To put CLA to bed as I view him as a destroyer of music. He and his brother have created a mystique. Good for them, it makes them rich, but IMO has caused the loudness wars means that the quality of popular music is lower now that it was 30 years ago, for things that matter to me. The great unwashed with their apple earbuds dont seem to care, so I leave him to it. There is music I like he has not destroyed.
As for the Bryston I am tempted to quote smokey yunick(or at least a quote attributed to him).
Suggestion runs high. And given the price disparity, no one was likely to try the Krells, levinsons etc of the time to see if they were the same. Turning a sows ear into a less painful sows ear by spending a couple of grand (in 1992 money) would cause raised eyebrows by many, esp as a performant nearfield could have be bought for that money. The 'well if it sounds good on this' really doesn't give that part of the studio profession any credibility with those of us who want high quality audio. For all means do a final release check on a boombox, but don't mix on rubbish speakers.
Note these are my views as a music lover who would like technology to improve quality not make it worse!
As for the Bryston I am tempted to quote smokey yunick(or at least a quote attributed to him).
Suggestion runs high. And given the price disparity, no one was likely to try the Krells, levinsons etc of the time to see if they were the same. Turning a sows ear into a less painful sows ear by spending a couple of grand (in 1992 money) would cause raised eyebrows by many, esp as a performant nearfield could have be bought for that money. The 'well if it sounds good on this' really doesn't give that part of the studio profession any credibility with those of us who want high quality audio. For all means do a final release check on a boombox, but don't mix on rubbish speakers.
Note these are my views as a music lover who would like technology to improve quality not make it worse!
For non acoustic instruments hi-fi has little meaning. As most music is non acoustic that may explain why people seem so confused about hi-fi. Let me be blunt: if most or all of your listening is to non acoustic music or heavily processed music or any other music which you cannot simply go and listen to for real then hi-fi can have no interest for you - even if you do not realise this and think you are interested in hi-fi. I suspect this is part of the problem; most 'hi-fi enthusiasts' listen to 'pop music' so genuine hi-fi is meaningless for them, so instead they pursue a sound they like but choose to call it hi-fi for reasons which are not entirely clear. Then claim that 'hi-fi' is a poorly-defined term!
Someone asked Valentino Rossi why he dangled his leg going into corners, and he said "I don't know; but I know why everyone else does." 😀
However you are talking to numerous people here who DO listen to acoustic music, and can compare the sound of live with recorded sound. And you are happy to describe hifi as indistinguishable to "most people". Your arguments are trying to have their cake and eat it!
The main problem with it is the implementation of the average hifi, maybe you could say ALL hifi as a generalisation.
Get a good binaurally recorded source and listen with the sound going directly into your ears (I find isolating earbuds best) and the soundfield appears to be very very well recreated enough for the brain to react as if the sounds were coming from a real 3 dimensional environment.
It's the shared experience bit that is wrong, sitting in front of speakers so that others can hear it too. The common speaker set up is too flawed in comparison to binaural techniques. IMHO...
However you are talking to numerous people here who DO listen to acoustic music, and can compare the sound of live with recorded sound. And you are happy to describe hifi as indistinguishable to "most people". Your arguments are trying to have their cake and eat it!
It is not always comparible.
It is very unlikely that any group of musicians - even your friends or those you are playing with yourself - will be happy with you putting your ear to bits of their instruments whilst they all play. Most musicians are happy to put up with microphones doing this though and when the sources are mixed together, you have the ability to hear the tones and timbres of the instruments from these close-up places all at once and a good listener will be able to switch attention to these different mic placements as if they are moving around like a ghost amongst the players.
When you go to hear live music, 99% of the time you hear a completely different sound, one of all the reverberations, all the instrument's timbres combined so that one will mask another, some attack you might hear close up is lost simply via the distance and reflections etc etc etc etc.
I think my favourite live music moments have not been when I've gone to a concert or gig, but when I've worked at a theatre and either had to wait for my scene changing cue right next to a live instrument or had to "hide" in the orchestra pit right next to some instruments ready for some musical setup quick change.. That is also a different experience from playing as you are again able to hear the sound from a completely different perspective compared to the musicians themselves.
Of course there are many two-mic recordings out there, recorded from a pseudo-audience perspective but again rarely binaurally from a real audience perspective (normally mics hanging high from the ceiling and with a multi metre distance between them) so again, it's not strictly comparable.
