Are you saying that skipping years of learning, like reading the "Art of Electronics", or making 100s of 'failed' simulations that go nowhere, or filling boxes with forgotten electronics protoypes, and still wanting to beat the masters may be "wanting too much"?
Hi you got me However i can say that i have seen something that approaches my ideal SIM software It is Xsim
It is for speaker crossovers calculation But it has a feature that surprised and won me over
In practice, the possibility of seeing practically in real time the effect of changing the value of an inductance, a resistance or a capacitance of the crossover on a certain fundamental parameter (i.e. frequency response).
I was genuinely impressed.
Unfortunately I have never been really passionate about speakers Someone says that it is the most important link in an audio chain Who cares ?
I see them more as a carpenter's job than anything else
It seems to me that a crossover, however complicated it is, is orders of magnitude less complex/challenging than an audio amplifier
So I don't think there will ever be an Xsim for amplifiers
But that would truly be a good and beautiful thing
Hi,
yeah crossovers are kind of trivial today due to good free simulators and increased knowledge. Beyond XSim there is VituixCAD which has even more capability to display how a speaker radiates acoustically and there is hardly any black magic is left in loudspeaker crossover design like there used to be, so in that sense you are right, they aren't very interesting, the crossovers.
But, think about this, what is good sound? The one you perceive of course, music which you can emotionally relate / attach to, at best quite a powerful experience, right? How this happens then? The music / sound you perceive in your conscious mind is provided by your own auditory system which you cannot control, but which is also attached to emotions for example, memory. Auditory system, brain, gets it's input from your ears and perhaps other sensors like skin, both sensing pressure variations which is acoustic sound in the room, which is put there by the speakers! In this sense there is a lot of very complicated stuff happening between an amplifier and sensation you have while listening to a system, sound is converted from electricity to pressure variation and back to electricity, processed by systems in your head. So, basically we are not listening to amplifiers, nor speakers, but our own auditory systems, which listens the room, which got pressure variation from speakers, which are operated by amplifier and some source. I bet all links in the chain are important and inflict their own fingerprint into perception, speakers are just one, so are amplifiers, but the whole thing is sum of all parts.
Acoustics for example three dimensional and interacts with physical objects per wavelength, so get's quite complicated fast, while sound in an electronic circuit has much less dimensions, basically one I think. Transducer being there to transform between electronic and acoustic domains, crossovers affect both transfer function (frequency response) but also how the transducer operates as electro-mechanical device with circuit impedance, which the amplifier is also part of, although could be idealized and abstracted away as ideal voltage or current source.
So, feeling is mutual in that sense that for someone who is intrigued by acoustics and all that could say amplifiers are quite boring, solved decades ago and work in any room and mood and music, while speakers, room and auditory system vary in short and long term, and also between all our places, we all have different rooms and acoustics and listening skill so expectations, practical limitations to position things, and so on 🙂 Close your curtains and sound changes more than swapping fully functioning amplifier to another. Far far more complicated than any electronic scheme in my opinion, but you likely know there is quite much variation in amplifiers as well as you've spent your time studying them, like I have spent mine studying speakers, the acoustics and the perception. What ever we spent time on, the complexity starts to reveal itself, right?
Well, this is a friendly post I thought to write for some extra perspective thinking about playback systems in general, it's fun stuff at least for me to think and listen and try to figure out what is important and what is not and thought to share, perhaps you and others get new found interest into this side of things as well, the whole chain before perceived sound. I've only had few amplifiers and want to experiment at some point, but currently I have no rush as all I've had have sounded plenty good enough, but my room and speakers haven't 😀 Until then, amplifiers need to wait their turn, I have no doubt electronics is another way to improve sound.
