There are lucky music lovers out there who are happy with 'good enough' and just get on with enjoying it. For me due to limited disposable income I have a trade off. Do I spend money upgrading the system or buy more music? These days music wins. Now if I ever get to the point where the room is no longer the controlling factor I might just go on a splurge, but that is a while away.
Bill, I understand entirely. The reason I started out with the least expensive gear for which the specs looked reasonable enough was due to limited disposable income. The better stuff I acquired later was spread out over time and always financially painful. I forwent other things such as vacations, something newer than a 20 year old car, etc. However, I knew the better pieces I bought were like money in the bank, and would either lose value very slowly, or possibly gain value eventually. So, I could always sell them if needed.
Later, before I retired, there was a period I might have indulged more freely, but I didn't. A lifetime of living frugally left me with an aversion to wasting money.
If it helps to understand, I raised three children by myself, two of which developed severe disabilities and required much more from me that healthy children would have, all the while holding down a full time job, and paying for housing in Silicon Valley. My job was a good one, but there was very little in the way of excess resources.
Anyway, as it turned out I didn't have to sell my few little treasures, but if I had needed to the DAC-1 would have been amongst the very last to go. When my hearing was better than it is now, and after I found out what hearing music clearly was like, I would not have been happy listening without it. It would have been almost analogous to giving up my eyeglasses, okay not really quite that, but more like going back to an old eyeglass prescription that no longer worked very well.
Later, before I retired, there was a period I might have indulged more freely, but I didn't. A lifetime of living frugally left me with an aversion to wasting money.
If it helps to understand, I raised three children by myself, two of which developed severe disabilities and required much more from me that healthy children would have, all the while holding down a full time job, and paying for housing in Silicon Valley. My job was a good one, but there was very little in the way of excess resources.
Anyway, as it turned out I didn't have to sell my few little treasures, but if I had needed to the DAC-1 would have been amongst the very last to go. When my hearing was better than it is now, and after I found out what hearing music clearly was like, I would not have been happy listening without it. It would have been almost analogous to giving up my eyeglasses, okay not really quite that, but more like going back to an old eyeglass prescription that no longer worked very well.
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I've always liked the look of those Wavacs, so thanks for that link. Now I can stop saving up! 😀
And I have to rely on listening, I'm getting old and senile! But my ears appear to holding up better than my brain. 😕
I should also note I am a recovering audiophile. 🙂 The 5.3 children make sure spare cash will be limited for at least until I'm 60!
A DAC-1 (around £450 second hand depending on options) is something I could consider saving for. But I would need at least 2 of them for the active X-over. Now this gives the interesting trade off. Is an optimised active setup with suboptimal DACs better than a super duper DAC but all the drawbacks of passive speakers (answer: it's complicated)
Ref glasses I held off with poor prescription for about 4 years. I used to wear contacts but I no longer had the comfort so only really used them for driving*. And as happens to many of us I now need varifocals. they really are freaky until you have reprogrammed the way you look at things. But its nice to be able to see again.
*The contact prescription gave me wonderful distance vision, but the dashboard was out of focus.
Ref glasses I held off with poor prescription for about 4 years. I used to wear contacts but I no longer had the comfort so only really used them for driving*. And as happens to many of us I now need varifocals. they really are freaky until you have reprogrammed the way you look at things. But its nice to be able to see again.
*The contact prescription gave me wonderful distance vision, but the dashboard was out of focus.
No. You can obtain objective facts about subjective experiences. There is a whole body of knowledge on experimental design and statistics to do just that. (Where is SY when we need him?)Bigun said:
You may or may not be enough like me to for it to matter to you. I would suggest maybe getting one and using it as a headphone amp with some good cans or earbuds, and see what you think. If you it first you don't notice much, you could try focusing on the details of different parts of music just for awhile with some good CDs to exercise your possibly lazy ears a little. Steely Dan's Aja works well for many. After that forget about it and just listen for enjoyment. If you don't think it makes a big difference for you, you can probably sell it for about what you paid.
I expect you will find you do like it however, but on the off chance you don't, it doesn't hurt to have a backup plan.
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Oh I know I would like it. It's well Engineered, no marketing flooby and measures as good as you can get. I am preconditioned to like it 🙂.
Sadly only have Aja on vinyl tho 🙂
Sadly only have Aja on vinyl tho 🙂
The problem starts with the fact that in most cases nobody (ok maybe except the folks that produce music ) knows what the original did sound like.
Beside the basic point that a piano should sound like a piano but not like a harp.
