In the 1980s I used to go to BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall. Some evenings I stayed at home and listened to the live relay on Radio 3. I heard the same hall; not exactly (hi-fi is not exact, but merely 'high') but good enough. It was a convincing, although imperfect, illusion.Charles Darwin said:
When talking about the meanings of words I usually find dealing with semantics is quite useful. When determining what was needed for hi-fi the listeners were not offered a choice; they were asked 'is it real, or it is recorded?'. As the electrical specifications were improved a greater proportion of listeners found that the two were indistinguishable. Checking for preferences was a separate exercise, possibly done on a different occasion.Jakob2 said:
Agreed. Nothing to do with hi-fi though, as that avoids specifying what a particular listener will prefer.
I never said they are common. Sadly, they seem to be all too rare, as I said in an earlier post. If they were common then at least some of this debate would get blown away by facts.
That is my approach too. Problems arise when one makes assumptions coloured by personal preference about what they think it was meant to sound like.
The Mona Lisa is there to be enjoyed - the brush strokes, the composition, the lighting effects, etc etc. Not very realistic though is it? Soundstage is soooo flat! It's a really really bad likeness of a woman! I can't stand looking at it any more!
Look at an image on my computer screen and I have different concerns about it's reproduction - nothing about whether it's a good recreation of a real human experience, but whether it looks like the painting.
Same goes with music - does it sound like the recording that was made? It is not about how realistic that recording is to a real experience because that is beyond the scope and intention of the source (unless you are assessing someone's spurious claim about the recording, or equipment ).
EDIT: changed the last sentence a bit so it reflects what I really meant.
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NATDBERG, A synth wired directly into a console might be considered artificial, though, in the sense that there is no sound coming out of the synth itself to walk up and hear.
Think I agree. Stereo is about convenience and practicality and for multiple people to listen at once. It's good and very enjoyable. It is extremely good at conveying a MUSICAL experience.
But it is not there to recreate some holographic experience. It never really was. The claim that is does is massive hyperbole but let's be fair to the pioneers of stereo, that in comparison to what was previously available it was a great step forward toward that hologram.
Binaural is as close as I've heard for a sonic hologram, even on what I would call low end headphones.
Complicite (a theatre company) put on a show where you wore headphones throughout, playing you binaurally recorded sounds and situations. They merged some live binaural sound with recorded sound and when the guy on stage just stopped walking around the binaural head but the what you heard continued his walking around..... wow, it was only the visual cue that told you something was wrong. At points his binaurally recorded children would run on stage and interact with his live recorded binaural sound.
Only thing they had to add was big seat rumbling reinforcement probably from about 200Hz down ( I was taking the headphones off to compare his direct live sound and the reinforcment to what was being recreated in my ears.
But binaural is not needed for listening to music and enjoying it to the fullest. It would be a disctraction to be honest! People use hifi for music mostly, even if some of us (minority) want some kind of Holodeck in their homes (that's a Star Trek thing).
So, in my view, if you want to be realistic about it and ignoring binaural, high fidelity is about a mono speaker recreating a mono recording, replaying what the mic picked up at that single point. Then it is up to you to place as many speakers as there were mics in a particular arrangement. Anything else (e.g. stereo) is being lazy/practical.
If someone is performing on stage and you start mimbling out the audience to climb on stage and stick your head in the piano then you are likely to get a burly man dragging you off to a quiet corner until the police arrive. So for me I stand by the fact that it's artificial in that I cannot experience this unless I win the lottery and persuade Nils Frahm I am not a nutter for wanting a special concert with my head in the piano.
And this is ignoring the 130dB SPL you can get close up.
It might be considered that by people who are obsessed with the idea of things not being real unless they personally experience them. A conceptial image of being ABLE to be there and hear it is a kind of extension to that obsession.
Some poeple are like that with concepts of space or if the earth is flat or not. Unless they experience some earth curvature themselves they say they are "open minded" about the idea of a round earth but have no direct evidence.
A microphone creates the electrical signal itself. It is generated completely by the microphone. The microphone responds to the air movement, yes, but the signal is generated by machinery. What is different between that and a signal generated by other types of electronics?
And here we have the same with light - we might think that light through a window is the same light all the way through but it isn't, it's just generated by the last layer of atoms in the glass and transmitted to us. but we still commonly consider it to be the same light. :
How we consider these things is not a matter of reality but more a matter of semantics and philosphical convention.
Once you realise that light is generated by a mirror and not simply reflected as per the common understanding then you begin to look at generated sound waves in a different err... "light" too!
For me, the signal a synth generates is still real for the above reason - it has just bypassed the colouration of the microphone. and therefore, effectively it is closer to the original! Confused? You will be..
It seems like you are changing definitions. For Bill you said he could walk up and hear the sound from the piano, so it would not be artificial. If that is the criterion for artificial or not then the synth does not meet it. If real is defined as anything that can be made to occur on a Redbook CD, then fine. But that's not the way you explained it to Bill.
I have no obsession one way or the other. And I understand how mirrors work. I'm just asking about the definition you want to stick with.
I have no obsession one way or the other. And I understand how mirrors work. I'm just asking about the definition you want to stick with.
