Tom Danley said:
Tom brings up several good points. It may seem minor, but in nature, it is very rare to hear more HF than LF content, thanks to HF attenuation in air. The only time you hear a natural source that is rich in HF content is when you are quite close to it - closer than 20 feet, for example. This expectation of HF rolloff according to distance is built into the hearing system as product of millions of years of evolution.
This is one simple example of why some colorations are more permissable than others. If the spectrum is tilted towards the bass, it just makes things sound a bit more distant than they really are. If the spectrum is tilted towards the treble, though, it's a coloration that never occurs in nature, at any distance. This automatically tags it as "unnatural" or "electronic" sounding, simply because it's a coloration that cannot occur in any acoustic environment. (Try and find acoustic absorbers that absorb more bass than HF - good luck.)
The issue of "more-acceptable" vs "less-acceptable" colorations needs to be looked at much more carefully. I think it's silly to make loudspeaker enclosures shaped liked violins, but the matter of wood vs synthetic cabinet materials isn't dismissed as easily - given the fact that materials colorations cannot be reduced to zero, what coloration is more musically consonant at a given residue level?
Tom also brings up the very important issue of non-coincident arrival times from line arrays. With enough effort (complex DSP and multiple amplifier arrays), a virtual point-source can be synthesized, but the accuracy of the point-source approximation will always be limited by the minimum size of the drivers and the finite number of elements in the array. In practice, most line arrays are driven in parallel, thus assuring non-coincident arrival times for almost any listening position.
Going back to the earlier point about colorations "not found in nature", I can't think of many musical instruments that are line-source emitters, or anything that is even close to that shape of emitter. A harp? Hardly, unless you remove all the strings but one, and make the frame infinitely rigid and non-emissive.
What about the RAAL tweeter I'm considering? Well, there's a big difference between a 12" high emitter and one that's six feet high - I wouldn't expect a 6-foot-high emitter to have a very good time signature, regardless of technology, ribbon or otherwise. In terms of time response, the winner would be an ionic speaker, but that's not compatible with high SPL and low distortion. The HF region does have some awkward choices between time response and low IM distortion. Horn/waveguide vs prosound ribbon, etc.
johninCR said:
Quoting from way up at Post #474,
If you are not familiar with the Integral Fast Reactor concept, you should be.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA378.html
This maybe of some interest (?), from the New Scientist 06 August 03.
"Musical roots may lie in human voice"
".....researches say that, aside from animal calls, speech emanating from oscillations of the human vocal cords is virtually the only natural sound we hear as tones.
This fact, combined with the new finding that preferred musical intervals are better predicted by the acoustic quirks of the human vocal tract than by mathematics,leads scientists to argue that the structure of music is rooted in our long exposure to the human voice over evolutionary time."
Cilla
"Musical roots may lie in human voice"
".....researches say that, aside from animal calls, speech emanating from oscillations of the human vocal cords is virtually the only natural sound we hear as tones.
This fact, combined with the new finding that preferred musical intervals are better predicted by the acoustic quirks of the human vocal tract than by mathematics,leads scientists to argue that the structure of music is rooted in our long exposure to the human voice over evolutionary time."
Cilla
At the risk of breaking the mood - thanks of the poetry, all - here's a funny, ironic, but also all-too-true post by the notorious Fake Steve Jobs. Although the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek, the closing remarks - "Remember standing in the hi-fi shop, lusting after the Linn LP12 turntable or the Quad speakers and telling yourself if you ever got some money you were going to buy a set-up like that?" - are all too true.
Gotta cut the MP3 crowd some slack. If I were their age, and in their position, I'd be doing the same - pulling stuff off the Net, trying to find a band that had a glimmer of talent, instead of the awful stuff being shovelled out by the record companies.
Turning the thing on its head, once more of us start getting fiber-in-the-home with its >20M/bit speed (suitable for streaming HDTV), and terabyte hard disks become commodity items (250 GB is already at the bottom of the market), I'm really hoping we see 96/24 and 192/24 Internet distributions become possible, bypassing the record company cartels and the Red Book Iron Curtain at the same time.
Sound quality has been stalled by the brick wall of 44.1/16 PCM for an astounding 25 years now - we are WAY past due for an upgrade, considering studios have been making recordings at least 88.2 or 96 kHz at 20 to 24-bit depth since the early Nineties. This quarter-century of technological stagnation is now one of the longest in the entire history of audio. The real bottleneck is the monopoly contractual status of the Red Book CD standard, combined with the steady growth of monopoly power of the corporate media structures.
