Hmm. Either you don't play an instrument either you never tryed to imagine what a conductor must do to drive an orchestra. Some of them are able to point an out of tune player within a section within the whole orchestra while at the same time seting pace and feeling of the whole ensemble...
As a former musician it took me ages to be able to talk to someone while playing ( i don't even talk about singing while playing). This is things whch can be learned, no superpowers or gift. You have to learn them by practice.
I think some of the posts about what classicalfan meant are being obtuse. If you're listening to a pair of loudspeakers with a particular set of resonances, those are going to be a distraction from critical listening.
If you're listening to speakers with obvious resonances that are a distraction, then they aren't appropriate for critical listening in the first place.
My main point was that people cannot fully enjoy music and analyze the faults in their system at the same time. While several people here have made such claims, they are wrong. You can do one or the other, and you can go back and forth every few seconds, or few minutes, however often you like. But you cannot do both together.
Here is a good analogy.
You go into an art museum to look at paintings. Now you can either stand back and take in the entire painting or you can move up close and look at the details of the artist's technique. The brush stokes for example. But you cannot do both at the same time. When you start to examine the details, you give up any possibility of enjoying the overall painting until you step back again. It is exactly the same with music.
Here is a good analogy.
You go into an art museum to look at paintings. Now you can either stand back and take in the entire painting or you can move up close and look at the details of the artist's technique. The brush stokes for example. But you cannot do both at the same time. When you start to examine the details, you give up any possibility of enjoying the overall painting until you step back again. It is exactly the same with music.
You make the assumption that the little details are what matters. Let's say this is the "painting technique".
But you denigrate the importance of the overall painting, the composition, the design.
Look. wars are won with tactics (close up) and strategy (the Big Picture).
You think that the tactics are all important, but IMHO, as I stated by our seats at the middle of Row M, the Big Picture is just as important. Actually, IMHO, it is more important, otherwise all you win are Pyrrhic Victories and you lose the war.
If we sat on the middle of Rows A to D we would hear the difference between the rows in the violin and viola sections... but in Row M we hear the entire orchestra.
I would postulate that the Big Picture is where soundstage comes in, it is more important really. The "brush strokes" are more important to the musicians perhaps. I want a stereo system (and recordings) that paint a musical soundstage in front of me, not a bunch of instruments in space with no coherence to each other. This is where good engineering comes into place for stuff like electric music, but for acoustic, usually the fewer (and better placed) mikes will do the trick... vide Wilma Cozart and her three mike technique.
You totally misunderstand what I have said. It is the exact opposite of what you wrote.
It is in fact the "overall painting" that I am trying to preserve for viewer, or listener in the case of music, and not have that person distracted by trying to examine the details.
I thought that I made myself pretty clear, but if you can tell me why you are confused over it, I would like to know.
You seem think that only by "listening" to the details you can analyze a system.. not so... listening to the big picture is also how you analyze the system. There is NO dichotomy.
Let me remake my point, in case I didn't make it obvious enough.
The point I'm trying to make is that listening "critically" while analyzing the soundstage of an audio system is as important as the details. When listening to an audio system, you have to listen both for its detail and for its soundstage: micro/macro dynamics, frequency extension, distortion, efficiency, "speed" (*), radiation pattern, etc... taken together, a good speaker will give you all of that and you can both listen to how it does it while enjoying it.
But, you can enjoy the music while "listening critically" because when it all gells, you just get lost on the performance. (**). In science, the lack of data can be data itself. For example, if you'r looking for distortion, you might set up the test rig to look for a null when there is no distortion.. so a value of 0 is data. Same thing when listening critically, at some point it just sounds... natural.
-So anyhow... what are you doing about your system? It seems like you're doing a lot of writing about your system, but do you listen to it?
(*) Sort of related to dynamics... but mostly how much power is lost at low levels to physical resistance. A measure of low level performance.
(**) How you ever noticed when a reviewers writes that they ended up playing record upon record and so on... and not taking notes? That's because they had reached a proper configuration for their system.
Nice try, but you are wrong.
You cannot be "listening critically" trying to analyze the deficiencies in the system and get lost in the performance at the same time.
The two thought processes are incompatible with each other. If you think you can do both together you are kidding yourself.
What does this thread have to do with DIY Multi-Way speakers?
Hasn't it belonged in the Lounge for a long time? or whatever else more appropriate forum?
Hasn't it belonged in the Lounge for a long time? or whatever else more appropriate forum?
While there are always some detours in these discussions the majority of this thread has been very much about the main topic of soundstage with multi-way speaker systems. You only have to go back four posts to #909 to see it last discussed.
