John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II

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But this is all 2 channel talk. Do you think 5.1 or 7.1 doesn't add to the party?

5.1 or 7.1 or ... channels is sooo 20th century. The new paradigm is Object Oriented Audio. Audio Objects are like little sound bites or clips, short in length, like the fall of a tree or a fragment of dialog or a 5-sec section of a musical performance. In the mixing room, all objects are positioned in space (X- Y- Z- position), loudness, and trajectory and speed of movement. All objects are then stitched together in a time-continuous performance, and rendered in the listening space.

That rendering can be done with say 5 or 6 speakers in a residential listening room, but also with say 60 speakers in a cinema room. So the rendering system is totally decoupled from the source material, and you can no longer speak of 'how many channels'. This is what is going on at the cutting edge of audio - things like Aura-3D and Dolby Atmos. Conventional 2-channel stereo will become the crystal AM radio of modern sound reproduction :mad:

Jan
 
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No one of golden eared gurus will participate. There will be tons of excuses and few brute force arguments ("I don't have to prove anything; I trust my ears!") :)

That does unfortunately seem to be the way of things. Which is a shame because much can be learnt from listening to these kind of things. Its not just a case of having to put these in order, its about trying to describe what you hear, what you don't like. There is never a right and wrong in all this, just an opportunity to learn and be honest.

(I suspect many might have listened but are just nervous of either voting or describing what has been heard. Don't be ! Its the only way to move forward and to ultimately gauge where any limits might start occurring).
 
No one of golden eared gurus will participate. There will be tons of excuses and few brute force arguments ("I don't have to prove anything; I trust my ears!") :)

Vuki, a little more precise, please - who are the "golden ear gurus"?

I trus my ears ionly, but I don't think of myself as golden eared, and I do not try to judge anyone's taste or press my own agenda. My ears are my reference for myself only, period.

I did not listen to Mooly's samples simply because at this time, my system is being recomposed, so to speak. I did mark the message though, and as soon as I have it put together once more, I will listen because I am interested. And yes, I don't have to prove anything because I am not proposing anything.

ON this thread, we have not yet estabilished even the basic goal posts, like for example what is the threshold of THD and IM audibilty, or what is to be considered the borderline between ragular and more efficient speakers. Thuis alone makes any technical discussion VERY hard because we have no generally accepted values, so everyone takes his own values as referent. An impossible situation.
 
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AND, just what am I supposed to listen to? IF I am not set up for digital playback from the internet?

Well I would say try it with what you have got. Just about any PC will play these via headphones. Even a result of hearing 'no difference' is a valid result as long as we know the playback set up.

The only way I have to play these in their native format is via a PC and headphones. My Marantz SA-CD Pearl Lite does have a USB input but wont play FLAC.

Convert them to WAV and burn a CDR. You might just say, you know what, I can tell there is something different between these...
 
Agreed, Mooly. I haven't given it a go yet simply because my pure class A, dual mono headphone amps is currently on loan to a friend, and I want to use it because it removes doubts about headphone drive as such, it is extremely transparent, though not as hard pushed into class A as John's. As soon as I get it back, in a day or two, I will try those samples out for my own curiosit'y sake.

I'll try both "as is", meaning sound card drive of the amp, and via the NAD, if possible. Makes for an interesting test indeed.
 
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5.1 or 7.1 or ... channels is sooo 20th century. The new paradigm is Object Oriented Audio.

Jan

I did put a paragraph on Atmos and how it would seem ideal for Pan Potted Pop (PPP) and how it would open up a whole load of new capabilities but wanted to stay with about 20 years old to keep the oldies happy. I guess the iphone and headphone market is the focus for the PPP producers now so they would not be interested in this. So we just have to wait for object oriented binaural, which I am sure someone at dolby is trying to crack.
 
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I did put a paragraph on Atmos and how it would seem ideal for Pan Potted Pop (PPP) and how it would open up a whole load of new capabilities but wanted to stay with about 20 years old to keep the oldies happy. I guess the iphone and headphone market is the focus for the PPP producers now so they would not be interested in this. So we just have to wait for object oriented binaural, which I am sure someone at dolby is trying to crack.

I was told that Object Oriented Audio for mobile renderers is almost upon us.
The main difficulty is the extra battery drain - users are very sensitive to battery life in their 'phones and tablets.

Jan
 
5.1 or 7.1 or ... channels is sooo 20th century. The new paradigm is Object Oriented Audio. Audio Objects are like little sound bites or clips, short in length, like the fall of a tree or a fragment of dialog or a 5-sec section of a musical performance. In the mixing room, all objects are positioned in space (X- Y- Z- position), loudness, and trajectory and speed of movement. All objects are then stitched together in a time-continuous performance, and rendered in the listening space.

That rendering can be done with say 5 or 6 speakers in a residential listening room, but also with say 60 speakers in a cinema room. So the rendering system is totally decoupled from the source material, and you can no longer speak of 'how many channels'. This is what is going on at the cutting edge of audio - things like Aura-3D and Dolby Atmos. Conventional 2-channel stereo will become the crystal AM radio of modern sound reproduction :mad:

Jan

Ahhh... been done before 1958, right near you. You see nothing is new. BTW I love how Brussels in particular still embraces the extremes in live performance "music".

Poème électronique - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
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The Acousmonium is the sound diffusion system designed in 1974 by Francois Bayle and used originally by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales at the Maison de Radio France. It consists of 80 loudspeakers of differing size and shape, and was designed for tape playback. As Bayle wrote in a CD sleeve note in 1993, it was

“ Another utopia, devoted to pure "listening" … as a penetrable "projection area", arranged with a view to immersion in sound, to spatialised polyphony, which is articulated and directed. ”
 
DSP is the 2k+ substitute dirty word for tone-control.

(all favor a decent mind fck, few are willing to admit it)

Offered for your amusement. The lower is one setting on a standard parametric equalizer (12KHz at 48kHz sampling rate) vs the exact analog equivalent using a standard IIR cookbook formula. To be fair the author has added a correction (years later) on top but I have not seen anyone implement it.
 

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Offered for your amusement. The lower is one setting on a standard parametric equalizer (12KHz at 48kHz sampling rate) vs the exact analog equivalent using a standard IIR cookbook formula. To be fair the author has added a correction (years later) on top but I have not seen anyone implement it.

You mean digital equivalent?
 
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