One nice CD/SACD I have is from DPA microphones of different piano recording techniques using their mics - it is like putting your head at different parts of the grand piano whilst someone plays which - if you've ever done that yourself, you'll know - is probably the BEST way to listen to someone play and hear every detail of hammer, string tone, attack blah blah much of which is lost by the time it reaches the audience.
I disagree.
An electric guitar when played through an amp has a sound. That sound is as important to capture as any non-amplified, accoustic instrument.
An electric guitar played through some gear and then DI'd (i.e. missing out the capture of the air movement by a microphone) also has a sound when played through the monitors and the artist or engineer acting with an artistic capacity, tries to capture this sound he/she hears in the very same way as any accoustic instrument; it's timbre, it's tone etc.
Hi-fi is about recreating these sounds as intended to be heard at the recording stage. It doesn't matter which instrument makes it, or computer for that matter. What is being captured is the sound at the studio as the artist or engineer intends.
Unless we are being pedantic about a particular defintion of "high-fidelity" ?
Isn't a piano's soundboard effectively the same as the speaker cone in a Vox AC10?
I agree on the binaural to a degree (I have said that I don't find the chesky binaural recordings at all realistic, which is a shame). But headphones are considered an adjunct to Hifi as with most recordings they don't give the soundfield unless you have a smyth realiser or similar working its magic.
As for live music, when you go to listen to a piano you don't stick your head in it. You sit in the audience and that is how it is supposed to sound. I personally hate the drive to make the concert experience sound more like the home hi-fi. It's the wrong way round. Although Ed Simon will disagree, as soon as any form of reinforcement is used, the acoustic event is lost.
As for live music, when you go to listen to a piano you don't stick your head in it. You sit in the audience and that is how it is supposed to sound. I personally hate the drive to make the concert experience sound more like the home hi-fi. It's the wrong way round. Although Ed Simon will disagree, as soon as any form of reinforcement is used, the acoustic event is lost.
Unfortunately there are some of us (or am I alone?) who can't get on with headphones at all. Having the soundstage move with my head is so unnatural for me that I can't abide it. A pity, as it would make life easier.
I am (obviously) forced to turn to hifi to get that head-under-the-piano-lid sound because I can't get it from a live solo piano performance. I am into audio reproduction equipment (avoiding the term hifi) because I love so many of the sounds I hear and I would like them reproduced in the home sometimes..
Other times I want to listen to music and quite frankly the notes, the lyrics, the expression is what I'm after and not whether it sounds exactly like a memory of a previous experience. For that, it doesn't quite matter whether it's a live recording or a studio recording. I can also love a song or tune as a thing unrelated to one particular performance by one artist - many cover versions sound great because the original source music was great in a non-acoustic, purely musical way (i.e. the notes, chord progressions etc).
Hi-fi should be able to reproduce what was recorded faithfully, "live music" is a very small subset of that ability (plus a kind of vague description anyway) and so in my view equipment should not be judged on that ability alone UNLESS that is your passion and you're judging it for suitability to satisfy you and you alone.
Sometimes it is not even recorded and will be a waveform on a computer - high fidelity would mean in that instance the waveform generated moving the air should be the same as the input's electrical representation as much as possible. (lets forget the issue of an artist listening and mixing on a coloured system which ultimately means you hear something slightly different to what they intended.... ).
I guess to answer the thread's question, I am very much interested in Hi-fi because I want things to faithfully represented by the system rather than coloured by my own leanings and sonic preferences. It's hard to judge a system without colouring the judgement with your own preferences but at least in theory, if not in practice, it's what I want.
I tend to pick my gear these days by a kind of measured transparency (as considered so by others, not me... I'm not technically up to it, nor wish to spend my time doing so) and trust that doing so will get me what I want. My satisfaction will them come from the source material I choose.
I think a fair few people in this game are after satisfaction to their sonic preferences at the expense of those that don't please them and so look for a system which emphasises certain aspects of sound and which may fall short in others. That would mean they are not strictly interested in hifi as per the definition, but still very interested in their own satisfaction and enjoyment.
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CLA produces muzak and muzak sells. Commercial success does not equal quality.
I find his mixes to be unlistenable except via ipod + headphones or as background music (aka muzak).
He compresses/limits his stuff so much that it sounds very loud at low volumes and if you turn it up to more fun/life/party levels you get to hear the enormous amount of rather horrible distortion this creates.
I've had some of his stuff on my computer and frankly it sounds revolting next to any mix that is not dynamically crushed. Had to remove it after a few days, same as Iggy's remastering of 'Raw Power'.