Although I feel strongly about the negative effects of lossy compression, I'm a lot more tolerant of lossy compression if you just start with a high enough data rate, like 192/24. When the sample rate and bit depth is that high, there's a lot of empty spectrum, and at the bottom of the range, the LSB's are mostly noise, most of the time. This makes compression much easier, just as it does in photography, where a high enough data rate can overcome a lot of JPEG coding artifacts. Even non-lossy compression becomes easier when most of the spectrum is empty, as it is with 96 and 192 kHz sampling systems.
One of the subtle reasons DTS compression is far better sounding than Dolby Digital is that DTS is a 20-bit system, unlike DD/AC3, which is hard-coded to 16 bits. DTS using a modest compression ratio of 3:1 instead of the 10:1 of DD/AC3 helps a lot too. Maybe I'm whistling in the dark, but I see Internet distribution of genuine HD Audio as a real possibility once Internet HDTV takes off.
Gotta cut the MP3 crowd some slack. If I were their age, and in their position, I'd be doing the same - pulling stuff off the Net, trying to find a band that had a glimmer of talent, instead of the awful stuff being shovelled out by the record companies.
Turning the thing on its head, once more of us start getting fiber-in-the-home with its >20M/bit speed (suitable for streaming HDTV), and terabyte hard disks become commodity items (250 GB is already at the bottom of the market), I'm really hoping we see 96/24 and 192/24 Internet distributions become possible, bypassing the record company cartels and the Red Book Iron Curtain at the same time.
Sound quality has been stalled by the brick wall of 44.1/16 PCM for an astounding 25 years now - we are WAY past due for an upgrade, considering studios have been making recordings at least 88.2 or 96 kHz at 20 to 24-bit depth since the early Nineties. This quarter-century of technological stagnation is now one of the longest in the entire history of audio. The real bottleneck is the monopoly contractual status of the Red Book CD standard, combined with the steady growth of monopoly power of the corporate media structures.
Although I feel strongly about the negative effects of lossy compression, I'm a lot more tolerant of lossy compression if you just start with a high enough data rate, like 192/24. When the sample rate and bit depth is that high, there's a lot of empty spectrum, and at the bottom of the range, the LSB's are mostly noise, most of the time. This makes compression much easier, just as it does in photography, where a high enough data rate can overcome a lot of JPEG coding artifacts. Even non-lossy compression becomes easier when most of the spectrum is empty, as it is with 96 and 192 kHz sampling systems.
One of the subtle reasons DTS compression is far better sounding than Dolby Digital is that DTS is a 20-bit system, unlike DD/AC3, which is hard-coded to 16 bits. DTS using a modest compression ratio of 3:1 instead of the 10:1 of DD/AC3 helps a lot too. Maybe I'm whistling in the dark, but I see Internet distribution of genuine HD Audio as a real possibility once Internet HDTV takes off.
pdan said:
- The music of speech is tell tale of the culture behind each language. Listen to Italian and try to avoid thinking they must have a taste for dolce vita.
pdan said:
- Cilla thanks for speaking my native language.
Myth(os) is fundamental for classic Greek culture (i.e. all west's foundation) bcs of its educational power. But as they said 'in the beginning there was logos'. Logos -> Logic. So its Logos behind Mythos.-Lynn, once again I find you correct in your approach.
When I'm in a more metaphysical mood, I sometimes suspect music, singing, and poetry are simply a sort of carrier-wave for a hidden, unseen, and higher-bandwidth communication between the creator and the listener.
What enlivens that thought is a common experience I've had when writing an article or a personal communication - I frequently think along a given line, but decide not to include it in the actual written item (self-editing). But more often than I expect, the reader(s) will start commenting about what I was thinking about, but didn't actually write! This has happened many times since I started writing about audio in the early Nineties.
That's what got me thinking about the rather metaphysical concept of a "carrier wave" - writing is probably the lowest-bandwidth media there is, yet in some strange way, my readers frequently pick up on what I was thinking, but didn't write down.
At live concerts, of course, it's easy to sense a sort of invisible energy surging between the performer and the audience, when both start to get inspired (using the word in the archaic sense) and the performance spirals up and up and up, leaving everyone exhilarated at the end. Something unseen, great, and powerful is happening here, and it's a gift of being human - people have experienced this performer/audience transformation of consciousness since the dawn of time.
