You are confusing musician with someone who cares about sound quality. FWIW I only buy mono DGs unless I MUST have that performance. But I realise I actively try and be an outlier. 🙂
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I'll give in by agreeing....it takes far too long to do otherwise!! 😀 I [secretly] agree with you...especially re. mono. 😎
Go for SCM50 equivalents with ATC mid and bass driver, the ProAc EBS/ Studio 3 (I think) for about £600. Not active but still... Proac Response 4s were on a forum for under £2k (2 x ATC mids per side) this year.
I really did see Quested monitors with all ATC mid, twin 10" volt bass each side, plus 18" subs for sale for £2k the last price.. ok, maybe 3 years ago now on ebay but their size and collection made them a hard sale. With active crossover.
It's not going to be the average price but things do pop up from time to time.
I don't think anyone is really looking for some kind of conclusion, they are doing it for the very process of thinking and talking about the subject. I know I am anyway.
What would be the point of coming up with a definition of hifi? Let's just go on our own paths of satisfaction - life is too short to compromise your own satisfaction with regard to this kind of stuff.
If you want to create a sonic hologram to fool the brain into thinking it is somewhere else then it is better to start from scratch and ditch all notions of how things are commonly done in the home. But hey, binaural is probably close enough not to bother re-inventing anything, other than how to give physical cues of bass etc.
Hmm hadn't though about proAc. I liked the tablettes 20 years ago. I have 10 channels on the miniDSP, so active crossover is not a problem. If I completed all the amp projects I'd have enough as well.
The process of confirmatory thinking? Not good for getting at truth. Maybe good for arguing for the fun of it. But that would be better suited to debating society fun, rather than serious science and engineering. Or, to put it another way, maybe better to apply to law school rather than engineering school.
EDIT: The reason we are so strongly biased towards confirmatory thinking is that for most everyday decisions, we can't dither forever. There are too many decisions to make every day to be able to spend too much time on each one. Natural selection seems to have determined that for survival purposes, quick, confident decisions that have roughly a 70% chance of being right are usually good enough to live long enough to produce offspring. Definitely beats random chance.
However, when it's important to be right, nothing beats exploratory thought combined with the scientific method. Just as quick confirmatory thought beats random chance, exploratory thought combined with the scientific method, definitely beats philosophical reasoning. Or anything else we have,for that matter.
Unfortunately, we have to be trained and expend effort to think so as to best optimize the chances of being right. Since System 2 is lazy and easily tires, for most people it's not as enjoyable as arguing like a lawyer to be persuasive and hopefully to win one's case. Or, at least one can think to one's self that he or she has won. Often both sides in an argument go away believing that.
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You should either check your internet service or your screen for proper working order. It must be showing only a portion of what I wrote. I'm sure it's not you since you are a flawless person.
So you are talking about your own definition when you replied, "That is an impossible task." and "Referencing/defining HiFi to the original acoustic signal as it came off the instrument is pure folly and ultimately impossible." to me.
It is a possible task when pursuing hi-fi. As I've stated, it's a degree of fidelity. Higher the better as in closer the better. Get it?
Disagreement when related to the meaning of "high fidelity" overall. Basically we seem to favour the same goal, as any recording/transmission/reproduction should be "more like the real thing" with "perfect fidelity" as the end point of that road; although we don´t know yet if that end point is obtainable.
If i understand him correctly, then DF96´s definition of "high fidelity" is that a greater proportion (means probably the majority) can´t distinguish anymore between a life event and the recording/reproduction of the very same live event.
Furthermore he argues that his definition would be quasi naturally given by the meaning of the words, and at that point i have my doubts . But it is a foreign language to me, so i might be wrong.
Based on his definition he insists that there exists a clear distinction between "preference" and "high-fidelity" , so if a certain listener choose a system (deviating from the majority decisions in some way) by preference it is possible to conclude that this listener was not looking for "high fidelity" .
I am focusing on the personal "high fidelity construct" just because no "perfect fidelity" is available at the moment. Therefore, given the multidimensional experience, there can´t be a clear distinction between "preference" and "high fidelity" (under the earlier stated premise that a minimum standard is garantueed i.e. a piana sounds like a piano) as any reproduction will deviate from "the real thing" in different directions.
And while the development in the audio field is guided by "majority decisions" (which means conlusions about parameters in the underlying population due to statistical inference from mainly small sample examiniations), on a personal level it might (means in reality will be different for many people being in the population) be totally different, means more "high fidelity" to the individual although the majority "feels" otherwise.
The reason is given by the different directions of deviation in a multidimensional experience/perception.
Therefore i insist that this clear distinction between "preference" and "high fidelity goal" does not exist in reality.
As said before, due to practical reasons, the direction of development overall is a different thing than the decision for a reproduction system for a certain person, which suits his personal "more like the real thing" (i.e. high fidelity) goal.
At least imo to consider the personal level will help to understand why there exists such a broad range of diverging reproduction systems or elements, alhough these do not reflect the usual "single parameter based majority choice" .
