Sometimes a person can reach a point where they seek out some distortions.
I went back to tubes because much of my favourite music is poorly recorded and could use a little softening.
Also, as a byproduct of using hearing protection at work and public transit, I can still hear 20,000 hz, albeit down 5db. On most tweeters I don't like it and roll it off a little further .
I cannot abide distortions around 4 kilohertz either; therefore the speakers I make for my own use are liberally dipped around there.
I'm old enough now to feel unashamed to say ,Hi, I'm Mitchell, and sometimes I enjoy coloured sound.
But I do agree that for accurate equipment, audio is like my calculations for laying out a highrise slab-
Numbers don't lie- people do.
Don't worry, you're not alone. A side note (which this topic seems great for) i took a part time job in a bar recently to help fund my studies. A very hip bar in central london. Imagine my surprise to find that not only did the 'discretionary service charge' that appeared on the bill NOT go to me, apparently it's standard industry practice to do so. Obviously the owner of the company is expanding rapidly and making lots of money... hell, he even has his own gordon-ramsay wanna be TV show.
Think it's the equivalent of defrauding your customers in my opinion, made me sick. So now I want to always tell them to take the service charge off the bill and leave a cash tip, but my wife says that's too awkward.
Woe is me.
Fortunately, that is not the truth ... the music is not poorly recorded, the problem is that the replay mechanism is not good enough. If you can hear the unpleasantness in the high frequencies it's because too much distortion is being added via the playback chain ...
I can say this because I've been through the exercise over and over again, hearing one of those 'terrible' recordings come to life, with all the high frequency information fully intact - creating a glorious, dynamic listening experience. And the only thing that changed was to improve the integrity of the playback chain, while completely ignoring any sort of standard measuring regime ...
The usual measurements, ways of measuring, tell one almost nothing about anything useful about how the gear performs, they serve to be convenient touchstones of basic integrity., and that's about it. How to really assess what's going on is to be prepared to wind up the volume control and use your ears - tells one a massive amount of information in a few seconds ...
fas42. Unfortunately I think it is the truth. I have never heard a system that gives me shivers on all recordings.
The sound can be screwed up in the recording process just as easily as in the playback process. I've done recordings myself of acoustic musicians, and been surprised when my amateur recordings sounded significantly better than many professional recordings. Both sides have some serious compromises to make. It's all about tradeoffs. Some studio engineers are much better than others.
How a speaker interacts with room acoustics is usually the weakest link in a playback system IMO. Consistancy of dispersion over frequency is a bigger deal than most people realize.
How a speaker interacts with room acoustics is usually the weakest link in a playback system IMO. Consistancy of dispersion over frequency is a bigger deal than most people realize.
Why you haven't is because it's very hard, fiddly, at the moment, to get everything right, to make it happen. IME the more expensive the system, usually the worse it is in bringing the required quality to the table, because it tends to magnify the remaining problems - so far I've only found dedicated tweaking and optimising to be good enough to get the SQ to the required level - you know you're there when every recording does do the "shivers" thing ...
Pano has had good experience in chasing this behaviour - and also knows how difficult it is to nail it, whenever you want it ...
And I've found the opposite - when a system is firing then the room acoustics become irrelevant, because the ear/brain is able to easily do all the processing needed to 'adjust' the subjective take, to suit ..
Every recording? Please, some recordings are crap and should come across as so, if not then your playback devices are not faithful to the recording.
Okay ... step 1: how do you know the recording is "crap" - because there is a sticker on it saying so, or because all your audio mates say so, or ...? If it's because every time you hear it if never sounds good, how do you do know that the fault is in the recording, versus the playback systems?
Adding distortion of any type can be done per person per recording. There is no reason to misrepresent a product. An amplifiers job is to amplify, a processors job is to modify the signal. Tube amps are not snake oil, but asserting that they sound better than a straight wire with gain globally is. A lot of guys like mr work very hard to strike a median balance of spectra and harmonics, globally adding distortion via bad tube amps virtually assures that some records will sound terrible. And yep, there is a paradox with engineers, by the time we know what we are doing we cant hear 20k (-:
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If it strays from the great reference in the sky it is going to be non optimal. Floyd Toole for basics here. Should be required reading in grade school. (-:
So Toole has a list of 'good', and 'bad' recordings - and this is authorative ... ?
Regarding adding distortion, I hear it's pretty common practice in studios to run the signal through some wobbly analogue processing, to give it that soothing, warm, analogue sound ... 😉
Regarding adding distortion, I hear it's pretty common practice in studios to run the signal through some wobbly analogue processing, to give it that soothing, warm, analogue sound ... 😉
Nope stick to your guns this is not off topic either, its the same monster. Awkward......You Brits...... "Pardon me Nigel, Terribly sorry to seem forward, but was that my wife Fiona you were with last night?" (-:
Hell i can give you my list, but of course he does for himself. And oh yes, we do certainly add distortion in many situations, after we add it it is not distortion, it is signal. This is why you should not add it at home globally if you want all of your stuff to have the best cgance of being what the artist intended. I used tube preamps today in fact, Soooo I wanted 3% distortion, (just a ref point here) now you want to globally add 5% more....Well now we have a mess, just generalities, but this is the point.
Hmmm, can't find any references to a list of recordings that Toole 'approves, and disapproves' of. But, I like his 'Circle of Confusion' - people judge recordings by listening to speakers, systems that colour the reproduction, and judge the quality by what they hear - there is no reference ....
I note he focuses on FR - so the answer therefore to improving SQ is to DSP what you have. Six speakers, get a reference recording, DSP that to give 6 versions, which when played over matching speakers will demonstrate identical FRs, to within whatever dB margin you want. In a DBT then no-one will be able to distinguish the speakers - is that the idea?
I note he focuses on FR - so the answer therefore to improving SQ is to DSP what you have. Six speakers, get a reference recording, DSP that to give 6 versions, which when played over matching speakers will demonstrate identical FRs, to within whatever dB margin you want. In a DBT then no-one will be able to distinguish the speakers - is that the idea?
Of course we wont find his list.
Mine, a very few
Diana Krall, live in paris. All of them really
Dave Matthews, any CLA mixed.
Norah Jones, Come Away.
All of the Donald Fagen stuff and this has the eztremes of the spectra, but Its all within range +-
Zac Brown. (The iast two)
Any of the Joe Lavano on Blue Note.
Early Dr. Dre stuff.
Mine, a very few
Diana Krall, live in paris. All of them really
Dave Matthews, any CLA mixed.
Norah Jones, Come Away.
All of the Donald Fagen stuff and this has the eztremes of the spectra, but Its all within range +-
Zac Brown. (The iast two)
Any of the Joe Lavano on Blue Note.
Early Dr. Dre stuff.
To me the goal is the consumer hears what the artist approves of. Anything less than that is shakey ground.
@Frank.
If your speakers have enough dynamic range they can be eqed into submission with the tools we have now. Or you could plug in a Bybee and hear what it sounds like in a quantum universe where you have big horn speakers, that apparently works for some of us.
If your speakers have enough dynamic range they can be eqed into submission with the tools we have now. Or you could plug in a Bybee and hear what it sounds like in a quantum universe where you have big horn speakers, that apparently works for some of us.
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