No. Symphony hall is for live performance. Musima would be to playback a prerecorded material, like movies in cinema, but without any picture, just music. There is no real people behind the white screen, you know, like there are no tiny persons behind the TV glass
The reason of no similar standards for stereo as for movies is due to lack of musimas. We will never see one of those. So you can forget about your dreams of uniform standardised world.
- Elias
Why not mix and master only for high end reproduction equipment, then build in compressors and eq for lower fi equipment?
Most lower fi equipment is digital so the compression and eq should be doable for a few pennies.
Yes there is but I really don't want to spend more time discussing why standardization would help the art and not restrict it, like you suggested. Did a standardization process like the development of language restrict us or did it free us? You've broken down the discussion to this point. While the discussion is interesting, it's irrelevant when we're discussing topics that built upon concepts that have been decided long ago (we do use language, we even do use a concept called "science").
Dirk,
That would be nice but who is going to set the standards? While you could do this the differences in implementation in the digital world is just as fragmented as loudspeaker and amplifier design. How do you write the algorithms that can take into affect all the different devices let alone the final earbud or speaker used for final reproduction? If we all attempted to meet a high standard that would be nice, but that is far from the case. I am truly hoping that we have gone through the worst period of sound quality with the prevalence of MP3 compression standards. Now with the ever larger storage media that we all have I can only pray that other standards such as Flac files and Wavefiles become more the norm. Then we can get back to quality sounds in the digital domain and away from terribly compressed lossy sound quality.
That would be nice but who is going to set the standards? While you could do this the differences in implementation in the digital world is just as fragmented as loudspeaker and amplifier design. How do you write the algorithms that can take into affect all the different devices let alone the final earbud or speaker used for final reproduction? If we all attempted to meet a high standard that would be nice, but that is far from the case. I am truly hoping that we have gone through the worst period of sound quality with the prevalence of MP3 compression standards. Now with the ever larger storage media that we all have I can only pray that other standards such as Flac files and Wavefiles become more the norm. Then we can get back to quality sounds in the digital domain and away from terribly compressed lossy sound quality.
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Where's the difference? The acoustic properties of symphonic halls are highly standardised. That's why the art of symphonic music could thrive.
"uniform standardised world"? I was talking about standards for sound reproduction. What's so bad about a reference level and working equal loudness compensation? I don't see how the lack of standards is a good thing.
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I agree that standards would be a good thing to have, but I don't see it happening. So many amateur producers and differing philosophies when it comes to recording practices make it prohibitively difficult.
We can wish for standard in recording, but as my grandfather used to say, wish in one hand, s*** in the other, see which fills up faster.
For general audio recording though...it might be tough to get all the little labels and amateur folks to fall in line with something like that, no?
Setting a reference level is a pretty trivial process. The real problem is the loudness war. This was (is?) a development that ruined most recordings in the past 2 decades.
Hi Guys
A couple thoughts. The “anechoic” condition might be useful for other things but the reason for it is that it is the only condition where reflected sound is not included in the mic signal. For some things (like working on loudspeakers) it can be helpful to see what the speaker and only the speaker is doing. That makes a lot of sense since your only able to work on the speaker.
Standing in one sounds really weird and very un-natural.
It’s funny too just how dramatic it is just removing ground reflections. The effect is powerful and yet unless you stood in the middle of such a chamber (which has a wire mesh floor and continued absorption underneath you) and talked, you would be totally unaware how “present” even floor reflections from your voice are.
The important point though, if you set up musicians and played live in such a room, you have the best ability to localize the source positions of any listening condition possible. ALL sound other than the direct sound from the source competes with the actual signal. To us hearing that, we don’t hear the flaws, our ears automatically seek the content out of noise so pursuing what it is that limits “how real” it sounds is difficult as well as often being limited in scope to what is practical rather than what is possible.
That is why I had suggested the outdoor stereo and small full range drivers on flat baffle experiments for stereo imaging, a lot of research done claims are made but none I know of had included the “ no room reflections” option one has available outdoors or used very high constant directivity sources which also greatly reduce room effects.
Part B is capture & playback. If you have a measurement microphone and decent or half decent headphones, rig your computer up so that you can listen to your measurement mic. After you get used to the sonic perspective (which is the headphone, middle of your head image) . Listen to your friends talk and noises around your house, when you record these sounds, they make some of THE BEST test sounds because you were there, these are sounds you know first hand.
That “near perfect” but no stereo world of a precision measurement mic collapses when you want stereo, there is no position one can put two mics in and capture a real stereo image, without two ears, we do not hear like two microphones in the same locations. Even a dummy head only captures some of the effects our heads cause and sounds more realistic but is still very limited.
Conversely, most of our recordings we listen to have a stereo image that was created in the studio. A single signal, fed to R&L equally, sounds like the center, the mono phantom image half way between the two speakers. The channel Pan pot is what allows the engineer to move that signals apparent image left to right and each channel has one, each signal is assigned it’s location in stereo space. The huge variety is “quality” in that industry reflects the artistic skill of the engineers and to a degree the monitors and equipment they have to work with.
