The SOURCE is THE Problem?? "souless sound"?

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-->FrankWW, perhaps so. However my "premise" (as SY calls it) 😀 is that if recorded & played back it sounds not quite as good as "live" be that decorrelated or not.

Please explain what you mean by decorrelated?
As in, how is a choral piece correlated and crickets (en masse) or fogs, birds decorrelated??

Stereopile test CD provides correlated and decorrelated pink noise. That I understand. Left and right channels bear no direct relationship.

_-_-bear
 
Studer consoles had correlation meters to check for mono compatibility. In setting up a mic system, you attempted to avoid out of phase components that would cancel in mono. A de-correlated signal contains only phase reversed signals on each channel. If you sum to mono, you get no output. I do not know how much more explanation would help. Regards.
 
I suspect the reason that "perfect " audio with no coloration, distortion whatsoever sounds cold or lifeless is due to our built in psycho acoustics prefers "colored" sound.

I build guitars as well as hi fi gear. Many in the Lutherie world have tried building a accurate, uniform flat frequency response instrument using mechanical impedance matching techniques. it has been done in the Kasha -Schneider guitar. Despite achieving the above goals most feel that these instruments sound uninteresting and sterile lacking in warmth. Our ears seem to prefer lack of linearity and want overtones in the sound.

Perhaps this is part of our preferences with audio gear. Perhaps our psychoacoustic system expects and prefers a certain lack of perfection in all sound including guitars and high end audio

IMHO

David
 
I'm aiming to have something released by year end.

@bear- saw Double Trouble a few months ago, backing Oz Noy (an amazing guitarist). A little bar, about three times the size of my living room.


With soul or souless🙂 .......ohhh, please feel free to include any speaker busting dynamics ...Waiver already signed .....😀

I suspect the reason that "perfect " audio with no coloration, distortion whatsoever sounds cold or lifeless is due to our built in psycho acoustics prefers "colored" sound.

I build guitars as well as hi fi gear. Many in the Lutherie world have tried building a accurate, uniform flat frequency response instrument using mechanical impedance matching techniques. it has been done in the Kasha -Schneider guitar. Despite achieving the above goals most feel that these instruments sound uninteresting and sterile lacking in warmth. Our ears seem to prefer lack of linearity and want overtones in the sound.

Perhaps this is part of our preferences with audio gear. Perhaps our psychoacoustic system expects and prefers a certain lack of perfection in all sound including guitars and high end audio

IMHO

David

Human Psyche wrong or the science ..... ?
 
Since we cannot change our psychoacoustic system any more than we can change our taste buds or sense of smell, I hate to say it but I think science or at least the belief that ultra accurate pure flat distortionless sound is what we should crave is mistaken. We will never have the best or ideal amp or source any more than we can have the only best wine or chocolate cake.

The charm is in the trying to get there though. So... I press on building my ideal system

IMHO
 
aw: Sorry to disappoint, but no speaker-busters. Natural acoustic instruments and voices, recorded with single point crossed figure 8 miking and minimal processing. No waiver needed, but those accustomed to Tang will be encountering fresh-squeezed orange juice and may or may not like it.😀

Some of it is twangy.
 
Since we cannot change our psychoacoustic system any more than we can change our taste buds or sense of smell, I hate to say it but I think science or at least the belief that ultra accurate pure flat distortionless sound is what we should crave is mistaken. We will never have the best or ideal amp or source any more than we can have the only best wine or chocolate cake.

The charm is in the trying to get there though. So... I press on building my ideal system

IMHO

I think it's the way we measure that is the issue. Until we can start measuring hi-fi gear dynamically we cannot begin to compare it to the human hearing system....


my 2 cents ..... 🙂
 
-->FrankWW, perhaps so. However my "premise" (as SY calls it) 😀 is that if recorded & played back it sounds not quite as good as "live" be that decorrelated or not.

Please explain what you mean by decorrelated?
As in, how is a choral piece correlated and crickets (en masse) or fogs, birds decorrelated??

Stereopile test CD provides correlated and decorrelated pink noise. That I understand. Left and right channels bear no direct relationship.

_-_-bear

Well, for Stuart it's a premise, but if
I understand you right, for you it's report of an experience, and as such, may be viewed as an empirical thing.

In a room after some reflections sounds tend to become decorrelated from their original signal - out of phase, much diminished amplitude, coming from different direction.

The bigger the room the greater the decorrelation our hearing might detect.

The outdoors is the biggest room.

The sounds generated outdoors by animals and human choruses carry the greatest possible variety of reverberations and delays possible (decorrelated sound).

Theoretically and practically, the variety is infinite ranging from from quite loud to the edge of audibility and delays up to hundreds of milliseconds.

The live feed from outdoors sounds fresh and enveloping because it carries a very large amount of this variety.

If a recording of this same feed doesn't sound as fresh and enveloping, then it has filtered some components

Here's a paper by Griesiger in which he examines sensation of envelopment in concert halls and how we perceive it. The conditions he discovers are already in existence for us outdoors.

And if we get lucky, or are skillful, we record enough of these conditions that the outdoor sound gets reproduced indoors, or at least enough of them do that we have the illusion it's outdoor sound come indoors.

http://www.davidgriesinger.com/objmeas.pdf

Here's a paper by Kendal covering similar territory

http://www.garykendall.net/papers/Decorrelation1995.pdf

(Where have the smilies gone?)
 
Studer consoles had correlation meters to check for mono compatibility. In setting up a mic system, you attempted to avoid out of phase components that would cancel in mono. A de-correlated signal contains only phase reversed signals on each channel. If you sum to mono, you get no output. I do not know how much more explanation would help. Regards.


decorrelated sound will sum to nothing in mono???

That definition I think leaves us short of the mark. All I need to do is to flip the phase of one channel and then sum them...

I'll read the links suggested previous to this post and try to see what this is really all about. Seems like it is merely the lack of short reverb times, or else the existence of long reverb times or some combination of the two. Outside is NOT devoid of reflections or reverberations, fwiw. Well maybe in a desert?
Or out on the Great Plains of the US in a wheat field??

Regardless, the idea is simply that a live feed seems to sound "better" than the recorded version of the same thing. Correlated sound or not. I merely suggested an "easy way" for folks at home to try the same thing without having to do very much that is difficult or unusual.

Analtoliy, I will have to have a download and listen...

_-_-bear
 
If one channel is completely decorrelated from the other (completely out of phase) then a summation of the two channels equals=0. I agree this has nothing to do with whether a live feed sounds different from a recorded one. However, someone brought in correlated sound thus my reply. Most stereo recordings are a combination of correlated and decorrelated sound, due to the lack of exact coincidence between the mic capsules, so I think this is spurious to the question.
 
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