fire to them.
Exactly the same conclusions ... horrible boomy muddy bass , a midrange so recessed that vocals were almost lost in the mix and a treble with as much bite as a toothless vampire.
They now reside in my alarmingly large " to be sold " pile.
On the other hand my current " system" built around my latest obsession with Tripath /Class D amps comprises of a 15 year old Sony CDP XB 720 E QS cd player , the latest SMSL SA 36 TDA 7492 PE amp and a pair of JBL Control one monitors .
In audiophile terms this little system should sound mediocre but in reality its capable of giving me chills and making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in ways that numerous others have failed to do.
Whatever "snake oil" makes this happen i wish it had been available 30 years ago it would saved me a fortune ,meanwhile i'm enjoying the music and have no urges to change anything ....... yet
Not all live sound is bad, you should get out more, lol.
A Fleetwood Mac show I worked months back was seriously hifi....the system was Clair Bros i5D line arrays, full range so no ground subs.
The second AC/DC show was seriously hifi too, in the AccaDacca way of course.
Other memorably good sounding shows come to mind, like ZZ Top, Bryan Adams, Devo and others.
That said, some shows can be pretty rough sounding.
I'm running Behringer (tweaked) active cabinets...very heavy/solid 9"/1" 2 ways.
I have cloth covered/disguised mattresses across the wall behind the speakers, subs not required.
That's the thing...I am running a cheap netbook as the player, a $180 Edirol USB soundcard as the balanced output source plus the pawnshop secondhand speakers....$600 outlay for huge sound.
The resultant system is astoundingly/just plain good/right in all qualities in absolute terms....for price/performance ratio nothing I know has a chance.
That said, I have done some power management/filtering and some interesting tweaks, but essentially close to zero cost (deliberately no electronics/pcb tweaking yet).
The take away is that first class sound really can be achieved for little cost/effort nowadays.
I would not call it snake oil.
This is the 'normal' sound for many/most people, driven by cost/manufacturers/retailers catering to the 99%ers.....and also the inspiration of the 'snake oil' merchants catering to those wanting a 'cure' for their lousy/not quite right systems.
Dan.
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The worst one I remember was circa 1998. The list of performers was incredible in terms of historical importance: Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell.
The problem was the venue, which was then called the Arrowhead Pond, in Anaheim, California (now renamed the Honda Center.) It turned out to be an indoor ice-hockey arena, so big I could barely see the musicians, and with a reverberation time that had to measure in the tens of seconds. Intelligibility was almost zero - the endless long trailing echoes made it almost impossible to understand a word. Holding a concert there was a bad joke, and an expensive one.
Not surprisingly, I never went back to that venue ever again!
-Gnobuddy
I heard them. Too small room, so hard to judge. Massive bass, larger than life soundstage, Ricky Lee Jones sounded 8 feet tall.
BTW here in Belgium they are only 200k a pair.
Jan
Massive bass, larger than life soundstage, Ricky Lee Jones sounded 8 feet tall.
Jan[/QUOTE]
I haven't come across this before.
At a demo of the first generation Dynaudio Evidence, I heard an impression of height beyond the ceiling (a Pink Floyd airplane in the sky) .
But is unnatural image size a phase-anomaly caused distortion?
Jan[/QUOTE]
I haven't come across this before.
At a demo of the first generation Dynaudio Evidence, I heard an impression of height beyond the ceiling (a Pink Floyd airplane in the sky) .
But is unnatural image size a phase-anomaly caused distortion?
Just watched an interesting presentation on You Tube by Bob Robbins of myspeakersetup.com he made at the Rocky Mountain 2014 Audio Festival.
His speaker set-up methods differ enormously from conventional methods but the more i listened his brand of " snake oil " began to make a lot of sense.
Apologies at not providing a link ( technical issues ) for anyone who would like to check it out but it's at RMAF14 entitled High -Fi Stereo Thats not Natural and the presentation was made on Oct 12 th 2014.
A word of caution though on a WAF scale of 0 -10, for most his set-up is around 2
His speaker set-up methods differ enormously from conventional methods but the more i listened his brand of " snake oil " began to make a lot of sense.
Apologies at not providing a link ( technical issues
) for anyone who would like to check it out but it's at RMAF14 entitled High -Fi Stereo Thats not Natural and the presentation was made on Oct 12 th 2014.A word of caution though on a WAF scale of 0 -10, for most his set-up is around 2
Just watched an interesting presentation on You Tube by Bob Robbins of myspeakersetup.com he made at the Rocky Mountain 2014 Audio Festival.
His speaker set-up methods differ enormously from conventional methods but the more i listened his brand of " snake oil " began to make a lot of sense.
Apologies at not providing a link ( technical issues ) for anyone who would like to check it out but it's at RMAF14 entitled High -Fi Stereo Thats not Natural and the presentation was made on Oct 12 th 2014.
A word of caution though on a WAF scale of 0 -10, for most his set-up is around 2
His speaker set-up methods differ enormously from conventional methods but the more i listened his brand of " snake oil " began to make a lot of sense.
Apologies at not providing a link ( technical issues
) for anyone who would like to check it out but it's at RMAF14 entitled High -Fi Stereo Thats not Natural and the presentation was made on Oct 12 th 2014.A word of caution though on a WAF scale of 0 -10, for most his set-up is around 2
I don't know what it is but once you've noticed it, you notice it more often. Large, massive sound stage; impressive, but unnatural.
Maybe it has something to do with radiation pattern, but that's just a guess.
Jan
Safe guess.
As far as I was able to get into that rather turgid setup video linked above, it also seemed to be the one thing that the salesman didn't really talk about or consider.
Giant lips floating in mid air is another one that annoys me. In my experience the worst offender I have heard was the (short-lived) wilson cub which threw a sound stage into all four corners of the back wall, whether the music called for it or not!
I have to say IMO you can learn more about speaker setup from a leisurely furtle through linkwitz labs than any youtube video. Although since he tidied things up getting harder to find some of the gems.
I have to say IMO you can learn more about speaker setup from a leisurely furtle through linkwitz labs than any youtube video. Although since he tidied things up getting harder to find some of the gems.
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