LOL! You guys kill me! Could it be sour grapes?
Come on now. There are systems out there that can do big stuff very well. They do tend to be big systems. And often rather expensive, because big, large dynamics and low subjective distortion don't come cheap. Hear one and you will be surprised how much magic there is in even the poorest recordings.
Don't believe me? Stop by and hear Gary Pimm's system in Portland some time. He's doing it with common, off the self drivers. But custom and very good electronics. And it does smaller music very well, too. As any good system will.
Maybe it's just a matter of taste...
Any body but me hear a Nestorovic Labs system 16? Or, even a system 5? Neither had any trouble with large format symphonic material, or small format Jazz. Rock, not so great, but then rock never entered into the equation.
I was the development engineer for 5 years, for system alterations and I built and thoroughly tested every system. Standard was a 1 1/2 db variation in FR between paired systems, at any given point, and a 3 db envelope. The system 16 sub woofers were capable of 106 db at 16 Hz, with 1 kHz just 3 db astray from that from physically separate satellite speakers.
Bud
I was the development engineer for 5 years, for system alterations and I built and thoroughly tested every system. Standard was a 1 1/2 db variation in FR between paired systems, at any given point, and a 3 db envelope. The system 16 sub woofers were capable of 106 db at 16 Hz, with 1 kHz just 3 db astray from that from physically separate satellite speakers.
Bud
I have an IsoMike Test CD. The 2L CDs I mentioned earlier better the IsoMike.
LOL! You guys kill me! Could it be sour grapes?
Or a more enlightened point of view?
More enlightened? Or more unctuous? (many of us here suffer that malady, me included)
But I'll still chuckle when I read someone talking about speakers that sound too good.
Obviously our tastes and experience are vastly different. To each his own. What matters in the end is what we like. Having grown up around, and worked for many years with live music, a system that sounds like what I know as live music is what pleases me. Thrills me, actually. If it isn't a technically perfect system, so be it. My experience has also been that systems that sound very "real" to me also manage to bring a lot of magic out of rather poor recordings. Doesn't make them good recordings, but will let the music shine thu.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be mean or insulting. It's just that sometimes there is a forehead slapping moment when you realize "Doh! We are after completely different things." Makes me laugh.
But I'll still chuckle when I read someone talking about speakers that sound too good.
Obviously our tastes and experience are vastly different. To each his own. What matters in the end is what we like. Having grown up around, and worked for many years with live music, a system that sounds like what I know as live music is what pleases me. Thrills me, actually. If it isn't a technically perfect system, so be it. My experience has also been that systems that sound very "real" to me also manage to bring a lot of magic out of rather poor recordings. Doesn't make them good recordings, but will let the music shine thu.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be mean or insulting. It's just that sometimes there is a forehead slapping moment when you realize "Doh! We are after completely different things." Makes me laugh.
If you want speakers that "bring a lot of magic out of rather poor recordings" then we are certainly "after completely different things" To me a poor recording should sound like, well, a poor recording. I must be nieve, but that just seems like such an obvious requirement for "Hi-Fidelity".
I want to thank Dr. Geddes, Panomaniac, Michael, Soongsc, and all the other thoughtful and intelligent contributors to this thread. Although we may disagree, this discussion lets us look at our assumptions about sound, perception, and musical appreciation.
I was lucky to have visited the BBC in their glory days of the mid-Seventies, when they were still doing a lot of fundamental research on loudspeakers, multichannel, and recording technique. One of the things that most impressed me was their working definition of what was "fidelity" to the original source. Since they had their own in-house orchestra (pre-Thatcher funding levels), they were able to walk between the control booth and the symphony hall with a few steps. That was the yardstick; how close was the sound in recording booth to what was audible outside it? This, along with manufacturing repeatability, is the basis for a BBC monitor - live versus recorded.
The UK government at that time encouraged diffusion of BBC research into the British industry - I know that Laurie Fincham was collaborating with the BBC on several loudspeaker-related projects, although there were some differences in philosophy, as well.
At Audionics (back in Oregon) we were foolish enough to apply for a license to manufacture a US version of the LS3/5a, and it took the British bureaucracy nearly 10 months to tell us no - I suspect they had never had such a request before. Meanwhile, our US competitors did the time-honored American thing, and made a copy of the LS3/5a while claiming the "research" was their own. (Edison flooded the USA with pirated copies of the Lumière Brothers movies, and never paid a dime in royalties.)