Notice they have two general ways to mix down music, one is with in wall monitors which are flush mounted and often partially horn loaded so there is minimal refraction / re-radiation, the front wall and room are highly absorptive while the rear of the room causes scattering / diffusion (LEDE).
Here, the idea is to have a very lowest level of close room reflections as possible, you want only the direct sound, and especially don’t want strong coherent reflections.
The “other way” is to use small monitors on the meter bridge (back of the mixer), the idea here is that being much closer, they can be much smaller and act more like a single point source than an array of point sources.
They have no real directivity BUT they make up for that by having them only a few feet from the engineer and FAR away from the room walls and have nothing behind them to reflect sound. Here, since the SPL falls at the inverse square law, any reflections that do return have much more delay and are much lower in level than the direct sound.
Two different ways of minimizing the room’s contribution to what the engineer is hearing.
Part of the problem too is the common denominator, what is the typical stereo reproduction system, is it an iphone or car stereo? We have never lived in a time where more effort goes into influencing us and what we buy. The story that the movie the Matrix came from was about how most of us live in an artificial world created by our media, that most of us are semi conscious consumers, all of that an effort to separate us from our spare cash.
I write stuff like this because there are a number of folks who are still interested in making it sound real. If the “state of the art” is going to be advanced, it is more likely to be pushed along by DIY’rs than any of the large companies that have found a dollar marketing the image of science and R&D produces more sales than a dollar spent doing science and R&D.
Best,
Tom Danley
A couple thoughts. The “anechoic” condition might be useful for other things but the reason for it is that it is the only condition where reflected sound is not included in the mic signal. For some things (like working on loudspeakers) it can be helpful to see what the speaker and only the speaker is doing. That makes a lot of sense since your only able to work on the speaker.
Standing in one sounds really weird and very un-natural.
It’s funny too just how dramatic it is just removing ground reflections. The effect is powerful and yet unless you stood in the middle of such a chamber (which has a wire mesh floor and continued absorption underneath you) and talked, you would be totally unaware how “present” even floor reflections from your voice are.
The important point though, if you set up musicians and played live in such a room, you have the best ability to localize the source positions of any listening condition possible. ALL sound other than the direct sound from the source competes with the actual signal. To us hearing that, we don’t hear the flaws, our ears automatically seek the content out of noise so pursuing what it is that limits “how real” it sounds is difficult as well as often being limited in scope to what is practical rather than what is possible.
That is why I had suggested the outdoor stereo and small full range drivers on flat baffle experiments for stereo imaging, a lot of research done claims are made but none I know of had included the “ no room reflections” option one has available outdoors or used very high constant directivity sources which also greatly reduce room effects.
Part B is capture & playback. If you have a measurement microphone and decent or half decent headphones, rig your computer up so that you can listen to your measurement mic. After you get used to the sonic perspective (which is the headphone, middle of your head image) . Listen to your friends talk and noises around your house, when you record these sounds, they make some of THE BEST test sounds because you were there, these are sounds you know first hand.
That “near perfect” but no stereo world of a precision measurement mic collapses when you want stereo, there is no position one can put two mics in and capture a real stereo image, without two ears, we do not hear like two microphones in the same locations. Even a dummy head only captures some of the effects our heads cause and sounds more realistic but is still very limited.
Conversely, most of our recordings we listen to have a stereo image that was created in the studio. A single signal, fed to R&L equally, sounds like the center, the mono phantom image half way between the two speakers. The channel Pan pot is what allows the engineer to move that signals apparent image left to right and each channel has one, each signal is assigned it’s location in stereo space. The huge variety is “quality” in that industry reflects the artistic skill of the engineers and to a degree the monitors and equipment they have to work with.
Notice they have two general ways to mix down music, one is with in wall monitors which are flush mounted and often partially horn loaded so there is minimal refraction / re-radiation, the front wall and room are highly absorptive while the rear of the room causes scattering / diffusion (LEDE).
Here, the idea is to have a very lowest level of close room reflections as possible, you want only the direct sound, and especially don’t want strong coherent reflections.
The “other way” is to use small monitors on the meter bridge (back of the mixer), the idea here is that being much closer, they can be much smaller and act more like a single point source than an array of point sources.
They have no real directivity BUT they make up for that by having them only a few feet from the engineer and FAR away from the room walls and have nothing behind them to reflect sound. Here, since the SPL falls at the inverse square law, any reflections that do return have much more delay and are much lower in level than the direct sound.
Two different ways of minimizing the room’s contribution to what the engineer is hearing.
Part of the problem too is the common denominator, what is the typical stereo reproduction system, is it an iphone or car stereo? We have never lived in a time where more effort goes into influencing us and what we buy. The story that the movie the Matrix came from was about how most of us live in an artificial world created by our media, that most of us are semi conscious consumers, all of that an effort to separate us from our spare cash.
I write stuff like this because there are a number of folks who are still interested in making it sound real. If the “state of the art” is going to be advanced, it is more likely to be pushed along by DIY’rs than any of the large companies that have found a dollar marketing the image of science and R&D produces more sales than a dollar spent doing science and R&D.