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Sometimes "The Algorithm" is biased in favor of the views of its creator. Amazon's algorithm is seriously confused by the random stuff that I order for 8 people ages 8 to 71. It rarely hits the mark, but it keeps trying to suggest stuff it thinks I need. Every time my daughter breaks her cell phone, I order myself a new cheap Motorola phone from Amazon and give her mine. My first Motorola phone was offered for two different prices, one without Amazon branding and "pushed" adverts, and one with the adverts. The discount was substantial, so I took the advert fed model. It seemed that for some reason Amazon thought I needed a Mercedes Benz since every time I drove by the dealership near Pittsburgh, I got a sales pitch. Obviously, they had no clue to my (lack of) taste in fine cars. I drive a 9 year old minivan. It seems that Amazon was gathering location data on mobile users without telling the phone owners. This wound up in court and all the pushed adds went away.
Google's YouTube algorithm does stuff that I DO NOT like. I am an older person who tries to stay in good physical shape. I often watch "exercise for age 50+ or 60+ men," kiking or running videos to find new stuff to try since our local gym closed down permanently when Covid came. Apparently, this causes Google to think I'm gay and stuff that kind of content in front of my face, usually featuring young boys. You can click on the offensive video and tell the algorithm that you don't want to see stuff like that, but the algorithm has a short or biased memory. A month or two later and it returns. The algorithm knows that I watch a lot of tube amp, guitar, and music synthesizer stuff, especially their construction and testing. They usually get this right, but they just have to stuff in some thinly disguised advert videos for super expensive amps. $4000 for a guitar amp? Yes, I will gladly watch the video, then Google up the schematic for it.
Google's YouTube algorithm does stuff that I DO NOT like. I am an older person who tries to stay in good physical shape. I often watch "exercise for age 50+ or 60+ men," kiking or running videos to find new stuff to try since our local gym closed down permanently when Covid came. Apparently, this causes Google to think I'm gay and stuff that kind of content in front of my face, usually featuring young boys. You can click on the offensive video and tell the algorithm that you don't want to see stuff like that, but the algorithm has a short or biased memory. A month or two later and it returns. The algorithm knows that I watch a lot of tube amp, guitar, and music synthesizer stuff, especially their construction and testing. They usually get this right, but they just have to stuff in some thinly disguised advert videos for super expensive amps. $4000 for a guitar amp? Yes, I will gladly watch the video, then Google up the schematic for it.
I do not think i understand right Regarding speakers the concept i like best (drivers of course can vary depending on tastes and requirements) is this one from Wilson Audio ... with the head severed from the body
I hate tower louspeakers deeply And also speakers with a too wide front baffle ... and also open baffle on the bass
Hi very interesting post indeed i would say that a great system is the one that really evokes emotion obviously with the right recording
Clearly everything starts from the recording What is not there no system can give it back
Just to be trivial in the old days when the audio fairs were more friendly as a curiosity i brought with me a cd from Telarc with this track here below
We were in the basement where Focal had their top Grand Utopia system with the electrified woofer The very big one
The people were chatting like a in bar Without paying the least attention to the sound coming from the speakers
The Focal guy put on the cd and raise the volume quite a bit ... i can assure that at 2:08 the people stop chatting and started paying attention to the music
That was a good system Great impact clarity ... other systems can do the same of course The ones with big woofers and horns for instance
I think that one fundamental characteristic for a speaker is the ability to provide high SPLs with very little distortion
For this reason it must be big enough to have a 10 but even 12" woofer of good quality
The satellite is not a big issue A good 2way able to reproduce decently the range above 200Hz can be put together quite easily
But the bass is a challenge indeed A big challenge
When i see towers with 2 5" woofers sold as full range speakers i understand how much damage intolerant neighbors and the WAF can do
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Yes Amazon profiles their customers on the basis of their buys I guess Or they can push particular vendors for unknown reasons
Chrome algorithm can be more precise The cronology of the searches can tell one or two things about anyone
As someone already said maybe they are just trying to keep people at home The reason i do not know
To slow down the growth of global entropy perhaps?
