If I were not to be borderline I might perhaps enjoy it more but.. Tomorrow I'll be depressed af and not in a state capable of waking up before 3PM +/-.
I'm using the internal headphone amplifier with the Crystal2 chip solution.
One other aspect is the sound levels. I listen at 70dB or so, it disturbs everyone else if it is higher. A band of musicians playing in a rock band will certainly exceed those levels, so if you want to get the same sound that you will get in a small concert hall with a live band playing you need real power and good accuracy.
Of course there are the loudness wars ... loudness curves to worry about. As the experts say, a Hi Fi system can reproduce the sound from string quartet in real life maybe.
You may be confusing cause with effect there. So it's probably way too late for her, she is doomed already. 😀
Which is exactly my point too... 😎
Btw, according to Olson the result that broader bandwidth is not preferred by listeners was based on listening tests as well.
He did the tests with real acoustical events and a mechanical filter, so it was the real thing in both conditions. In these tests afair 70% of the listeners preferred the unfiltered (means full bandwith) version.
In the tests with filtered and unfiltered versions both reproduced by a reproduction system, the quite higher IM distortion in the unrestricted case (which was ~15kHz at that time afair) was found to be the reason for the listeners preference decision.
But even in Olson´s experiment ~30% preferred the filtered version. I can´t remember if there were additional experiments to find out why.
Given that you used the phrase (in the snipped part) "preferred by most..." i have difficulties to follow.
Most parameters were studied in controlled experiments and often the question was just "can it be detected?" while at the end in consumer tests the question most likely is "will it be preferred" or at least "will it be liked equally" ; a difference detected by 100% of the listeners but disliked by 100% of the listeners will most probably not make it through.
So it is always a matter of statistics and preference and a matter of individual differences. "most people" isn´t the same as everybody.
As cited before, the people that invented the stereophonic (two channel) system did already know that certain effects (perceptionwise) were strongly influenced by the listening experience with real live acoustical events. Perception of depth was one of these. Low frequency content will affect the impression of the space in which the acoustical event takes place.
"adjusted in the light of new listening tests" confirms imo that what i´ve said; what about the people that are now listening and already preferring what will be only adjusted later "in the light of new listening tests" ?
The distinction between "high fidelity" and "preference" is artifical up to certain degree.
Which is a "non seguitur" as in most cases "listening tests" aren´t done in a sufficient way to allow categorical conclusions.
But anyway as said before it is a matter of statistics (and hypothesis etc. etc.) and not so easy to decide what "indistinguishable from each other" would mean wrt "high fidelity" .
For an individual listener it might have been totally different. Maybe he needs different cues than other listeners to be able to form a convincing illusion.
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Which was my point, just better put. As I (frequently) point out I have a peak at 6-8kHz, so my threshold is different from my wife's for example. I suspect most of us vary in this way. One man's high fidelity is another man's awful.
Statistical tests are useful in some cases, but using them to define the meaning of terms is fraught with difficulties, IMO. Especially very old tests.
Which would be so even if no human is listening to the air waves, so more related to the "self purpose" case.
Nobody would care about "high fidelity" because nobody knows what the reference points are (or should be).
The innocent word "accuracy" carries all the difficulties at this point; accuracy related to what exactly?
As the bits are not there for self purpose , they are intended to give a certain meaning/impression to human listeners if reproduced through the aforementioned transducer (in reproduction chains including everything else needed).
It is known that the same raw recorded material, if mixed (produced) by different people at different places results in (sometimes quite) different outcomes.
I don´t know at the moment of studies that examined the (maybe) occuring differences if the same person works with the same raw material in different places, but would strongly expect different outcomes as well.
But, think that you are George Massenburg doing some work in the famous room c at Blackbird Studios and trying to create certain impressions/illusions and finishing your work when satisfied (means breaking out those famous bits).
And now think, that you being not George Massenburg, were listening under the same condition to the same bits.
Will you have the same impression/illusion ?
And a step further, now think that you are listening to the same bits under very different conditions. Will reproduction of the same bits (unchanged) provide under these conditions the same impression/illusion that they were intended to do?
If not, where is the "high fidelity" in this picture?
To relate it a bit more to Floyd Tooles point of view (and maybe Griesinger´s too), if he/they speak(s) for example about listener envelopment or apparent source width and the variations of room acoustics (and/or speaker parameters) that influence these properties, which version is the accurate one (would mean that with the highest degree of fidelity)?
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This has always fascinated me. I have through various reasons had a bass shy system for a good chunk of my adult life, so when i hear full range I realise how much room ambience we synthesise from the LF signals. This is being fixed.
I was listening to some choral music from the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 50th anniversary box set last night. Youngest was asleep so had it low. Was interesting how you could hear the decay of the voices but without a sense of space. For Me loudness controls are vital moving forwards.
(note above is just a personal observation).
I have been fortunate to have started with 12" Wharfedales, followed by 15" Tannoys, followed by KEF transmission lines and then isobarics. Not necessarily accurate, but with good bass content, and find it hard to get on with "small" speakers. When the room hasn't made too much of a mess of the sound, spacial clues have formed my subjective view of what constitutes accuracy, or high fidelity. And being a lover of bass, as in double bass* rather than dance music, if the bass notes don't develop properly (IMO) then it is all moot.
