For me the goal is for the reproduction of all kinds of music to be convincing - no subsets need apply. If a music style requires high levels of deep bass, or excessive SPLs to 'work', then I'll pass on that for now,
.I've heard plenty of systems that make a particular, unfamiliar recording appear very impressive, but then sound like total poo when playing something I'm familar with. Only getting some of the behaviours right, will not ensure lifelike sound every time - that type of replay is not my goal ...
The point is not about someone having a 'fabulous' system, it's about what's relevant to making it work properly, to function at its potential best.
When one neither designs nor builds nor measures nor analyzes, analogy is all that's left.
I don't understand this. First, the purposes and goals associated with automobiles, e.g. carrying heavy loads, pulling a trailer, rapid acceleration, and so on, are just as objective as those associated with home music systems.
Second, when it comes to what the purpose of music systems is, I find most people tend to limit their cases to acoustic performances as the source that one is trying to reproduce, and tend to have in mind some ideal environment and ideal listening position, as if there was such a thing. But, among other things (whose range can be quite complex), how something sounds depends upon one's relation to the source of that sound. Is the listening position that is to be reproduced two feet from the original source, ten feet, fifty feet, two hundred feet, directly in front of the singer, the drummer, the violin player, or is it better to listen off to the side, from the standpoint of the musician or singer, and so on? Exactly what listening conditions is the music system supposed to reproduce?
Even more problematic are musical sources that are not themselves of an acoustic character, such as electronic music of various stripes. What is the original source for music that is electronically produced? Is it one of the many monitors that might be used in the production of that music? Which one? The most expensive monitor or the least expensive ones? An average of all of them?
To say that the objective goal of a music system is the reproduction of musical performances may sound simple and appealing at first blush, but a bit of careful, critical reflection quickly shows that this 'common sense' ideal is far more problematic than it first appears.
We humans are blessed with a sophisticated, inbuilt sound processing system which can be 'fooled' - well, as least some of us have it it seems,
. When you listen to live music, produced by 'natural' means, then no matter where you're listening to the performance there are multiple audible cues that keep telling you that the music is not coming from an mechanical reproduction system - when was the last time you mistook live, acoustic sound for a hifi system? Fortunately, for some at least, an audio system working at a high quality level is capable of mimicing enough of those clues so that brain accepts the illusion, also irrespective of your location - this is the 'invisible speaker' performance level, where even when you 'know' the sound is coming from drivers that happen to be somewhere in the room, the brain 'refuses' to see the sound as emerging from them.
This is not a theoretical construct, it has happened to me numerous times, on a regular basis when I make the right efforts. And has happened for others, completely independently,
.Even complete synthetic music 'works', in the sense that you 'see' the artificial acoustic that the sound was constructed to be part of - it doesn't seem to be coming from a monitor.
Also helps in hearing past recorded distortions...
LRB - "It's a Long Way There" (full version) - YouTube (intros until +1:00)
for no reason in particular.
LRB - "It's a Long Way There" (full version) - YouTube (intros until +1:00)
for no reason in particular.
Ben,
Now we are getting somewhere, you have acknowledged dispersion patterns and room interaction are a big part of what we hear, and do make a difference in the "down the hall test."
I grew up listening to 8" "fullrange" Karlson cabinets my dad built, they did a number of things well:
1) The single (roughly) point source sound results in good imaging, and allows a (relatively) smooth phase response over a wide band, unlike poorly implemented crossovers.
2) Decent bandwidth (for the time) of 60-16kHz.
3) "Tight", not "boomy" bass.
4) Small size allows easy placement in optimum room position.
In all those metrics the Karlsons had the living room Magnavox console stereo beat.
They also have a number of faults, though Freddyi, who bought them, does not seem to mind:
1) Rough frequency response.
2) Polar response is not uniform.
3) Distortion becomes evident at SPL levels comparable to a live girl with a guitar.
4) Diffraction effects from the Karlson "Christmas tree" shaped exit and 90 degree hard edges are audible.
My present system is "fabulous" due to the reduction of as many acoustically bad things as I could think of.
In an effort to listen to something better than I grew up with, in my present house I started with the room shapes first.
The house was a 16' x 50' shell, but I was able to build the living room/studio and control room/office with dimensions that tend to not support standing waves, and by virtue of the "shed" roof, the floor and ceiling are not parallel.
After construction was finished, was happy to find even mediocre speakers in a room designed around music playback sound pretty good!
Around 6 years ago, a friend gave me some decent 8" speakers and dome tweeters.
I built simple cabinets for them with well rounded corners to reduce diffraction, the cabinets are thin with a built in toe in, they are mounted in the room corners, virtually like soffit mounting. The design works well at eliminating a number of undesirable room interaction problems inherent in a box placed away from walls.