Chrome algorithm can be more precise The cronology of the searches can tell one or two things about anyone
As someone already said maybe they are just trying to keep people at home The reason i do not know
To slow down the growth of global entropy perhaps?
^^ Yeah that's the hifi sound, which goes directly into tears almost, feels emotional, takes the attention and make you feel involved, part of the event, right? I think David Griesinger has laid out in his papers about auditory proximity how and when this effect happens. His research is mainly around concert hall / live sound but since the effect is in auditory system I speculate we can directly take it to loudspeaker / playback systems as well, and believe or not it partly explains why certain type amplifiers might sound better, too 🙂
To get the information straight from source and reason yourself, you could watch some of his lectures in Youtube
or go and find his papers with search engines or from his website https://www.davidgriesinger.com/ (seems to be down currently).
In short, it is very important to preserve original harmonics over the playback system chain, from source to ears in order to basically maintain maximal signal to noise ratio when we are listening fragile phantom image with two speakers in a room. When original harmonics of sounds embedded in the recording are well preserved, every fundamental frequency cycle there is huge amplitude peak for that sound as all harmonics align in phase and superimpose, which makes the sound stick out from all the sounds around us. Apparently our auditory system has evolved to pick out sound sources based on this phenomenon / feature of sound, it's part of pitch detection and localization and so on. The sounds that have these loud peaks every fundamental cycle are likely close to us, and thus important. A lurking threat, or perhaps a relative talking nearby, and auditory system generously picks them out from all sounds around us, into our consciousness and gives the required attention. Griesinger says these important sounds get their own neural stream, involuntary attention, and that they are easy to memorize etc, basically it means the brain pays attention to the sound and suppresses the other unimportant sounds around us in favor of this full attention. The other soundscape around us gets another neural stream, background stream, while the important sounds gets fore ground stream. This is what we want with hifi as well, we'd want our brain get the maximum impression for our perception, right, the impact.
Basically, room acoustics, the positioning and loudspeakers themselves should try and maintain the phase/harmonics information, which means we need to carefully set up our stereo triangle with good speakers (not too much group delay, balanced between L/R, balanced and attenuated and delayed early reflections if possible and so on), in order to have brain a chance to get the involuntary attention to phantom center. When the stream separation happens, the phantom image gets pin point localization and clarity, feels involving and goes into emotions. But, too much early reflections, mediocre speakers badly positioned, or just listening too far away so that early reflections overwhelm the direct sound, and the noise level rises (harmonics get lost) and brain cannot do this stream separation anymore and all you hear is of course the music still, but it's just sound from direction of speakers but the brain is not paying attention to it anymore, room and main sound is just one neural stream. This doesn't sound very good perceptually, unless you specifically want it, as it is less involving, less interesting, less clarity, less drawing attention, sometimes we just want relax. Such sound feels hazy as there is no clear localization, it's just not as good as it doesn't involve our brain almost at all, it's sound / noise that our brain feels is not important.
So, if we as listener learn to listen whether our own auditory system is in state of stream separation, or not, we can willingly choose how we want to listen! We can also logically reason about the sound listening with and without the stream separation, by finding the transition distance and then moving a little to hear both sides at will. Conversely, if this phenomenon is not known by a listener, it is very easy to confuse the sound to something else and attribute it to speakers or amplifier or anything, when instead it might be just different listening distance! Imagine, you go into some hifi show room and hear best sound you ever heard, and that is likely you have the stream separation happen there. Now, pay attention to listening distance, what the system DI is, how the system is positioned, what is the acoustics, and so on, it needs to be loud enough as well, since there is noises around, people talking, but as long as your brain pays attention to it it should sound quite nice! And the nicer the better the system is overall. But, if the sound didn't catch your attention, just get yourself closer! It might be the room acoustics and positioning is bad so the involving sound, the stream separation, can happen only at very short listening distance, where direct / room sound ration gets high enough so the brain has a chance to latch in. Either the designer / person who setup the system didn't mind about this stuff. But, if you have it, you now have a chance to judge it against the previous system fairly, since you know your auditory system is in same state.