The usual method in the audio field is/was to examine single parameters (quite often with artificial stimuli) and define, based on the results, upper bounds which can be measured.
That method did apparently work, but the fact that we still have to rely (need to do) perceptual evaluations means that we still not know enough.
No, I think it is analogous. In both cases:awkwardbydesign said:
- a well-known term with an agreed meaning is being challenged by those who for some reason don't like the meaning - yet seem unable to come up with a coherent useful alternative
- the issue is on the borderline between objective and subjective
- measurements are available, which show what people used to believe were the relationship between objective and subjective
Actually, the wavelengths of green cannot be measured, as green is a subjective phenomenon. However, we can measure and determine those wavelengths which most people perceive as green. We can then, if we choose to, define green to be those wavelengths - but accepting that this may not suit everyone's colour vision, but just the majority. Note that again we are not talking about preferences, but reality. We might choose from time to time to repeat the tests to see whether most people's subjective impression of green still match the wavelengths we expect.
That must have been written by someone who has swallowed the 'high-end' myth. Some 'high-end' gear is clearly only mid-fi in its electrical performance. Other stuff is genuine hi-fi, but will not sound better than cheaper stuff because the extra cost has been spent on cosmetic issues and fashion issues.plasnu said:
What DF96 seems to be saying, as I hear it anyway, is that if one where to hide a band or some speakers behind a curtain and ask people if they think they are hearing a live band or speakers, some kind of statistical measure would result.
As you point out, measured that way, the result can't be free of "preference" effects in all ways, but that doesn't necessarily matter too much, it might, but we would have to see. If it were found that a significant percentage of people were to say they think live or speaker, and if they were wrong half the time, however that comes about, some determination would have been made about what people can distinguish will have been made.
Of course, the measurement could be carried out well or badly. The curtain could be thick and block some details of sound, or thin and allow some peeking by the test subjects. Therefore transparency in how the study was conducted should be provided. And the study should be replicated by independent groups to see if they get the same results.
If it turns out the study results stand up to serious professional scrutiny, then it may turn out to be useful information. Of course, there will always be individual variation, and there will always be personal preferences, but if system designers aim to design systems that would seem adequate for 95% of people, maybe that would be some progress. While it might not work perfectly, the only way to find out exactly how well it would work would be to do the experiment and find out.
In the end, we have to rely on the scientific method to make progress in our knowledge. While imperfect, over long periods of time, the errors tend to get corrected and we do learn better and more accurately than we ever could through philosophical argument.
Yes and no. (By the way, I am pleased that you now seem to be understanding what I am saying, even though you still disagree with me.)Jakob2 said:
If it was found that the majority of people are satisfied by 0.5% distortion (to pick just one axis of a multidimensional parameter space), in the sense that this provides a sound which they find indistinguishable from the real thing, then we may conclude that 0.5% is good enough for hi-fi for the majority of people. However, there will be some people who require 0.2% for indistinguishability -although this deviates from the majority it does so in the direction of higher fidelity so should not be regarded as 'not hi-fi'. There will probably also be some people who, while finding 0.5% leads to indistinguishability, actually prefer the sound of 2% distortion - these are the ones who are not looking for hi-fi. There will be others who cannot distinguish between 2% and 0.5%, so they will be happy with hi-fi even though they do not require it. Does that clarify what I mean? This is how we can distinguish between preference and hi-fi.
The problem only arises when people who have made little or no attempt to compare their preferred but distorted sound (along some axis) with the real thing, nevertheless pronounce that for them it is more like the real thing. They are confusing preference with hi-fi. This confusion is endemic on this forum.
Now I am making an assumption in this: that if X% is needed for hi-fi (as judged by the majority) then 2X% cannot be closer to hi-fi and 0.5X% cannot be further from hi-fi. This is because we are talking about reproduction. I believe this is a reasonable assumption.
It's a laudable goal for situations where it might apply, such as live acoustic performances, but it remains a theoretical ideal. As a practical matter, all existing microphones are lossy encoders when it comes the issue of capturing all acoustical information about a live performance. That being the case, we are stuck with some limitations for practical audio reproduction for now.
There is still considerable room for improvement for existing technology however, so lets not get too bogged down in unobtainable theoretical performance when we can work towards making practical performance improvements for systems that are available now and in the near future.
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It is however a case where the German word is so much more satisfying 'Tonstudiotechnik'. Concise, meaningful and rolls nicely off the tongue 🙂
I'm talking about the only possible and hence sensible definition of HiFi as Basic has shown in his quote of my post which you decided to snip off for basically the reasons also lined out in the part you declined to quote.
It is the definition that stood for decades until the New-Age fairies descended on our hobby in the '80s.
Can we please avoid name calling? It's not going to help solve or settle anything. It does tend to escalate arguments into more and more tribal behavior.
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My apologies as i was a bit sloppy in my attempt to tranport Hoeg´s intention with the translation.
Of course he knows that perfection is unobtainable (and will be probably for some more time) and therefore i should have written "to allow a listening impression most similar (as similar as possible) to the original impression he would have had if attending the original event" instead of "the same listening experience" .
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