Returning to the subject at hand, I wonder how valid "fidelity to the original recording" can be. You can't actually hear the recording; it's just an electrical waveform (or a big pile of ones and zeroes), and not audible as such. Looking at the miles-long squiggly line isn't the same as hearing it. And we can really get lost in the weeds of chasing absolute phase, linear phase, and "time-alignment" if we attempt to replicate that waveform at the listener's ears. Audibility of phase - in the sense of requiring an acoustic waveform that is visibly similar to the electrical original - is still a matter of controversy. What you see on the scope screen isn't necessarily going to correlate with what you hear.
The only thing I can imagine that would be "faithful" to the original LP or CD would be replicating the mastering lab, or at least the monitoring speakers and room acoustic. That's the last point in the recording chain where the producer, musicians, and record company sign off on the final product. With synthetically created music (multitracked with tracks created at different times and places), that's probably as close as you can get to what the production team intended - since there never was a single acoustic original in the first place, but rather a montage of different performances edited into a single creation.
The equivalent in movies, of course, would be the screening room used by the director and producer. Standing on the movie set, you would see (and hear) something very different than what appears on the screen. The same applies to multitrack recordings; what you hear in the studio isn't very close to what appears on the final recording. Musical timbres are different, thanks to choice of mike position (in locations where you'd never listen acoustically), choice of microphone, equalization, compression, etc. etc. as well as whole parts of the recording being missing. The whole thing doesn't come together until final mixdown.
For those who aren't into classical recordings - which in a way are equivalent to filmed plays - you can probably go any way you want. There never was an "original", aside from what was heard in the mastering studio. Even so-called "live" recordings of rock concerts are not very close to what the audience heard - which is probably just as well, considering the appalling sound of many SR systems.
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The implication is to have a pair of speakers for each and every recording to address every recording error that ever has been made. That's just not practical. What's so wrong about having a standardized sound reproduction system that finally helps the art and not the ego of the audiophool?
Best, Markus
Understanding the problems with the source material is critical to understanding how valid sound quality preferences must be made and what constitutes an invalid experiment. When Lidia and I did our perceptual work we always used computer modifications of the original source material and had that original source material always available as a reference. Thus the "standard" was always quite clear (pun intended).
Consider the situation, as described above, where a certain set of loudspeakers makes a bad recording have "magical qualities". Now imagine this loudspeaker being used as the playback system in a recording studio. The audio engineer will happily go about creating a "bad recording" while thinking all the time that he is creating "musical magic". All that we can hope for in this situation is that the studio goes out of business! It won't do a bit of good to fire the mixing engineer because he was an innocent party to this calamity and the next engineer would almost certainly do the same thing. Unless he somehow realized how "flawed" the loudspeakers were!
While it has not been stated the root of the controversy here is the difference between the recording and the art. This is the musicians delemma and why musicians often make very bad sound quality evaluators. They ONLY hear the performance - the art - not the recording or the playback. A good friend of mine is a classical pianist with many CDs to his credit. He played one for me on my system that was truely an inspired performance of a solo piano "Rite of Spring" - the only recording of this score available anywhere. He, of course, asked me how I liked it. I said the performance was "magical", "too bad the recording was flawed". He was agast. "Where?" So I showed him. He listened and listend and said "there's no mistake there". He could not hear the clipping. I had to show him on Cool Edit how the waveform had been clipped by a particularly loud passage. And then he listened again and again. Finally after he ceased to hear his performance he heard the clipping. It was a revolation to him! He wondered how the audio engineer could have missed this. I simply said - "He probably didn't, but he was pretty sure that you wouldn't hear it."
Performances and playback are completely different and unrelated things and when they get mixed together only controversy and confusion can be found.
While I agree that complex acoustic music (ie, large scale classical) is very useful for evaluating speakers, I think there is a major caveat, similar to Earl's. If you weren't at the original performance, you can only guess what the recording 'should' sound like. Same applies with how it was mixed - without knowledge of how and why something was done in the process of making the recording, you're only guessing.
I think until speaker designers also learn the art of recording, we will just keep going in circles. I've been recording as a hobby the last few years, and I want to emphasize that microphones pick up sound very differently than our ears - what this means is that without some amount of manipulation, a recording will definitely not sound like the original event, and knowing how to do that is both skill and art. Using more than two microphones is also definitely part of the equation.
And my experience with musicians as arbiters of recording/playback quality is similar to Earl's.