Now, take your single ended amplifier with high low order HD, what does it do? it amplifies the original harmonics, which should increase signal to noise ratio even more, which should help brain to attach to the sound! Basically, the stream separation is on/ off event, it either is there or not, and if you move closer / further from speakers it's quite easy to detect where the state of auditory system changes in this regard. If you find the transition in your room and setup, I speculate that if you swap in certain amplifier, the transition distance is simply bit further out in the room, while with some other amplifier it's closer to speakers, so either amplifier could sound pretty similar, you'd just might have to reposition the set a bit. Conversely, if there is amounts of higher order distortion, it makes it unrelated to original harmonics, which is basically noise, which reduces brains ability to lock in. Well, perhaps there is more effects from different amplifiers, but this could be one.
A lot of this is just speculation and logic by me, but this is how various aspects of playback systems, makes currently sense to me. I think this is core to the circle of confusion for examle, which one can remove just by knowing which state the auditory system is at, and changing it proactively if wanted (and possible). The transition distance where stream separation happens with a stereo system is my beacon how to root my perception to the particular setup, how to connect perception to written concepts, it's how I can tune my system positioning, it's how I can reason with the sound, come up with listening tests and so on.
There is more to sound, like how colored it is, what is the frequency response balance, how the system and room interacts, how the envelopment feels and so on, but the stream separation is fundamental in the sense that it must happen in order to playback system be registered properly perceptually, for it to go to emotions, by definition. It has quite far fetching effects from hifi show impressions to gear reviews and so on, not much people seem to talk about this stuff, although to me it's absolutely fundamental for great sound. Does it make sense to you?🙂
To get the information straight from source and reason yourself, you could watch some of his lectures in Youtube
In short, it is very important to preserve original harmonics over the playback system chain, from source to ears in order to basically maintain maximal signal to noise ratio when we are listening fragile phantom image with two speakers in a room. When original harmonics of sounds embedded in the recording are well preserved, every fundamental frequency cycle there is huge amplitude peak for that sound as all harmonics align in phase and superimpose, which makes the sound stick out from all the sounds around us. Apparently our auditory system has evolved to pick out sound sources based on this phenomenon / feature of sound, it's part of pitch detection and localization and so on. The sounds that have these loud peaks every fundamental cycle are likely close to us, and thus important. A lurking threat, or perhaps a relative talking nearby, and auditory system generously picks them out from all sounds around us, into our consciousness and gives the required attention. Griesinger says these important sounds get their own neural stream, involuntary attention, and that they are easy to memorize etc, basically it means the brain pays attention to the sound and suppresses the other unimportant sounds around us in favor of this full attention. The other soundscape around us gets another neural stream, background stream, while the important sounds gets fore ground stream. This is what we want with hifi as well, we'd want our brain get the maximum impression for our perception, right, the impact.
Basically, room acoustics, the positioning and loudspeakers themselves should try and maintain the phase/harmonics information, which means we need to carefully set up our stereo triangle with good speakers (not too much group delay, balanced between L/R, balanced and attenuated and delayed early reflections if possible and so on), in order to have brain a chance to get the involuntary attention to phantom center. When the stream separation happens, the phantom image gets pin point localization and clarity, feels involving and goes into emotions. But, too much early reflections, mediocre speakers badly positioned, or just listening too far away so that early reflections overwhelm the direct sound, and the noise level rises (harmonics get lost) and brain cannot do this stream separation anymore and all you hear is of course the music still, but it's just sound from direction of speakers but the brain is not paying attention to it anymore, room and main sound is just one neural stream. This doesn't sound very good perceptually, unless you specifically want it, as it is less involving, less interesting, less clarity, less drawing attention, sometimes we just want relax. Such sound feels hazy as there is no clear localization, it's just not as good as it doesn't involve our brain almost at all, it's sound / noise that our brain feels is not important.
