Are you really interested in 'Hi-Fi'?

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#442
Am I interested in HI-FI - Yes
Anyone who beats themselves up about minuscule amounts of amplifier distortion is not really taking a holistic approach to their system.
It all is going to make a difference from the source to our ears.
Most speakers are very poor when it comes to distortion figures. If you really want a jolt to your perception of your system the try some different speakers!
valves V Solid state - both have good and poor examples. A simple valve amp can do lots of things right. The high voltage can translate to having a very robust PSU holding many joules of reserve. Immunity to RF is very important.

Does this all matter? Well I like to take out my tweaked PA system every now and then and play music. Do the public immediately sit up and take notice? No they don't! But at the end of the night they leave with smiles as they have heard something that has connected to their brains. If you can reproduce music that has a good measure of the joy - precision -energy - or whatever the creator intended then you have achieved something very precious. Is that not what high fidelity is really about?
 
#445
Bigun said:
We have our subjective listening experience. People experience sound differently depending on their mood.
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So what? The issue for hi-fi is not 'did I enjoy it?' but 'did it sound like the real thing?'. It turns out that provided certain engineering criteria are met by the equipment, then the second question can be answered 'yes' by most people.

Listening is subjective. Facts about listening ability are objective.
 
#446
If we hear exactly the same thing that the recording engineer hears sitting in front of his monitors in his glass box, can we say it is Hi-Fi?

Or we could grab the studio recording tapes and play those back on better speakers. That's the final product anyway.

We would be then hearing His Masters Voice?
 
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#447
BasicHIFI1 said:
If we hear exactly the same thing that the recording engineer hears sitting in front of his monitors in his glass box, can we say it is Hi-Fi?

Or we could grab the studio recording tapes and play those back on better speakers. That's the final product anyway.
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If they even use tape, which many do not anymore, playing it back on different speakers won't sound like what the mix engineer heard.

If you want to hear what the mix engineer heard, then there are other problems:
Chris Lord Alge and Bob Clearmountain mix on Yamaha NS-10 speakers. Might not like those.
Other engineers use other speakers, so you might need a lot of different playback systems.

Also, the final product isn't what comes out of mixing, it's what comes out of mastering.
 
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#448
I guess I had this in mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ktbae63VI

I really like the way the tape starts up. That's a nice tape player. Looks like an inch wide. That studio is pretty big.

playing it back on different speakers won't sound like what the mix engineer heard.
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Ok so what are we supposed to play it back on? Do we have to get into 'author's intention here, or is our equipment interpreting it all? The funny thing is that the artist intended it to be played on any and every system, as many as possible, so they won't mind too much. But we mind.

Mastering... got to look it up again.
 
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#449
I don't mind. Use whatever you like is okay with me.

It's just that some people what to recreate the experience of attending a symphony, or some other live performance. To such end, they would like to define Hi-Fi in a way as indicating virtually indistinguishable from being-there-in-person reproduction quality, at least as perceived by most people. Otherwise, there is no good point of reference delineating a very high quality reproduction system from some lesser one.
 
#453
DF96 said:
So what? The issue for hi-fi is not 'did I enjoy it?' but 'did it sound like the real thing?'
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That was certainly the standard I grew up with. It was originally created in an era when live music, quite untouched by electronics, was the gold standard for what people listened to, or aspired to listen to.

The world has changed beyond recognition since then. We are more disconnected from nature, and all things natural, than we have ever been in previous human history. We live in a largely artificial, human-created environment, assembled out of the ongoing collective thoughts, ambitions, and actions of several billion people.

This level of artificiality applies to the sounds we hear, too. It's truly weird, but when considering the majority of all recorded and reproduced sounds that the average person hears today, the vast majority of the time, there is no trace of a "real thing" (in the sense of an original performance) any more.

It may have begun with multi-tracking and mixing decades ago. But when Pro Tools, MIDI, Autotune, and software modeled sounds (like PianoTeq, https://www.pianoteq.com/ ) are added to the equation, what ends up in the finished product has more or less been conjured almost entirely out of digital bits assembled by human artifice - bits which never had a basis in an actual sound created in actual air.

It's very telling that most of the background music you hear now, whether in a TV show or from ceiling speakers in a store, is EDM; electronic dance music, computer generated, where drums are represented by gated distorted sine waves and every other sound is similarly synthetic, and intentionally artificial-sounding.

It's not just EDM, either. A few years ago I watched a talented and very creative composer create music for a successful nationally televised TV show. I was quite shocked to find that he worked alone in his spare bedroom, surrounded by a cluster of powerful Apple computers, conjuring up the sounds of everything from an entire symphony orchestra in a great concert hall to a solitary didgeridoo in the Australian outback - all without a musical instrument in sight.

I am a musician myself, and play actual live music with friends on a fairly regular basis. Even there, we use microphones, a P.A. system, guitar amps, digital reverb, and so on; the guitar I hear from the P.A. speakers sound rather different from the actual sounds made by the guitar sitting in my lap.

And, I might add, intentionally so; my goal is for my guitar to sound better through the P.A. than it does on its own. Music production rather than re-production, yes, but if I were to record myself, it would sound different (and, hopefully, better) than what you would hear from the guitar itself.

So, even though I listen to a lot of "live" music, I still cannot truthfully say that I evaluate most of the electronically reproduced sounds I hear based on how much they "sound like the real thing". Usually there is no "real thing" for me to compare to, just whatever is coming out of the speakers sitting near our TV.

But the bottom line is that, artificial sounds or not, for me, at least, none of this negates the original physics and electronics and acoustics-based standards for Hi-Fi engineering, from the days when actual engineers and scientifically trained researchers worked in the field.

I still want an amp and speakers that does not unintentionally, and unpleasantly, corrupt the source signal, whether or not that signal had a basis in an actual live performance in a room somewhere.

Contrary to the highly subjectivistic camp, this actually means that, more than ever, I put my trust in the objective measurements. If there is no live sound standard to compare with, there is no way to tell if what I hear is accurate or not - but standard audio measurements can and do tell if the amplifier is accurate or not. Flat frequency response with tone controls centered, low distortion, good stability, adequate power? Check. It's a good amp. Move on. Life's too short to obsess over minutiae. 🙂

Speakers, though, are a tricky spot. The small amount of objective data provided by most manufacturers is insufficient to tell you much about how they sound, not to mention, they almost certainly sound quite different in your living room than they do in mine.

So, for most of us, speakers do come down to a largely subjective assessment - even if it's the subjective assessment that this particular speaker is relatively neutral-sounding!

-Gnobuddy
 
#457
Bigun said:
yeah, put the noise cancelling headphones on mum without connecting them to anything, then crank up the stereo 😀
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Nuu that won't work haha. I've got two sisters sleeping upstairs
and some neighbours that once broke into my room to steal my power cables so I couldn't power it on.

Headphones for me isn't an option either as the headphones don't have the large soundstage and sliight reverb. I like the slight reverb.
 
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