No matter what this phenomenon is, or what you call it, the job of a hifi system is to get out of the way, and not impede its passage. That's why there are intangible, impossible-to-describe aspects to music - because music invokes the deepest and most primal aspects of human consciousness - and consciousness is the great "Terra Incognita" of science and philosophy.
What enlivens that thought is a common experience I've had when writing an article or a personal communication - I frequently think along a given line, but decide not to include it in the actual written item (self-editing). But more often than I expect, the reader(s) will start commenting about what I was thinking about, but didn't actually write! This has happened many times since I started writing about audio in the early Nineties.
That's what got me thinking about the rather metaphysical concept of a "carrier wave" - writing is probably the lowest-bandwidth media there is, yet in some strange way, my readers frequently pick up on what I was thinking, but didn't write down.
At live concerts, of course, it's easy to sense a sort of invisible energy surging between the performer and the audience, when both start to get inspired (using the word in the archaic sense) and the performance spirals up and up and up, leaving everyone exhilarated at the end. Something unseen, great, and powerful is happening here, and it's a gift of being human - people have experienced this performer/audience transformation of consciousness since the dawn of time.
No matter what this phenomenon is, or what you call it, the job of a hifi system is to get out of the way, and not impede its passage. That's why there are intangible, impossible-to-describe aspects to music - because music invokes the deepest and most primal aspects of human consciousness - and consciousness is the great "Terra Incognita" of science and philosophy.
Salas,
"The music of speech is the tell tale of the culture behind each language."
Yes, but what language do I laugh or cry in?
"In the beginning there was logos", for Christians, yes, and perhaps for Plato, but not for Hesiod or Homer. Many early myths, as far as I know, preference Chaos.
Cilla
"The music of speech is the tell tale of the culture behind each language."
Yes, but what language do I laugh or cry in?
"In the beginning there was logos", for Christians, yes, and perhaps for Plato, but not for Hesiod or Homer. Many early myths, as far as I know, preference Chaos.
Cilla
Holding a modest B.Sc. in Psychology, it's been entertaining looking at all the fruitless and frankly, absurd theories that have come and gone about consciousness. When I started my studies in 1968, the Behaviourists ruled the roost, and they (led by their guru, B.F. Skinner) had the audacity to claim that consciousness didn't exist at all!!! Well, growing up a partial Buddhist, that claim was too ridiculous to be considered, and it was satisfying to see the Behaviourists lose their hold over the profession by the mid-Seventies, to be replaced by the Transpersonal Therapy group.
The neurologists had their try with the equally ludicrous "Telephone Switchboard" theory in the late Sixties through the Seventies, and when digital telephone exchanges became ho-hum technology, switched to a computer metaphor, despite the obvious and massive parallelism of physical neurological structures, and the complete absence of any kind of programming language. They then tried the "Hologram" metaphor, until you think for a moment and realize it describes exactly nothing and predicts nothing, it just sounds cool and has lasers in it. Yes, memory appears to be distributed through many structures in the brain - but it doesn't mean it has anything to do with wavefronts or the types of coherent structures seen in a hologram.
Now the fashion seems to be computer-operating-system based models of "Theory of Mind", that there are many small sub-minds all co-operating together, and somehow this magically transforms into what we experience day-to-day as consciousness. Uh-huh, yeah right, and the evidence for this is ... ? Like the discredited theories of Freud, where we've never found any evidence whatsoever for Id, Ego, and Superego, there's not much evidence that consciousness is something like a modern computer operating system - and why should there be any correspondence?
Just because computers are snazzy and cool and modern, our minds are supposed to operate that way? I don't think so. Our neurobiology has been around for millions of years, and we have archeological evidence of modern human behaviour going back at least 50,000 years.
There is indirect evidence that the ancients of the classical world experienced a somewhat different type of consciousness than we do - they mention in their writings that "the Gods speak to us", and this apparently was no metaphor, but a direct and common experience. For most of modern mankind, the Gods are inscrutably and frustratingly silent - possibly as a result of universal literacy silencing a part of the mind that gave the ancients (and tribal people) direct access to mystical knowledge and illumination.
The ancient Greeks may have been right on the transition-point to modern consciousness, but unfortunately, we have no record of what happened at the ancient mystery rites, and the early Christians were quite thorough in destroying the pagan temples and their cults. We see through a glass, darkly. We see motion, something is happening, but we don't know what it means.