So, if we as listener learn to listen whether our own auditory system is in state of stream separation, or not, we can willingly choose how we want to listen! We can also logically reason about the sound listening with and without the stream separation, by finding the transition distance and then moving a little to hear both sides at will. Conversely, if this phenomenon is not known by a listener, it is very easy to confuse the sound to something else and attribute it to speakers or amplifier or anything, when instead it might be just different listening distance! Imagine, you go into some hifi show room and hear best sound you ever heard, and that is likely you have the stream separation happen there. Now, pay attention to listening distance, what the system DI is, how the system is positioned, what is the acoustics, and so on, it needs to be loud enough as well, since there is noises around, people talking, but as long as your brain pays attention to it it should sound quite nice! And the nicer the better the system is overall. But, if the sound didn't catch your attention, just get yourself closer! It might be the room acoustics and positioning is bad so the involving sound, the stream separation, can happen only at very short listening distance, where direct / room sound ration gets high enough so the brain has a chance to latch in. Either the designer / person who setup the system didn't mind about this stuff. But, if you have it, you now have a chance to judge it against the previous system fairly, since you know your auditory system is in same state.
Now, take your single ended amplifier with high low order HD, what does it do? it amplifies the original harmonics, which should increase signal to noise ratio even more, which should help brain to attach to the sound! Basically, the stream separation is on/ off event, it either is there or not, and if you move closer / further from speakers it's quite easy to detect where the state of auditory system changes in this regard. If you find the transition in your room and setup, I speculate that if you swap in certain amplifier, the transition distance is simply bit further out in the room, while with some other amplifier it's closer to speakers, so either amplifier could sound pretty similar, you'd just might have to reposition the set a bit. Conversely, if there is amounts of higher order distortion, it makes it unrelated to original harmonics, which is basically noise, which reduces brains ability to lock in. Well, perhaps there is more effects from different amplifiers, but this could be one.
A lot of this is just speculation and logic by me, but this is how various aspects of playback systems, makes currently sense to me. I think this is core to the circle of confusion for examle, which one can remove just by knowing which state the auditory system is at, and changing it proactively if wanted (and possible). The transition distance where stream separation happens with a stereo system is my beacon how to root my perception to the particular setup, how to connect perception to written concepts, it's how I can tune my system positioning, it's how I can reason with the sound, come up with listening tests and so on.
There is more to sound, like how colored it is, what is the frequency response balance, how the system and room interacts, how the envelopment feels and so on, but the stream separation is fundamental in the sense that it must happen in order to playback system be registered properly perceptually, for it to go to emotions, by definition. It has quite far fetching effects from hifi show impressions to gear reviews and so on, not much people seem to talk about this stuff, although to me it's absolutely fundamental for great sound. Does it make sense to you?🙂
Hi thank you very much for the very kind advice but it is all too difficult for me to understand
One thing i can understand ... low noise and low THD and maybe great response to SW
I had some noise issues in my system Then i plug all the units on a same decent power strip and the noise went down and the sonic details popped out
We listen to recordings So the first thing to do is to select the recordings so well made that can work as a tool to assess the transparency of an audio chain
Of course the listening room is very important But who can afford a dedicated and treated listening room ? very few i am afraid and lucky them
For instance i have a cd with a very well captured ambience In my home is decent but nothing special Then i listen the same exact cd in a well treated room and the feeling of the hall was very very nice and impressive
So the test is very easy ... select a series of test track and listen the sound that comes out of the speaker
When a very good recording sound so so the problem will not be the recording for sure
When the distortion is high it will show in un unpleasant way for sure And the same for noise Noise is noise not music Unless it is already in the recording In that case nothing can take it out
One thing i can understand ... low noise and low THD and maybe great response to SW
I had some noise issues in my system Then i plug all the units on a same decent power strip and the noise went down and the sonic details popped out
We listen to recordings So the first thing to do is to select the recordings so well made that can work as a tool to assess the transparency of an audio chain
Of course the listening room is very important But who can afford a dedicated and treated listening room ? very few i am afraid and lucky them
For instance i have a cd with a very well captured ambience In my home is decent but nothing special Then i listen the same exact cd in a well treated room and the feeling of the hall was very very nice and impressive
So the test is very easy ... select a series of test track and listen the sound that comes out of the speaker
When a very good recording sound so so the problem will not be the recording for sure
When the distortion is high it will show in un unpleasant way for sure And the same for noise Noise is noise not music Unless it is already in the recording In that case nothing can take it out
I have experienced the best sounds in completely normal living rooms: Mixed furnishings, from cupboard, show case, flowers, small carpet, pictures on the walls, here and there a sculpture. Something like this. Specially audio-furnished rooms sounded rather dead or monotonous.