Best,
Tom Danley
The reason I did not get your point is because language is far from standardized and in a continual flux. If it were standardized we'd have no accents or dialects. I'm sure you can tell the difference between german, bavarian, austrian and swiss german, similarly we have Queens english, scottish english, american english, australian english. All with different spellings and words which simply do not exist in other forms of english or have different meanings.
I do agree on the Loudness Wars though, they ruined almost everything.
How many times have I heard the words if it is such a great idea the big manufacturers would have done that already. It is so true that smaller manufacturers and designers are willing to go outside of the norm. Sometimes I tell my daughter the reason that I came up with an idea was that I didn't know enough to understand that it couldn't be done. That is were our breakthroughs come from. I also tell her that I never learn much by getting something right the first time, but by my mistakes, that is where other ideas come from just by accident. Other times I just disagree with current thinking and see something that others are just overlooking. I think that the days of the big Bell Labs research and development went out with the control of large companies by stockholders who say why would you invest that money if I am not going to make a big profit within one financial quarter. I would love to discuss some of what I am working on but it just isn't a smart thing to do sometimes. I have made proposals only to see my work in print by someone else and a patent attached to my hard work.
I do appreciate your thoughts here. I do take speakers outside and point them up to the sky to remove as much of the environment as possible while testing response curves with a very closely spaced measurement microphone. Only wish I could afford that B&K metal diaphragm measurement mic with 100Khz top frequency response.
I do appreciate your thoughts here. I do take speakers outside and point them up to the sky to remove as much of the environment as possible while testing response curves with a very closely spaced measurement microphone. Only wish I could afford that B&K metal diaphragm measurement mic with 100Khz top frequency response.
We are used to hear reflections because the world is a reflective place. If you record for example a string section with heavy damping on the floor it will sound very unnatural. Those ground reflections are a necessity for natural sound. For that reason recording studio's always have a very reflective floor.
It is true that reflections have a big impact on the perceived sound. If you have just a few reflections comb filter effects ruin the perceived sound quality, witch is the case when you put speakers on a mixing desk. And if the reflections are very frequency dependant, witch happens with conventional speakers in a normal living room or in rooms with simple geometry, then we can not distinguish the direct sound from the reflections and stereo imagery suffers. But if you have lots of frequency independent reflections, like the situation in a good concert hall, then the reflections add detail to the sound.
A very simple test can verify this: Take a good recording and start adding reverb, its amazing how much reverb you can add before the stereo image suffers. This test shows that frequency independent reflections are not bad at all.
Of cause control room acoustician's always say that reflections are bad, but only if there are few and if they are frequency dependant. Diffuse frequency independent reflections are fine and add to the realism of the sound.
... and localization suffers again
In a concert hall the ability to localize sounds is greatly reduced. You can't have your cake and eat it.
ground (floor) reflections are the worst enemy of realistic sound reproduction because they are powerful cues for a sound source elevation and distance
floor reflections are most responsible for confused perception of three sound sources in a stereo listening room - two real sources in loudspeakers and a phantom sound source - instead of just perceiving the phantom
alas this is generally misunderstood/ignored because it is extremely difficult - within prevailing paradigm of front radiating speakers - to design a moving-coil loudspeaker that is immune to floor reflection problems, rare technically successful designs (successful to a degree) are so odd-looking that just the looks kills any of their chances on the market (see Snell "Type 1" or Gradient 1.3)
such generalization is untrue
it applies to all sound other than the direct sound that is INCOHERENT with the direct sound
reflections that are coherent with the direct sound have just the opposite effect - that is an effect of a "magnifying glass" - because in fact those reflections allow us to hear into the recording better
alas virtually all loudspeakers designed according to the prevailing paradigm, including those used in most scientific tests, produce incoherent reflections in the listening room, hence the general misunderstanding of the question of reflections, that's all
but it is possible to design loudspeakers that produce only coherent reflections and in such a case there is neither confused imaging nor masking of details, perhaps one just needs to experience this oneself to believe, read Bob Olhsson comments here:
New mastering room - Gearslutz.com
and here:
And now for something completely different - Gearslutz.com
Mr Danley - just as Mr Olhsson did before - You think You know
... and localization suffers again
but not just because of any reflections present, again Mr Olhsson (on David Moulton's speakers):
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This is not my experience at all.... and localization suffers again
I regularly visit the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and you can pinpoint the individual instruments almost everywhere you sit. Just the 2 back row's and back corners have poor localisation.
Most people can pinpoint a person speaking in a very reflective room, even if the speaker is very close to a wall and the listener close to an other wall. A simple experiment in your living room will verify this.
Just try the experiment I suggested in my previous post: Add reverb to a good recording. You will be surprised how much you can add before localisation suffers.
More on spatial hearing: www.aes.org/sections/pnw/ppt/jj/spatial_hearing.ppt
That's the first time I hear anybody report such a thing and the literature doesn't support such a claim either. Sighted listening is a strong bias.
I've been to a couple of different highly regarded concert halls and localization was almost always completely gone.
Nice summary which by the way contradicts your claim (slide 25).
Probably still the best book about spatial hearing is Blauert "Spatial Hearing".
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