All we have is indirect evidence of a deeply mystical way of life, that survives in a dim, distorted form in the world's tribal cultures of today. The history of human consciousness is a book yet to be written - partly because we know so very little of what we have right now, much less what existed in ancient times. Yes, music is part of this - it is part of what makes us human, and spans the range from the hardest physics to the most profound mysteries of existence. It is all of these at once.
At one time, before William of Ockham and Descartes split the world asunder, mystical illumination and science walked together. Now they aren't even seen in the same part of town, much less holding hands in public.
In Asia, though, this split isn't a deep as it is in the West, and the two realms of experiences are closer together.
The neurologists had their try with the equally ludicrous "Telephone Switchboard" theory in the late Sixties through the Seventies, and when digital telephone exchanges became ho-hum technology, switched to a computer metaphor, despite the obvious and massive parallelism of physical neurological structures, and the complete absence of any kind of programming language. They then tried the "Hologram" metaphor, until you think for a moment and realize it describes exactly nothing and predicts nothing, it just sounds cool and has lasers in it. Yes, memory appears to be distributed through many structures in the brain - but it doesn't mean it has anything to do with wavefronts or the types of coherent structures seen in a hologram.
Now the fashion seems to be computer-operating-system based models of "Theory of Mind", that there are many small sub-minds all co-operating together, and somehow this magically transforms into what we experience day-to-day as consciousness. Uh-huh, yeah right, and the evidence for this is ... ? Like the discredited theories of Freud, where we've never found any evidence whatsoever for Id, Ego, and Superego, there's not much evidence that consciousness is something like a modern computer operating system - and why should there be any correspondence?
Just because computers are snazzy and cool and modern, our minds are supposed to operate that way? I don't think so. Our neurobiology has been around for millions of years, and we have archeological evidence of modern human behaviour going back at least 50,000 years.
There is indirect evidence that the ancients of the classical world experienced a somewhat different type of consciousness than we do - they mention in their writings that "the Gods speak to us", and this apparently was no metaphor, but a direct and common experience. For most of modern mankind, the Gods are inscrutably and frustratingly silent - possibly as a result of universal literacy silencing a part of the mind that gave the ancients (and tribal people) direct access to mystical knowledge and illumination.
The ancient Greeks may have been right on the transition-point to modern consciousness, but unfortunately, we have no record of what happened at the ancient mystery rites, and the early Christians were quite thorough in destroying the pagan temples and their cults. We see through a glass, darkly. We see motion, something is happening, but we don't know what it means.
All we have is indirect evidence of a deeply mystical way of life, that survives in a dim, distorted form in the world's tribal cultures of today. The history of human consciousness is a book yet to be written - partly because we know so very little of what we have right now, much less what existed in ancient times. Yes, music is part of this - it is part of what makes us human, and spans the range from the hardest physics to the most profound mysteries of existence. It is all of these at once.
At one time, before William of Ockham and Descartes split the world asunder, mystical illumination and science walked together. Now they aren't even seen in the same part of town, much less holding hands in public.
In Asia, though, this split isn't a deep as it is in the West, and the two realms of experiences are closer together.
pdan said:
- In your native tone of laughter or cry. The very first cohesive sounds that a mother used to transfer emotion, joy, and protection. A China girl giggles or cries very differently than a German girl.
- Myths were the educational backbone. Those early guys were members of knowledgeable hieratic societies. They probably blinded Homer for letting too much out. After his seminal contribution, Greek culture boomed. See the importance of 'beauty' in his education. He wraps war around beautiful Helen! He tells them to fight for beauty!
Hesiod with his 'Theogony' (Gods birth - 'Cosmogony' World's birth) uses nature and giants and Gods in utter drama to teach order and ethics. Showing in the end that man is small, it takes to work. See Earth, Night, and see again 'Eros' (definition of love as inspired passion ). He links again all 'Hellenes' (Greeks) for beauty of love (see name Helen chosen by Homer). Chaos has a hidden pattern. And its the virtue of beauty.
They knew that inspiration is the steam engine of spirit. We have a living example before us:
Lynn looks for inspiration during his broken leg period, he juxtaposes a 'beyond the Ariel' conductor of musical beauty research ideal to a sad torturing happening. He works to extract spirit of beauty from a chaotic period. No wood is possible to have been cut , but his thread is estimated as one of the best ever for sheer loudspeaker culture. If he succeeds to realize it perfect, we get a DIY Parthenon.