I would also like to remind that loudspeakers have different imaging sizes and shapes. And since most stereo signals are mono (found on both channels), we first need to position the speakers in relation to each other.
I recommend starting at a distance of half a meter from each other. Listen, and then increase the distance between the speakers to 60 cm. Listen for a while and then move them 70 cm apart. If the sound breaks up, then you have determined the maximum distance. Simply move them a little closer again until the loudspeakers play together harmoniously and homogeneously.
With most compact loudspeakers, this distance is far less than one meter, with very very large floorstanding loudspeakers very very rarely more than 1.5 meters.
The angulation can often be very strong: until you can clearly see the outer walls of the speakers at the listening position.
The distance to the rear wall is determined by the fundamental tone and bass: here too until it is homogeneous and coherent.
Phenomena such as the sweet spot no longer play a role, as the sound is consistent and homogeneous throughout the room.
If you want more stereo now, don't move the speakers apart but move closer to the speakers;-)
I recommend starting at a distance of half a meter from each other. Listen, and then increase the distance between the speakers to 60 cm. Listen for a while and then move them 70 cm apart. If the sound breaks up, then you have determined the maximum distance. Simply move them a little closer again until the loudspeakers play together harmoniously and homogeneously.
With most compact loudspeakers, this distance is far less than one meter, with very very large floorstanding loudspeakers very very rarely more than 1.5 meters.
The angulation can often be very strong: until you can clearly see the outer walls of the speakers at the listening position.
The distance to the rear wall is determined by the fundamental tone and bass: here too until it is homogeneous and coherent.
Phenomena such as the sweet spot no longer play a role, as the sound is consistent and homogeneous throughout the room.
If you want more stereo now, don't move the speakers apart but move closer to the speakers;-)
I think that's what's behind the US ban in Chinese electric cars. Of course, they cant be just a throttle and a brake, they have to have every whiz-bang feature to somehow stand with or above the competition. Just verifying the million or so lines of code running these things - if you get access at all, or what they give you access to is what's actually running - would be a daunting task.
They say it'd be better for China not to know the whereabouts of all consumers of this particular product, for national security purposes. One would think "AI to the rescue" to rapidly reverse engineer executing code at any level to ensure only permissible data is "phoned home". Makes me wonder at times what percentage of up time on my W10 systems is used for this purpose - even with everything in those setup panels no, no, no, no and no.
On thread topic <pant> <pant> - I cant keep up. Of course the speaker is the most important part; I believe it's been fully understood already that nearly any modern amplifier colors sound only at a small, small fraction of what any speaker does. There's even the idea of "we build the tools, then the tools build us" and you can apply that to something like "dome tweeters". Hear enough of those for enough time, perhaps then even the sounds of nature no longer seem "right".
