When I worked with one travelling rock band, we had a bass guitarist that liked to sing. But he was just screaming! So when he was screaming, I used to add 500 Hz for him on EQ, to add the 1'st singers' formant to his scream, and more reverberation, to make him sound acceptable. Several years later I met him, and he complained, "We recently were in a studio. Dude, they are so dumb, they even could not record my clean voice!"
I love anecdotes like that.
And as far as guitars, yes a completely straight electric guitar sounds wrong unless the person has robot abilities for consistency... there simply is too much void to fill in the musical space without acoustical resonations. I've tried to get musicians to play straight with no modifications, for both our sakes that only lasts about 10 seconds.
IME the better musicians that I have dealt with don't suffer the above, and I find them to be the best honest critics.
If their rig sounds even slightly different with guitar cable or speaker cable etc change they will say so immediately, and accurately too.
Dan.
The best musicians that I know can enjoy the music they love even from AM radios.
Right. And I hate intermodulation that some famous SE tube amps add, while preserving an air of decaying sounds. Also, I hate damage of decaying sounds by some famous PP amps that reproduce loud sounds well. That's why I design more amps, to satisfy my critical tastes.
Fine, then why does the fur fly when someone who likes to actually measure things points out that, for instance, an RIAA pre-amp deviates from RIAA by 5 or 6dB in a critical band or their amplifier has several percent distortion under some conditions.
When amp and speakers measure good, even Pandora can sound nice!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK7uO-O7oSQ&feature=youtu.be
Everybody that I generally know tries to make an accurate RIAA curve. IF there are exceptions, and they sound good, then perhaps we sometimes rely too much on an accurate RIAA curve to make the best sound reproduction in a given playback system. However, overall, an accurate RIAA curve is best.
Some kind of distortions caused by saturated cores can make stereo image more pronounced, but it causes fatigue due to intermods. I used similar approach in my early mixer for a rock group to make voices to sound more dynamic, more aggressive, but each microphone was used by a single singer.
Maybe you are describing a "pathological case" where there is some person who wants to believe, or who even holds sacred, that added effects they like produce added accuracy.
But not everybody who likes added effects is pathological, so maybe we could stick to cases where sane people are involved?
Otherwise, when you ask "why does the fur fly," you are in effect asking why crazy people are crazy. Who knows and who cares in an electronics engineering discussion.
In the Neve console stuff at one point he talks about an adjustable control that adds as much as 5% 2nd and 3rd harmonic to enhance some aspect of the sound. Also much talk about how the transformers add to the big sound. I have also heard of amp designers adding 2nd harmonic to get "better sound". In the console it can be seen as an effect but was not presented that way.
The only specs on the Neve console were size, weight and power consumption. The quality issues seems to be in the Rolls Royce traditions of "good enough".
Maybe we are focused on the wrong side of accuracy? Life is much easier if .1% THD was good enough.
The only specs on the Neve console were size, weight and power consumption. The quality issues seems to be in the Rolls Royce traditions of "good enough".
Maybe we are focused on the wrong side of accuracy? Life is much easier if .1% THD was good enough.
I don't care of THD. What I care about, does it fool my imagination well as if sounds are real, or not. Even absolutely synthesized music may sound like some real instruments are around you, if the tract including speakers adds minimum of audible distortions, as less as possible.
Sorry to interrupt here
Open loop?
I have no idea what you are talking about, you obviously have some ax to grind. Discussing whether a SET with 10% distortion sounds better than a Bryston PA is not my idea of discussing electronics engineering. This is not a music creation/production forum. You obviously want to talk about a larger issue than designing amplifiers, if you want to add your own preference to what the artist presents I could care less. That discussion is totally open ended, subjective, and fairly pointless.
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John;
even though Scott is a famous opamp designer, I believe that his RIAA phono stage sounds clean and transparent!
Oops... Youtube blocked the recording in Netherlands, sorry Jan!
I hope they found the sound so real, as if it was an original sound track added to the video.
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