The crossover frequency point allows for uniform dispersion throughout the crossover region.
They were a big improvement in terms of the four deficiencies shared by the Karlsons and the 10" and tweeter PA boxes I had been using, and replacing the 15" 50 Hz Fb "sub" with a sealed 2x12" allowed extension to 16 Hz.
Later, after becoming familiar with Smaart (a dual FFT measurement program), I corrected some mistakes in the passive crossover that were not evident with the 1/3 octave RTA I had used for measurement previously.
With a 1/3 octave EQ inserted in the tape loop, the system now had reduced the four deficiencies to a point where they are no longer audible to me, other than distortion at levels higher than I care to listen to. I do not want to listen to a horn band in my living room (I have, it is not pleasant).
The speakers are pointed at the opposite room corners, each of which has a door.
When the door is open, down the hall, one primarily hears that speaker, and not a lot of room reflections.
At any rate, there is nothing exceptional about any of the components in my stereo, but attention to elimination of many details that get in the way of realistic reproduction enable it to sound like the recording not only within the stereo triangle, but also "down the hall", regardless of musical genre.
Whether the recording sounds "real" is another issue, but that won't be resolved at the loudspeaker end
.Art
The 'attention to detail' philosophy is central to achieving the result - this is "data",At any rate, there is nothing exceptional about any of the components in my stereo, but attention to elimination of many details that get in the way of realistic reproduction enable it to sound like the recording not only within the stereo triangle, but also "down the hall", regardless of musical genre.
Whether the recording sounds "real" is another issue, but that won't be resolved at the loudspeaker end
Art
, which is common to every "other people's" instance I've come across in my wanderings ... The very good news is that there appears almost no limit to the "realness" factor - one can keep pushing and pushing in areas of refinement -- because most recordings were carefully done, compared to casual live listening, the playback ends up sounding more alive than the 'real thing' ...
This summer I have been to three live classic concerts, where I did not have direct sight of the musicians (had been booking too late and had to live with seats that were still available). But I was at least in the same hall with them. More than once I thought: Sounds pretty much like my hifi at home - just less spatial resolution in here.
This "listening from down the hallway" test is really completely silly imho.
Rudolf
This summer I have been to three live classic concerts, where I did not have direct sight of the musicians (had been booking too late and had to live with seats that were still available). But I was at least in the same hall with them. More than once I thought: Sounds pretty much like my hifi at home - just less spatial resolution in here.
This "listening from down the hallway" test is really completely silly imho.
Rudolf
Like everything else, it depends.... In one of our theatres here under the balcony is about how you describe your experience. The balcony, on the other hand, is wonderful.
This "listening from down the hallway" test is really completely silly imho.
Rudolf
What do you propose as a casual. familiar, every day, intuitive. evocative way to think about what a good quality music reproduction system ought to be able to do, as a minimum?
Glad to hear your ideas for a non-silly way to look at goodness.
Easy as it ought to be to simulate the muffled, down-the-hall sound of a real instrument or singer, few of us claim (honestly or delusionally) their systems do it.
Or should we go back to puffed-up posts about whose system is the best of all?
Ben
Down the hall often sounds more real because there's more decorrelated sound coming to the listener than in the listening room.
I'm sure people "hear" music and sounds in different ways; a large part of it is how you focus on elements of the sound - imagine a concert in a hall, and some members of the audience discuss it afterwards: a violinist, a music reviewer, an acoustics designer and a instrument repair technician ....
From my POV it's how well the system can "fake" it in every area - the blindfold test. Down the hall it may happen, but what do your ears say standing a foot directly in front of a speaker enclosure?
That's the idea ...
There are plenty of arguments used as to why "it can't happen" - but the reality of it indeed happening tends to pull the carpet out from underneath that type of thinking,.
Top notch PA setups can do it, I've heard a couple over the years manage it nicely - which means the normal standard of most, bellowing and shrieking, attempting to give you a headache in the shortest time frame is not really acceptable ...
There are plenty of arguments used as to why "it can't happen" - but the reality of it indeed happening tends to pull the carpet out from underneath that type of thinking,
.Top notch PA setups can do it, I've heard a couple over the years manage it nicely - which means the normal standard of most, bellowing and shrieking, attempting to give you a headache in the shortest time frame is not really acceptable ...
Sorry, there is no intuitive and every day way to explain what hifi can do and what it can't. It is a multifaceted psycho-physical event which is certainly not understood by posting car analogies
Hifi was never meant to put an acoustical representation of a singer or instrument into your room. It puts the recording into your room. If you listen to Mrs Fleming down the hall, it should not sound like her standing in your room, but like a recording of her singing in the Met (or elsewhere), which is playing in your room.