It is to wonder how a tool like AI will "build us", as it becomes as ubiquitous as something like all the cell phones as its portal to us. I assume I'll be long gone before that really taps a solid root into everyone. I dont even recognize social reality anymore with everyone's nose in a screen and everyone tuned out of the present, instead into their wireless earbuds - the infinite entertainment. A statement seen on reddit; "What percentage of your day do you spend gesturing to people to kindly remove their 'buds so you can speak to them" What?! Zero! We used to be able to simply say "hi"...and if the person was bored enough, a conversation could emerge from that.
went too far?🙂 feel free to come back to it at somepoint, if you remember.It was just extension to previous post, how our own auditory system is part of good sounding playback system 🙂
Excellent reflection, difficult to predict.
Easy to catastrophize.
However, like everything, it's also up to one to play his part.
One can always refuse to use it.
Or, one can go and look for all the settings necessary to put a stop to what the Internet steals from his privacy.
But "laziness" often prevails, or the (real) convenience of having everything according to one's tastes.
Which obviously comes at a price.
I quite disagree.
In my opinion, the evaluation of anything that comes under one's senses is predominantly comparative, not absolute.
A great recording remains a great recording and you can't really know how transparent a system is by just listening to that recording or that system.
Let's be clear, I understand you very well, because you are one of those who wants to know everything, and that's okay.
But also I'm waiting to see you put your confusion into practice.
I mean "confusion" in the most beautiful sense of the word. 😉
Hi no i do not want to know everything Actually i want to know something I need to fix some principles rules ... a reference
There is even a disk label called Reference Recordings ... as i said above it is very difficult to extract all what is there in a recording
It is like watching a small object with eyes and with a microscope If you watch it with eyes a clean towel you will not see bacteries/particles that you can spot only with a microscope
Most of the system have a limited resolution power this is my belief
The more resolving is a system the more complete is the experience I am pretty sure that with a very resolving system in a well treated room the listening experience could approach the live feeling Even surpass it More real than real
Consider that for instance when you go to a concert very rarely you are in the best spot to appreciate the concert
And also people near you can cough smell ... fart That is not the live experience that i crave for sure
I would much prefer a cave with only me in the sweet spot enjoying Pavarotti singing in front of me A very moving experience
These reviewers have put in words quite well what i mean
https://www.stereophile.com/content/rockport-technologies-antares-loudspeaker-page-3
https://www.stereophile.com/content/stax-lambda-nova-signature-electrostatic-ear-speaker-page-3
I conclude praising recordings They have been one of the best invention of human mind
I love recordings and actually i even bought a little but nice digital recorder with the idea of recording some friends singing and playing
Never done that But i have great admiration for recording engineers Not the one playing with eq and compressors etc. The purist ones
There is even a disk label called Reference Recordings ... as i said above it is very difficult to extract all what is there in a recording
It is like watching a small object with eyes and with a microscope If you watch it with eyes a clean towel you will not see bacteries/particles that you can spot only with a microscope
Most of the system have a limited resolution power this is my belief
The more resolving is a system the more complete is the experience I am pretty sure that with a very resolving system in a well treated room the listening experience could approach the live feeling Even surpass it More real than real
Consider that for instance when you go to a concert very rarely you are in the best spot to appreciate the concert
And also people near you can cough smell ... fart That is not the live experience that i crave for sure
I would much prefer a cave with only me in the sweet spot enjoying Pavarotti singing in front of me A very moving experience
These reviewers have put in words quite well what i mean
https://www.stereophile.com/content/rockport-technologies-antares-loudspeaker-page-3
https://www.stereophile.com/content/stax-lambda-nova-signature-electrostatic-ear-speaker-page-3
to be transported in another time in another space where the live event occurred
I conclude praising recordings They have been one of the best invention of human mind
I love recordings and actually i even bought a little but nice digital recorder with the idea of recording some friends singing and playing
Never done that But i have great admiration for recording engineers Not the one playing with eq and compressors etc. The purist ones
Yes, taking good recordings is an art. The fashion of putting everything through an equalizer and playing around with the signal is disastrous in terms of sound quality. One example is many recordings from the 80s and 90s. Completely washed out, opaque, brittle, unclear, smeared...-(