Sound Quality Vs. Measurements

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Frank, you know your music.
Played to death on HiFi shows when it came out.
After a diet of over 20 years i like it a lot again.
Played it on my system the other day.
It sounded .... well, much better then my memory, so my system i have now does it better justice then what i used in it´s day.
I hear more details, i hear more space, i hear more dynamics, tonal balance is more natural...
YES, we had progress i think although many will deny it.
And it is not because amplifiers have lower distortion now.
I think we just master the puzzle better.
picking up the pieces and putting them together.
That is true for vinyl too.
My table sounds much better then the one i had 30 years ago.
Was no slouch either.
Goldmund Studio, Fidelity Research FR65 silver, EMT Van den Hul.
 
Trash the LP - well, what I mean is if you have the live version the "littleness" of the vinyl rendition is not really worth going to - they've captured a huge space in the second clip ... this is the sort of recording that deserves a setup capable of those 132dB peaks I've mentioned - arena sound in the best sense of the term ...

Not LP, its a CD player :rolleyes: which skips on the dynamics and i have both versions ....




Yeah 132dB huh Franky ...
 
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Even here i disagree :Echoic memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
You can hear a recordings " over and over again " and that is what i do.
Must have heard " Jazz at the Pawnshop " a 1000nd times.
I know every glass and every cigarette.

Music-related memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Sloboda, Hermelin and O'Connor (1985) discussed a patient, NP, who was able to memorize very complex musical pieces after hearing them three or four times. NP's performance exceeded that of experts with very high IQ's. However, his performance on other memory tasks was average for a person with an IQ in his range. They used NP to suggest that high IQ is not needed for the skill of musical memorization and in fact, other factors must be influencing this performance".
 
The fun bit for me, is that an album I haven't heard in ages can be put on, starting at a random track - and I "know" at the end of the track how the next track begins ... I wouldn't have a clue what its name is, etc - but my (human) system is triggering on the pattern of the end of the track, and the expected beginning of the next ... interesting, :) ...
 
This is interesting as well

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music-related_memory#Koelsch.27s_model

"Music stimuli are perceived in a successive timeline, breaking down the auditory input into different characteristics and meaning.

At this point, features involving pitch height, chroma, timbre, intensity and roughness are extracted. This occurs about at about 10-100ms"

I wonder how these relate to

the next simplicity_iriver

"The five criteria of Hi-Fi audio

- THD+N
- SNR
- Crosstalk
- Frequency Response
- Jitter"


Let's see, they left out slew rate, settling time, phase, TIM, IMD, mA output, capacitance drive, EMI / RFI shielding, PSRR, EMR......

what else

=p
 
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Frank, you know your music.
Played to death on HiFi shows when it came out.
After a diet of over 20 years i like it a lot again.
Played it on my system the other day.
It sounded .... well, much better then my memory, so my system i have now does it better justice then what i used in it´s day.
I hear more details, i hear more space, i hear more dynamics, tonal balance is more natural...
YES, we had progress i think although many will deny it.
And it is not because amplifiers have lower distortion now.
I think we just master the puzzle better.
picking up the pieces and putting them together.
That is true for vinyl too.
My table sounds much better then the one i had 30 years ago.
Was no slouch either.
Goldmund Studio, Fidelity Research FR65 silver, EMT Van den Hul.

In xovers , do you parallel multiple caps to obtain value or see no value in doing so ..?
 
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Joined 2002
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Belafonte at Carnegie Hall does not distort on my system. Neither vinyl, nor CD.
It is one of the most " real " sounding recordings ever made.
I talked about the phenomenon of " focus " before.
What is that ?
I experience it particular with voices.
There seem to be an "edge" where the voice ends and the surrounding "air" begins.
The most striking example i found is this song :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Ci1VrvD74
Ignore the advertising.
OK, this is on You Tube so the quality is compromised.
When you want to apreciate it in full glory fetch the album or beg, steal or borrow the CD.
YES; the effect is on the CD too.