I think until speaker designers also learn the art of recording, we will just keep going in circles. I've been recording as a hobby the last few years, and I want to emphasize that microphones pick up sound very differently than our ears - what this means is that without some amount of manipulation, a recording will definitely not sound like the original event, and knowing how to do that is both skill and art. Using more than two microphones is also definitely part of the equation.
And my experience with musicians as arbiters of recording/playback quality is similar to Earl's.
It's even worse. Toole calls it the "circle of confusion". Recording and mixing engineers also need to learn what stereophony and multichannel is capable of.
They are sitting in non-standardized listening rooms with non-standardized speakers. These widely varying recordings are reproduced in even less standardized rooms.
Best, Markus
Ends meet
If live-alike sound has to be appreciated , this means that the system able to reproduce it must introduce in the information the fuzzy-random chaotic perception of normal people in front of the event
So the program will be part of the system and will concur with all the equipment to make the air vibrate .
Conclusion : oh! No! They're coming !
If live-alike sound has to be appreciated , this means that the system able to reproduce it must introduce in the information the fuzzy-random chaotic perception of normal people in front of the event
So the program will be part of the system and will concur with all the equipment to make the air vibrate .
Conclusion : oh! No! They're coming !
Markus
What you say is only true of two channel CD. There are standards for film and I suspect this is why film has, in general, the better sound quality. My pianist friend actually noted this and once asked me why that was. he was learning.
If live-alike sound has to be appreciated , this means that the system able to reproduce it must introduce in the information the fuzzy-random chaotic perception of normal people in front of the event
So the program will be part of the system and will concur with all the equipment to make the air vibrate .
Conclusion : oh! No! They're coming !
WOW! Is that Martians Or what!? Should I be worried?
Its scarry how a serious discussion brings things out that that we haven;t seen before.
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Yeah, I was just going to bring Toole into this. If anyone here hasn't read his book, get it! It is very unique in this field.
The point I wanted to make is that recording is an art, and there may ultimately be no way to get a grasp on what variables matter most, both in recording and playback. The route Toole takes is different, and possibly more successful, while no easier. He (through Harman) arranged large scale, controlled, and long term listening sessions, under various circumstances. In his book, he presents his conclusions about what 'people find sounds best'. Ultimately, it comes down to on and off axis frequency response, and the quality/quantity of bass. I, for one, am very glad he shared his results, because it would be impossible for any one of us to do.
His conclusion is what has prompted me to take dipole speakers as far as possible, in terms of maintaining off axis regularity. I might add that he discounts non-linear distortion as an issue (with reason drawn from scientific studies), and has nothing to say about 'dynamics' associated with high efficiency drivers. The only nod he gives horns is for their ability to play loud. And of course, Toole isn't the final arbiter in things, but he does give ample evidence for his conclusions, more than anyone else I've seen so far. Get the book!
The point I wanted to make is that recording is an art, and there may ultimately be no way to get a grasp on what variables matter most, both in recording and playback. The route Toole takes is different, and possibly more successful, while no easier. He (through Harman) arranged large scale, controlled, and long term listening sessions, under various circumstances. In his book, he presents his conclusions about what 'people find sounds best'. Ultimately, it comes down to on and off axis frequency response, and the quality/quantity of bass. I, for one, am very glad he shared his results, because it would be impossible for any one of us to do.
His conclusion is what has prompted me to take dipole speakers as far as possible, in terms of maintaining off axis regularity. I might add that he discounts non-linear distortion as an issue (with reason drawn from scientific studies), and has nothing to say about 'dynamics' associated with high efficiency drivers. The only nod he gives horns is for their ability to play loud. And of course, Toole isn't the final arbiter in things, but he does give ample evidence for his conclusions, more than anyone else I've seen so far. Get the book!
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There's an old story about why all of George Szell's recordings (on CBS in the '60's) sounded so shrill. The story goes that Szell would take home the stereo master tapes and listen to them on his old and highly rolled off system. The next day, he would come back and tell the engineers to "liven them up"...don't know if it's a wive's tale or not.
Re: Deutch Gramophone being "reference quality"...from circa 1970 until present, they have been the biggest "multi-mikers" in the classical music industry (which is a shame, given their catalog). Philips and CBS have been a distant 2nd, although CBS has done a better job of putting Humpty-Dumpty back together. Interestingly, Decca (London) and EMI (Angel/Capital) kept using 4 channel into the early to mid '70's ( in Europe), which might explain why they produced, on average, more natural sounding recordings than DG, Philips, et.al.. In the US, RCA made the more natural and dynamic sounding recordings(to me).