Which is exactly my point of view (not the lo-fi part of course 😱 ) and imo your description supports the supposition, does it not?
If the peak does not disturb during an acoustical event, but does during a reproduction (means every time) than a recessed region would be more "hi-fi" as it would be more like the real thing.
I think I will stick with my definition of High Fidelity:
The accurate reproduction in the form of air pressure variations of the waveform encoded in my source.
It is unambiguous, does not require acoustic instruments or rely on some mythical 'acoustic event' of which nobody knows what it really was like.
The accurate reproduction in the form of air pressure variations of the waveform encoded in my source.
It is unambiguous, does not require acoustic instruments or rely on some mythical 'acoustic event' of which nobody knows what it really was like.
I am happy to accept that instruments with on-stage amplifiers (such as electric guitar and ondes martenot) can be regarded as acoustic for the purposes of hi-fi. The issue is: did the performance ever exist as an acoustic signal in the air? A band on stage passes this test; a band in the studio may or may not, depending on how the recording was made.NATDBERG said:
I have a recording of Messiaen's Organ Symphony in which the organ and the orchestra were in different places. That would fail the 'acoustic' test. It is enjoyable as a piece of music, but can tell us nothing about hi-fi.
I disagree. Hi-fi must be about recreating sounds at the performance stage. That, of course, means that the recording stage must have hi-fi as its aim, which may be rare these days.
Of course it is a factual question, but as i said before, it is a question that it is rarely examined. There is a lot of anecdotical material from the past, even including listeners impression that a recorded voice was indistinguishable from the real event when played back from an Edison cylinder, which obviously does not really reflect what we think about "high fidelity".
If you could cite a couple of conclusive studies wrt comparisons between live and reproduction, it would help a lot, as i obviously missed a lot.
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Yes, you did point out your personal point of view several times.
Or more simply, because your point of view is not the right one?
I´d agree, although you will have difficulties to find a lot of other people that agree to this. Mainly for the reason that - as stated a couple of months ago in a discussion with pano - the usual stereophonic reproduction is broken (means from a technical point of view as the difference between the original sound field and reproduced sound field is stunning) and in most cases nobody knows what the original acoustical event did sound like.
Remember the beginning of our discussion as you insisted that "sounding like a piano" were not sufficient because it should sound exactly like the piano that was actually used.
Which is a nice challenge as usually nobody (at the reproduction side) knows about the original sound.
Most people respond to the terrific difficulties by defining "high fidelity" wrt to the "broken rigth from the beginning" with a newly choosen reference point which is the media content. No need to compare it further to the real thing.
In reality it does not help either, as again nobody knows what it should sound like.
High fidelity - in your words should be more like the real thing - and "workable compromise" sounds contradictionary, especially if you are denying the preference part.
My example (admittedly crude) just shows that even perfect reproduction of the data will not help if the premises of the production were not met during the playback.
Allow me a personal note; it seems that you like to accuse other members of trying "to muddy the water", but maybe his highness could just consider being not right (as unlikely as it might seem) , mhmm? 🙂
What hi-fi is not... having a box with the ability to change your wife boring nagging voice into a nightingale's song. Or vice versa.
Please let me make something clear, I don't like a lot of pop music including what CLA mixes. That's not the point. There is a demand for what he does. That demand doesn't come from you or me, but for the people who like it, that's what they want. And for those people and that market, he does what his clients want, and many other engineers wish they could do that particular style as well, for those occasions when that's what a client wants.
As far as what is good music and what is not, people tend to like the music they grew up with in their mid to late teens and maybe early twenty's. Once formed, those preference tend to persist for throughout life. That's not to say it works exactly that way for everybody, but statistically, that's the way it works.
Therefore, it should be no surprise that kids who listened to loud, distorted music in their formative years, still think that sounds good later. And they may think going to the symphony is as boring as anything can get. The point here, is that what is good or bad music is not an absolute. It's pretty normal for everybody to think the music they like is superior to other types, and any people who think otherwise must be wrong.
Not only that, but it can go to the extreme of thinking anybody that makes ugly (to the listener) music must be evil, and evil people like that deserve blame for all the bad music in the world.
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Although this - somewhat arbitrarily redifinition of "high fidelity" - seem to help at a first glance, it does imo not, because still nobody knows - apart from the producers - what degree of accuracy is really needed.
See for example the extreme environment of Blackbird Studio C.
If you can´t mimic the environment used during the production of the content, which degree of accuracy is possible during playback?
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