So no, this doesn't belong in the Lounge at all. But if it troubles you, then by all means don't bother reading it.
I guess the all-knowing sage has spoken.
I still don't know why anyone would want to do both at the same time in the private environment, but it can actually be done and is done constantly by recording engineers. In fact, especially when mixing live to two-track, they must be intimately involved with the performance or the mix will suffer. They qualitative evaluation is never absent, but the performance aspect must drive the mix.
Who cares anyway? Millions of people enjoy what some here might call horrible systems, and I'll bet they get more enjoyment out of the music than you do. It's not that their systems are so good, it's that they hear "through" the bad because it just doesn't matter. If it matters to you so much that you have to choose between paying attention to the system or enjoying the music, then you have missed the point. You can upgrade, downgrade, or sidegrade, you'll never be happy with the system. This is literally the worst aspect of audiophilia.
Visual to audio analogies never work, and this one is no exception. Visual perception works entirely differently from audio perception. I'd explain why, but the thread is now so self-hijacked that it'll never be on track.
Listening fatigue. It isn't optional. It is thinking directly about your sound while it's playing, and the system problems that cause it are beyond our physical ability to separate into parts... therefore we hear them all at once. It is subconscious, and we go on trying to decode it in our heads. After a time we can become fed up with listening. We realise that listening was never actually as enjoyable as it could be. Almost all systems have this to some degree less or more. The difference is like comparing a landscape painting to going outside and experiencing the real thing.
Should have just taken the zobels out when I suggested it. Wouldn't have to be making all these metaphors and applying them to this specific situation, and then debating whether the metaphors are more like or less like the situation. I mean really now. Nothing at all has happened in this thread. It might blow your amp though.
Reproduced sound never even attempts to reproduce the "real thing". The goal is to create something new that gives the listener the impression of the "real thing" to the degree that disbelieve can be at least partially suspended. The only time reproduced sound can fake a listener into thinking it's real is in a very tightly controlled situation involving a solo instrument.
So what we are doing is trying to present that new reality in a way that is as satisfying as possible. Again, the visual analogy fails because the difference in dynamic range of the real thing vs a painting or photo are far too extreme, where we can actually reproduce the full dynamic range in a recording. The color representation of photos and paintings are limited to the available color gammut, where no such limitation exists in audio, all frequencies are available. The problem is worse than 2d vs 3d, because 3d imaging fails by placing phantom visual images in locations that oppose focus localization. Sound reproduction, especially from one or two channels, cannot represent the original sound field in any way, and nobody actually tries to do that. It's always a fake, hopefully a beautiful and satisfying one.
But a painting never suspends disbelief enough to be perceived as anything but a painting. If it's photo-realistic, we think how good or bad it is. If it's impressionistic, we enter the world of a whole new experience that is only distantly related to the original. But good sound reproduction should allow the listener to forget it's his sound system, or at least be impressed with it to the extend that enjoyment of the new reality is unhampered.
Should a system sometimes become unable to allow different parts of the music to stay separate from the others where you can focus on them on their own?
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No. In the version of your post before you edited it, you asked what I mean by solo instruments. The issue here is all about believable reproduction of an original sound field. The Bell Labs experiments of the 1930s showed how difficult this was, and that the reproduction of an original complex sound was impossible with two channels. However, if you confine the sound field to something very simple, like a single point-source instrument played through a single speaker, you can create a very close replica of the original sound and sound field for a single listener, albeit in a different acoustic space. But if the sources are many spread over a space, replication of the original is no longer possible.
Two channel stereo reproduction does not, and should not, attempt to replicate the original, because you can't do that with two channels and a complex sound field. People like to think "two channels, two ears", but that's not anything like how it works. I think explaining this is off topic, and there are many references, like Speakers in Rooms by Toole that completely and thoroughly explain the problem. But the short story is, two channels isn't enough, and comes with huge limitation built-in. Both speakers are heard by both ears, and are at least partially localized. Both speakers are in an entirely different acoustic space that is imposed on top of the original. There's a response notch mid band caused by the summing of both speakers at both ears. And on and on. So, replication of the original is out the window. What is done is to create something new that is an acceptable and believable representation of the original. And when that is played in a different acoustic environment with different speakers with different polar patterns to a listener who can't be bothered sitting equidistant between the speakers, you get yet another completely different representation...one that is only partly related to the intended representation.
Frankly, two channel stereo is a mess, should never have happened, but we had two groove walls and that drove it. The Bell experiments concluded that 3 was the absolute minimum, left, center and right. Sound familiar? So we got what we go, and the best two channel system in the world still can't replicate the original sound field.