Joachim,

This an other posts by you do reinforce my opinion that first and foremost in sound quality is the original performance and how it is recorded/mastered.
If I hear a report like 'the LP is great but the CD sucks' or vice versa I am pretty convinced (but have no hard proof) that it is because the CD version is a 'remastered/improved' version of the original LP/tape master. This is also based on several personal experiences.

Jan
 
Mostly i do not parallel.
Sometimes i can not avoid it though.
For example i need a 100uF foil for the midrange and there are only 47uF of that particular type.
When i parallel i try to use the same values. Say make a 9.9uF from 3 x 3.3uF.
And then i do the bypass trick on the tweeter.

Ok, so in actuality you favor one large value as oppose to 3 smaller values , i do the tweeter setup the same , always have..



..
 
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Joachim,

This an other posts by you do reinforce my opinion that first and foremost in sound quality is the original performance and how it is recorded/mastered.
If I hear a report like 'the LP is great but the CD sucks' or vice versa I am pretty convinced (but have no hard proof) that it is because the CD version is a 'remastered/improved' version of the original LP/tape master. This is also based on several personal experiences.

Jan

Remastered new CD's sound worse to me than the original CD .....
 
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Joined 2002
Paid Member
I've heard there's some math in music, from Pythagoras to...

There was Aristoxenus too, exploring the practical side (how the musicians/audience sensed the music) rather than the theoretical side that Pythagorians worked on.

"The Harmonics of Aristoxenus"
https://ia600204.us.archive.org/17/items/aristoxenouharmo00arisuoft/aristoxenouharmo00arisuoft.pdf


3 years later Fiat realized how bad the steel was, it rusts from the inside.

Nigel
The story was a bit different.
It wasn’t the steel.
It was some deliberate organized idiotic action (*), combined with low-almost non existent- quality control.
Things changed a lot ever since.

This is also based on several personal experiences.

You can add me to the list.

George
(*)You can’t think of it unless you have lived southern of Rome.
 
You can not do better then what is on the record, CD, Vinyl, High Res or whatever.
I use this effect all the time on shows playing " good " sounding material.
Especially for Vinyl there are huge diffences in the quality of the playback equipment.
Many here may have never heard what is possible.
Even when they own an expensive deck, it may not be well setup and adjusted.
That is always with physical equipment.
I use a microscope and a scope to setup my table.
I also adjust for speed with an FFT analyser.
Found that some recordings are " faster " cut then others.
The lathes are not always running on exact 33 1/3.
By the way i am happy with the sound of my Cd player.
A 20 year old Forsell Air refference.
I apreciate the cleanness and the speed stability.
And now it comes ( a new scandal ) :
On the High Resoltion Forum ( Bob Katz, Malcolm Hawksford and such ) we found that CD
as an END PRODUCT is aurally transparent, correctly dithered and noise shaped.
I would wish it had 96kHz sampling rate though to not get in trouble with the various anti aliasing filters. I can not hear higher then 16kHz though.
To get the 16 Bit on the CD is near impossible ( it starts with noise in the microphones plus the various equalizers and copressors, etc. ) , so in the studio high resolution
( Bit depth say 24Bit or higher ) is mandatory.
Some years ago we measured around 300 CD´s and only 2 had 14 Bit, the best we found.
How high the sampling rate should be to make a master is not that clear.
I whould say multiples of 44KHz to avoid truncation problems.
 
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And now it comes ( a new scandal ) :
On the High Resoltion Forum ( Bob Katz, Malcolm Hawsford and such ) we found that CD
as an END PRODUCT is aurally transparent, correctly dithered and noise shaped.
I would wish it had 96kHz sampling rate though to not get in trouble with the various anti aliasing filters. I can not hear higher then 16kHz though.
To get the 16 Bit on the CD is near impossible ( it starts with noise in the microphones plus the various equalizers and copressors, etc. ) , so in the studio high resolution
( Bit depth say 24Bit or higher ) is mandatory.
Scandal? I've never had a problem with Red Book - I've always scratched my head about the hulabaloo with hi res, it never made sense to me, and my own experiments indicated zero problems with 44.1/16. Plenty of problems with deficient playback, engineering not up to scratch - but that's a very different issue ...

Definitely 24 bit in the studio though, so gross manipulation doesn't cause problems.
 
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