...and then there is the "Mercury Sound" from circa 1954-1965 (stereo). They recorded in 3 channels using 3 omni mic's (as did Everest), with no limiting during the mastering process. RCA also started out with no limiting, but had such a high rate of returned ..."defective" ...records, that they soon started compressing their recordings. If, by chance, you happen to own an original uncompressed RCA LP in mint condition, you could put it on the market and use the proceeds to buy a pair of Earl's speakers. Back to Mercury... they are a matter of taste, but the remastered LP's and CD's from the '90's will test any system for midband dynamics. I find some of them a little "bright".
Anyway, DG is the furthest thing from "reference" that I could possibly think of. They never met a highlight mic that they didn't like.
Re: Deutch Gramophone being "reference quality"...from circa 1970 until present, they have been the biggest "multi-mikers" in the classical music industry (which is a shame, given their catalog). Philips and CBS have been a distant 2nd, although CBS has done a better job of putting Humpty-Dumpty back together. Interestingly, Decca (London) and EMI (Angel/Capital) kept using 4 channel into the early to mid '70's ( in Europe), which might explain why they produced, on average, more natural sounding recordings than DG, Philips, et.al.. In the US, RCA made the more natural and dynamic sounding recordings(to me).
...and then there is the "Mercury Sound" from circa 1954-1965 (stereo). They recorded in 3 channels using 3 omni mic's (as did Everest), with no limiting during the mastering process. RCA also started out with no limiting, but had such a high rate of returned ..."defective" ...records, that they soon started compressing their recordings. If, by chance, you happen to own an original uncompressed RCA LP in mint condition, you could put it on the market and use the proceeds to buy a pair of Earl's speakers. Back to Mercury... they are a matter of taste, but the remastered LP's and CD's from the '90's will test any system for midband dynamics. I find some of them a little "bright".
Anyway, DG is the furthest thing from "reference" that I could possibly think of. They never met a highlight mic that they didn't like.
While I agree with Floyd on 90% of his book there are two key areas that I object to. First is his use of "preference" as a judgement. One might get different results if "accuracy" were used as a criteria, but thats far more difficult to test and doesn't help the "mother company" sell speakers. Second is that he discounts the impact of very early reflections (and also dynamics as you correctly state) which is why he can discount the use of waveguides and compression drivers. If he were to take a different approach to the questions being asked he might come to the same conclusions that I have. My speakers meet all of his criteria, except that I add one or two that he doesn't have and that is the supression of very early reflections and diffraction as inhibiting good localization and very low transient thermal modulation.
So in a sense I don't reject anything that Floyd says, I just add a couple that he doesn't consider.
I wish that would be true. While there are standards for film mixes there are none (or too many) for DVD/Blu-ray remixes. Recently visited a studio that did the DVD remixes for some of the more well known movies without any bass management.
Furthermore standards for film are pretty basic. They should be far more specific (Reflection patterns, speaker directivity, frequency dependent reverberation times, etc.).
Nice (basic) reading from Chris Kyriakakis (Audyssey) on "Preference":
http://www.audyssey.com/blog/2009/05/reference-vs-preference/
Best, Markus
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And that's as it should be. Some people have full-range speakers that can handle the bass and some have 'small' speakers that can't. Bass management (sending bass from small speakers to the sub) is something that should be done on playback, not when the tracks are being mixed.
Oh dear, oh dear. You just don't get it at all, do you? Such a pity. But understandable - because it's unusual.
A really great system can reveal enough information buried in a recording to bring across the emotion and soul of that lie buried beneath technique. It's isn't about enhancing the recording, it's about revealing what is already there. And such a system tends to put the noises, clicks, pops, hiss, buzzes and distortions in another space. You can hear them clearly, but they just don't bother you much, as they don't seem part of the music (they aren't, you know). A system like that will make good recording sound spectacular. But this must be something you've never experienced, or you would certainly not disdain it. It really is NOT a bad thing - it's delightful.
The better my system gets, they fewer "unlistenable" recordings I find. The bad recordings are not magically turned into great ones - it's just that the bad parts become so much less objectionable. The bad is still there, it just doesn't get in the way any more.
But no reason to beat the poor dead horse. If you've never heard it, it may be too hard to believe. As for me, I'm happy to know that there is real treasure buried in many sub-par recordings. Getting it out isn't a goal, it's a result of a great system. A surprising result. For those who don't like that sort of thing - OK. There are plenty of good recordings available. Enjoy them! ( I know I do).