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Here we differ, but that's fine. Not like there is a lot of choice YET. As the recent AES headphone boondoggle* in NL showed there is some proper research being done into 3D effects with headphones going on as more people listen with headphones now that any other method.
*Those who think headphones are not hifi will consider it a boondoggle. Me. I love my stats.
I know what you are saying but "artificial" is not the word. It is just that your judgment is blinkered by your own personal experience. You don't know the experience so you can't judge it and therefore it sounds like you dismiss it?
You can have that head-in-piano experience if you want to - there are pianos everywhere, just have to engineer the situation if you're motivated enough. Doesn't have to be specifically Nils playing. See a grand, open up the lid put your head in and ask someone to play - all it takes!
A recording artist conveys THEIR experiences very often and you don't have to have had the exact same sonic experiences for those recordings to be very real. Every play I've ever been to has been about something I've never experienced but I would say a lot of them have been acted very realistically and convincingly. That is a big point of art in general - other people's experiences conveyed to you.
If the artists/producers intention is to give that impression then you will get a more or less close representation thereof within the limits of stereos abilities.
What stereo can do if realism is the aim is to figuratively open a window in your room to the venue. It can not overlay the venues acoustics onto your listening room. If that is your aim you have to go beyond traditional stereo into binaural, multi channel surround or Ambisonics.
(I don't know much about Ambisonics and will read up on it. My only contact so far has been via the Calrec-made Soundfield mic which is a stunning piece of kit.)
If I were to replace 'artificial' with 'contrived' would that be better?
Random punter tinkling whilst I have my head inside does not recreate the concert experience of X playing in Y hall with Z orchestra. Which is my PERSONAL reference for classical music written to be performed to an audience.
Other contrived sonic events are available and can be equally enjoyable but you can't have 300 people with their head in a piano at the same time. The whole 'going to a concert' the build up, the drinks before, the hoping for wild xxx when you get the other half home are all part of the 'experience' . You can't recreate the expectation but you can try and get the hall sound so you feel as if you are in the concert hall and let your brain fill the rest in.
I'll stop there as this could end up getting Freudian. 🙂
Random punter tinkling whilst I have my head inside does not recreate the concert experience of X playing in Y hall with Z orchestra. Which is my PERSONAL reference for classical music written to be performed to an audience.
Other contrived sonic events are available and can be equally enjoyable but you can't have 300 people with their head in a piano at the same time. The whole 'going to a concert' the build up, the drinks before, the hoping for wild xxx when you get the other half home are all part of the 'experience' . You can't recreate the expectation but you can try and get the hall sound so you feel as if you are in the concert hall and let your brain fill the rest in.
I'll stop there as this could end up getting Freudian. 🙂
Seems like I posted a couple of pages from the book, The Righteous Mind, previously in another thread. Its rather interesting stuff about people in general, so maybe try it again here.
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The beauty of the recording art is that you potentially can have millions of people with their head in the piano all in the comforts of their own home.
You don't have to but since Pet Sounds and Sgt Pepper it has become a possibility. ;-)
Bill was talking about an artificial experience, not an artificial sound source. hence the different take.
On the other subject, as someone who is interested in recording techniques and deliberate colouration via use of equipment - that is how the recording industry artists and engineers mostly think of things themeslves, part of the palette in creating the sound - the equipment is part of the sound. That includes the microphones, mic pres, the mixer etc etc etc.
What you attempt to recreate via your hifi is the sound of ALL of this. The electrical signal reaching the media. So the electrical signal generated by the mic-preamp is no less valid than the signal from any other processing. And in the same way, the electrical signal from a synth is just as valid as the signal from a microphone.
Forget everything that goes before the media you play - every single effect and synth and microphone used IS the sound. It is not destroying or compromising the sound, IS the sound.
The point you judge fidelity is from the media you stick into your set up. How you judge whether it sounds like it should is up to you, but from a philosphical point I think it begins there.
Practically speaking it is difficult to judge and therefore we fall into this acoustic, real experience comparison. Doesn't make any other non-acoustic sound any less real or valid, it is just that they are hard to use as a tool for comparison.
Well, here's a thing. I ordered it and it arrived today, so I tried to rip it to my NAS for streaming. And it appears to have been copyright watermarked. I couldn't rip it to the computer, but I WAS able to burn a CD-R and than rip that!
How does that work, then? 😕
Admittedly I am pretty computer illiterate! 🙄
Reference source has not changed.
What you call "obvious" is just your opinion. They are not obvious at all, in my opinion. Since you didn't answer my question on why, I'll ask another one, do you sell electronics or have ties to those that do?
You misunderstood my reply. When you wrote, "preferred by a certain listener" that listener would include the recording engineers who were there during the recording session. Their memory capacity would serve well when it's time to evaluate the replayed sound.
Again, you are mixing the term hi-fi with a term mentioned by another poster, perfect-fi. The degree of fidelity is what the term is, high level in this case. Sure it would be better if higher but there are practicality factors come into play in real world. What we have on the market is made through the next best thing. If you don't like it, go to concerts.
Pardon my off topic response but if beings that are advanced enough to travel many (or even hundreds) light years to earth, they wouldn't bother to play with our primitive (in their standard) contraptions.
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