And as far as loudness controls are concerned, useful though a good one could be, replay at the "correct" level is what works for me.
* I once went to a concert of simply 10 double basses at the RNCM. That was fun. 🙂
Accuracy in launching acoustical waves into the air as instructed by the data. Again, that's all there is on a CD or LP. Some instructions for moving some air around, or to put it another way, to pressurize air adjacent to the transducer according to the instructions on the CD.
Then, depending on the listening environment, a wave will be launched and propagate, such as with high frequencies in a room, or pressure will build up, such as with very low frequencies inside a headphone ear cup. They are essentially two different ways of looking at the same thing, from a physics perspective. It's just that one is a more intuitive model in one case as opposed to the other.
What else? Most mics are directional pressure transducers. A few are velocity transducers. They do not capture information for later reproduction as to the shape of the wavefront impinging on them. It could be a plane wave, it could be a spherical wave, etc. We don't know. Therefore, such information is lost and cannot be reproduced in the listening environment. That being the case, we can't know how the wave would continue on it's way and reverberate or be absorbed in the acoustical environment in which the sound originated. Not to mention that the vast majority of detailed information about the original acoustical environment is not picked up by mics or encoded on a CD.
Due to all the foregoing, it is not possible to completely recreate the original experience as it would exist in it's environment later. All you can do is accurately move the transducer exactly and precisely as the data on the CD instructs. You can put the transducer in a horn if you want, to aid efficient mechanical coupling with air, but whether or not that will help recreate the original sound is also not encoded on the CD.
EDIT: There are actually a few more complications than I have mentioned, but hopefully you are starting to see the nature of the problem.
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I would like that, but needs must. Current house does not have thick ceilings and little one (19 months) sleeps in the room above the stereo. I have been to a concert where they had a contrabasson, which was eerie, although not as bad as the low notes on a 32' organ stop. I am fond of organ music, but getting a good facsimile at home is a challenge!
This recording (of a 3m tall piano!) is an interesting example of how low frequency reproduction really changes the feel of the replay. SOLO | Nils Frahm
It's a free download, and a fascinating sound. I don't like any of his other stuff, BTW.
Some years ago my wife and I were outdoors in Balboa Park in San Diego, California, when the air was suddenly filled with the most amazing organ music I've ever heard.
Completely immersive, completely unbounded by any walls, immensely powerful, and seeming to come from everywhere at once, I'd only heard music like that in my dreams before. It was an absolutely astonishing experience.
The organ music came from a church in the square. I no longer remember the name of the church, and I know nothing about the organ itself.
In all honesty, I have never heard any form of electronically reproduced music that came anywhere close to recreating that experience. I don't think it's even possible, unless the whole system was outdoors and you had a few kilowatts of audio power to play with.
-Gnobuddy
This might be a case where the normal 20Hz rule might need to be changed. I am sure someone somewhere has studied the infrasonic spectrum of a cathederal organ.
Now I have heared something close in terms of soundfield once, which was a Wilson Audio Demo of a handpicked recording, with a lot of steering of the participants. Notwithstanding we were told what we would hear, it was the first and last time that all the walls of the room vanished. At least for me. At the time.
Now I have heared something close in terms of soundfield once, which was a Wilson Audio Demo of a handpicked recording, with a lot of steering of the participants. Notwithstanding we were told what we would hear, it was the first and last time that all the walls of the room vanished. At least for me. At the time.
I support DF96 totally and if you just stop to think about it you will too and the arguments here will seem trivial.
Hi-Fi is that piece of equipment between the source, be it a record, tape or CD and your ear that does not add or subtract anything.
If you like what you hear or don't like what you hear has nothing to do with hi-fi. Hi-Fi is a truthful (objective), not a faithful (subjective) reproduction of what is presented to it.
That is all.
As soon as you enjoy it warm, cold, soft, thump, slam or whatever, you deviate from the truth and you lost the idea of hi-fi.😉
All this talk about Hi-Fi verses something else reminds me of butter.
When margarine first came out, butter product manufacturers managed to get a law passed saying that advertisements could not claim that margarine tastes like butter. Eventually, the margarine guys figured out a way around it, they said, "It tastes better than butter!"
When margarine first came out, butter product manufacturers managed to get a law passed saying that advertisements could not claim that margarine tastes like butter. Eventually, the margarine guys figured out a way around it, they said, "It tastes better than butter!"
.. and some instruments sound like they always have but people who only choose to hear nicend-up versions of their sound via recording techniques, listening live in venues far from the instruments (so you're actually listening to the hall's nicer reverb version) or via coloured audio systems and THEN tell us that "hifi" should sound like that too... all the time, no matter what you're listening to.
Sometimes people will tell you a recording is bad because they only choose to listen to soft and lush recordings and only choose to listen to soft and lush music or go to venues with a soft and lush sound. i.e their experience and expectation is blinkered by choice.
Some people love to stay warm and hate hate hate anything cold and uncomfortable and will complain . Others will experience the cold and discomfort and just take it as yet another real experience, no judgement no complaint.. (in fact might feel more alive in doing so).
That too. I read about a taste law in some book long ago, don't remember which. Could have been a law in some small jurisdiction, I don't recall if they said. Whether it's true or not, it makes for a good story.
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