Hifi doesn't even pretend to deliver this representation throughout your listening room in equal quality. There is a sweet spot. And hopefully you have not optimized it to sound best when sitting in your doorway.
There have been days when some magic mushroom sandwich did that for me, yes. But I have since decided to be content with less "realistic" illusions.
If you put some decent effort into your room and system, it will deliver a believable and enjoyable rendering of the recording into your room. If this it not "realistic" enough for your taste, you probably need to wait for wavefield synthesis to come up with some really holographic solution.
Rudolf
Well said.Sorry, there is no intuitive and every day way to explain what hifi can do and what it can't. It is a multifaceted psycho-physical event which is certainly not understood by posting car analogies
Hifi was never meant to put an acoustical representation of a singer or instrument into your room. It puts the recording into your room. If you listen to Mrs Fleming down the hall, it should not sound like her standing in your room, but like a recording of her singing in the Met (or elsewhere), which is playing in your room.
Hifi doesn't even pretend to deliver this representation throughout your listening room in equal quality. There is a sweet spot. And hopefully you have not optimized it to sound best when sitting in your doorway.
There have been days when some magic mushroom sandwich did that for me, yes. But I have since decided to be content with less "realistic" illusions.
If you put some decent effort into your room and system, it will deliver a believable and enjoyable rendering of the recording into your room. If this it not "realistic" enough for your taste, you probably need to wait for wavefield synthesis to come up with some really holographic solution.
Rudolf
Sorry, there is no intuitive and every day way to explain what hifi can do and what it can't. It is a multifaceted psycho-physical event which is certainly not understood by posting car analogies
Hifi was never meant to put an acoustical representation of a singer or instrument into your room. It puts the recording into your room. If you listen to Mrs Fleming down the hall, it should not sound like her standing in your room, but like a recording of her singing in the Met (or elsewhere), which is playing in your room.
Hifi doesn't even pretend to deliver this representation throughout your listening room in equal quality. There is a sweet spot. And hopefully you have not optimized it to sound best when sitting in your doorway.
There have been days when some magic mushroom sandwich did that for me, yes. But I have since decided to be content with less "realistic" illusions.
If you put some decent effort into your room and system, it will deliver a believable and enjoyable rendering of the recording into your room. If this it not "realistic" enough for your taste, you probably need to wait for wavefield synthesis to come up with some really holographic solution.
Rudolf
+2 I'm with Rudolf here. I think of audio the same way I think about video and movies.
Yeah, sometimes when I'm in the kitchen and someone knocks on a door, I have to check out the window because it sounded like someone knocked on my own door, but when I'm watching a movie, it's about the presentation of a performance, not necessarily "being at the scene".
I might be crazy here, but I think for audio to properly convey the idea of being transported to another location, one needs more than an audio recording of the location, no matter how good it's done. For instance, simply walking into a large concert hall gives a person a "feeling" of space. This feeling which when removed causes claustrophobia in some people. The brain is very much aware of it..and these feelings I believe are capable of "coloring" one's perception, making it far, far easier for the brain to process the auditory space that you're in.
An audio system might be able to convey some of the acoustics of the recording space, but actually plunking that space down over the top of your listening room, imho is probably a fool's errand as it requires far more information being sent to the brain which speakers just can't do.
So, for myself, rather than try and convince myself that "I'm there." it's far easier to just take recorded audio and playback gear for what it's worth and enjoy what it can do.
We're a long ways away from Holodecks and physical matter manipulation, which is what we'd need to honestly do what a lot of folks think vibrating membranes and a handful of transistors should be able to do.
That's actually what does happen, the 'space' projected by the recording does take over the space that the listener happens to inhabit. The information has been encoded into the recording, but at a low level - the very area where most systems come unstuck. People may perceive the speakers as not being capable, but it all comes down to the overall competence of the system, as a totality.
I've heard this occur over and over again - the system sounds very ordinary, just a normal hifi, the sound is 'small', a 'performance' is taking place over where the speakers are, which can be easily disregarded as a sort of background event, a sideshow to what else is occurring in that room. Then, as the quality of the playback improves through warm-up and stabilising of all the components the subjective impact and engagement of the musical event being projected builds in intensity, until it dominates the room or space - not through volume, this never changes; but the information in the recording being fed to one's ears makes more and more sense - it becomes 'convincing', sufficiently to override the acoustic signature of the listening space.
This is one of the myths of audio, that you can't listen very close to intense sound. Well, musicians do it all the time - try standing as far away from a drumkit in full cry as the drummer is - there ... intense, visceral sound which overwhelms your senses, takes you to another place. That's the goal ... what the speaker should project when you're that close. Of course, many speakers just sound nasty, aggressive, bludgeoning - which are the symptoms of flawed sound ...
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