As a physical definition imo "high fidelity" should mean "reproduction of the original soundfield" but that is still a long way to go (binaural reproduction is quite near "high fidelity" as it tries to approximate the perceived soundfield means in the ear channel).
Everything else isn´t clearly defined as it relies not only on technical parameters but on listeners illusionary capabilities as well.
Even at the production level people are not committed to the same idea of "reproduction/high fidelity" ; at least i don´t know about a common standard that defines what "high fidelity" really means (in numbers) for the chain beginning at the recording to reproduction in a listeners home.
There a several approaches to narrow the choice of variables (and there range) but nothing is really widely accepted.
And even if a proposal would be accepted, what about all the recordings made before that date?
It was not cool to have glasses in the 50's so I memorized the eye chart. E F P T O Z L P D E F. IIRC (might have a transpose in the third row).
Maybe the idea would be that Hi-Fi reproduction systems (and listening room characteristics) should not impart any audible departure from the information contained in playback source media. That's about all one can have any control over, other than particular source material selection choices. Something like that. Maybe there is a better way of putting it.
Not true. The people in the original tests knew exactly what the original sounded like because they heard it at the time.Jakob2 said:
That is the basic point, which people often forget. Note that a reproduced piano should sound like the piano actually used, not some other piano.
Hi-fi is widely accepted, although perhaps not among audiophiles - who like to kid themselves that they need more when many of them actually prefer less.
There is a lot of FUD being spread about in this thread. Why do people find the idea of sound reproduction to be so scary? Could it be that they are afraid of one of two things happening:
1. they are exposed as needing just simple hi-fi as defined 60 years ago - nothing more;
2. they are exposed as needing something less than this, and preferring something less than this.
If a famous artist or photographer spent a lot of time talking about colour, and then turned out to be colour-blind it would be rather embarrassing for him. He might try to redefine colour, or claim that nobody really knows what colour is. He might say that green grass is rather boring and conventional. He might have to admit that he doesn't understand the physics of colour, let alone the anatomy and physiology of vision - but of course he does not regard these matters as important. So he spreads FUD. The art world being what it is, he will have many followers.
I obviously missed something. Could you please guide me to the original tests?
If you link the phrase "high fidelity" to the phrase "sound reproduction" it is not that widely accepted anymore.
See for example my quote of Wolfgang Hoeg (publisher of the german Handbuch der Tonstudiotechnik, and author of some EBU tech docs related to quality sound reproduction) who expressed the opinion that the goal of every sound transmission (means recording/transmission/reproduction) is that the listener (to the reproduction) would have the same listening experience as he would have if attending the original event.
Another approach would be, that the recording (or the reproduction?) must be enhanced in a certain way to compensate for the missing visual effects.
The somewhat difficult part seems to be that nobody really knows what information is contained in playback source media.
For example, without relying on human listener properties nobody would know if there is some virtual source contained in the source.
All we know with certainty is that the original sound field (wrt to real acoustic events) will not be captured on the stereophonic media.
Any impression evoked by the media content will depend on the reproduction gear and on the individual listener properties/habits as well.
And listeners are nonlinear systems, so even if the reproduction chain is exactly the same as the production/mixing/mastering system a listener different from the sound engineer might have a seriously different perception.
Damn, now I have to look for a DAC-1! Preferably a DAC-1 HDR.
And if you ride a motorbike, as I do, the varifocals I tried were deadly! Peripheral vision distortion could have killed me, so I went with bifocals.
Sorry, I don't have a reference. I believe they were carried out in the 1950s, and involved both musicians and loudspeakers hidden behind a curtain. Members of the public were asked to judge whether the reproduced sound was like the real thing. Engineering parameters such as bandwidth and distortion were changed to see where the thresholds were.Jakob2 said:
For example, it was these tests which established that a frequency range from 20Hz to 20kHz was needed to satisfy most people. It was also found that an unbalanced range (e.g. 20Hz to 5kHz) sounded worse than a balanced range (e.g. 50Hz to 5kHz - I don't remember the actual figures). People prefer roughly the same number of octaves above and below mid-frequencies.
I read about this in a book by James Moir many years ago. I think the title was something like 'High Fidelity Sound Reproduction'.
As 'hi-fi' means 'sound reproduction' (of a sufficiently high quality) I cannot imagine how people could fail to link them. I realise that there is a modern fad for destroying the meanings of words through laziness or ignorance, but I do not subscribe to this fad.
I am unable to attach any meaning to this, but I suspect that if I knew what you were trying to say I would disagree. There are no fairies inside an audio data file.
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