The thing is, our brain and ears can't be improved. What has happened is that audio electronics became essentially perfect - it reached, and exceeded, the abilities of the human hearing system.
For expensive, state-of-the-art audio electronics, this happened many decades ago, maybe even the 1960's. (Heck, they were awfully close to perfection in those 1934 experiments we've been discussing! The sound was never recorded and replayed, though, only transmitted live over wires.)
The 1960's were over five decades ago. Semiconductors arrived. New audio designs arrived. Transformers went away. Japanese engineers pushed audio amps to utterly absurd levels of beyond-perfection.
These days, even cheap audio electronics routinely exceeds the capabilities of the human ear/brain system.
So, it is actually impossible to "advance the field" of audio electronics in the sense of providing improved performance. It's already as good as it can ever be!
There will still be engineering advances: we can make things smaller, lighter, cheaper, cooler-running, and so on. All of these are technical advancements, but have nothing to do with the actual quality of sound!
Loudspeakers, stereo, listening rooms, though: there, we still have plenty of room for improvement. Our speakers are still so bad that even with the good ones - studio monitors - no two sound alike, even in an anechoic chamber. We have amps with 0.001% THD and ruler-flat frequency response, but our speakers have 5% - 15% THD, +/- 2 dB or worse frequency response, dispersion that changes drastically with frequency, and all sorts of room interactions.
The problem there is that nobody cares any more. There isn't a big enough market for good speakers to support any serious research effort. Home Hi-Fi is dead. Movie theatres are dying. Even large-scale live music concerts are dying.
So the new focus of research is shrinking speakers down to less than 1.5 cm diameter and 1.5 mm thick, so they'll fit in your shiny new fondle-slab, and then claiming they are "full range speakers". 🙄
-Gnobuddy
Listening levels sorted out
Interesting link. Looks like I can only listen to Jazz and New age in my current environment, realistically. The speakers I use will likely be sensitivity 89 dB/W.
I like the lower powered amplifiers that I have heard - is there anything special about them? I have heard of the 'first Watt' theory.
FIRST WATT FAQ
Interesting link. Looks like I can only listen to Jazz and New age in my current environment, realistically. The speakers I use will likely be sensitivity 89 dB/W.
I like the lower powered amplifiers that I have heard - is there anything special about them? I have heard of the 'first Watt' theory.
FIRST WATT FAQ
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Yes, I agree with all the above.
The idea isn't to "use" playback equipment, but to "test" it against the original sound source.
One would hope that this would help push the state of the art, perhaps more in speaker technology than in other areas.
But I'd have to regrettably agree with Gnobuddy's post. Work such as this could make for one or more AES papers, and maybe some speaker designer/manufacturer will see something that would make its product better (meaning providing a more faithful reproduction), but I can't imagine it having much of an effect in the audio industry.
Gnobuddy is right, all the audio business R&D money is going to make what the general public thinks of as "good hi-fi audio" and to make it cheaper and more available. With Class D and switching supplies, we can make a 7-channel, 100 watts per channel Super-Mega-Surroud-Sound control amplifier with Dolby/THX/Digital this-n-that, and it weighs half what the average 40-watt push-pull tube stereo amp of the 1960s weighs, and it puts out less than 1/10th the heat. Taking inflation into account, it costs a lot less too.
Never mind, as you (plural) were, back to your arguments of the definition(s) of hi-fi ...
You can start a new thread on amp or do a forum search if you are that curious.
So whats your listening levels? From the pictures of speakers you posted looks quite loud.
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Well actually I could not find anything in the search - any threads you know of?
Why? I guess it depends on exactly what you mean by "completely new". As a significant part of any music reproduction system will be amplifying/copying signals you need to decide how to specify the required accuracy for this process, and you need to find out how accurate it needs to be. How is that "completely new"?TNT said:
What is a voltage from a low impedance feeding a high impedance but a "well defined interface"?
To me, your requirement for something completely new looks rather like a simple refusal to admit that what we already have is almost good enough for everyone who actually want sound reproduction, and actually good enough for most people. Of course it would be a bit of a let down to have to admit that people got it more or less right 50 years ago, before some people in this thread were even born!
Because 2 ears are what we have!
And...do you mean THD coming from the electronics or the felt distortion of reality coming from bad reproduction ? That goes to another level and you can't measure it ( like the numbers from 0 to 1.. or 0 and 0.0000000000001 <:how many are in between ?)
And...do you mean THD coming from the electronics or the felt distortion of reality coming from bad reproduction ? That goes to another level and you can't measure it ( like the numbers from 0 to 1.. or 0 and 0.0000000000001 <:how many are in between ?)
For a particular sort of counter example, brains can learn to hear more, as evidenced by the training mastering engineers undergo in order to be able to do their work.
Overall I would say, Gnobuddy, my friend, your opinion, while well stated, omits facts that might be dis-confirming to the conclusion reached. Thus, it was not completely evenhanded.
I have 2 ears.TNT said:
Who mentioned 0.01%? Certainly not me.
OK, you want something different from low distortion stereo. What do you suggest instead? Mono? High distortion 3-channel? Brain implants? What about the back catalogue, which is mainly fairly low distortion stereo?
Keep in mind that there are posters who are not sober while interacting on forums.
Ah but Mark, this stuff that master masterers can hear, even the old grey haired ones may not be 0.00001% distortion. Just because brain DSP can do more with what the ear receives does not mean in a controlled test untrained johnny cloth ears might not do better.
Yes, I understand, but playback equipment is needed to evaluate the recorded part of the live v recorded music for rather obvious reason. And selection of such has to be undertaken with the utmost care I think.
In the end I tend to think this "test" is not overly helpful in that the results are more of "live" v "particular playback system" than anything. Although a different playback system would likely yield somewhat the same results.
Or the results tend to be like what Nico described in his post #988.
Also, and as was shown in the 1934 tests, the live v recorded test must be done in identical rooms. For a string quartet everything could maybe be done in the same room. And then how well does this room correlate to a music room in a typical house.
But since my post got me accused of being indifferent to hi fi, maybe I'm looking at this all wrongly.
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Keep in mind that there are posters who are not sober while interacting on forums.
Why u pickin on me? I been quiet.
Could be. We need to do more testing to find out. If we could just find a rich audiophile to endow a university chair in that type of research. I'm sure the dean would go along if enough money were involved, at least they usually do. 😛
Shocking fact: tens of thousands of unsophisticated listeners happily listened to 20% THD without noticing it (that's about the amount of tracing distortion you get from a conical stylus playing high frequencies near the centre of an LP.)
The linear speed of the groove is lower here, so recorded wavelengths are shorter, which is why tracing distortion is worst near the centre of a record. To me, as a kid, records almost always sounded harsh near the centre. Even so, I was shocked when I read this amazing little book called "Pickups - The Key To Hi-Fi" and found out just how much distortion was actually being generated just by tracing distortion alone.
It wasn't just records. Remember cassettes? Double-digit distortion percentages were quite common with cassettes, too. Particularly on pre-recorded cassettes, which usually combined the cheapest quality tape with excessively high recording levels, pushing the tape well into saturation - and extreme levels of distortion.
Now, if you ear-trained those listeners, how much better might they get at detecting distortion? Could they double their sensitivity to 10%? Quadruple it, to 5%? Make a staggering tenfold improvement (one order of magnitude), to 1%? Make an utterly implausible hundredfold improvement to 0.1%?
Look at it this way. An untrained teenage boy can probably jump 15 feet in the long jump. If you took a thousand boys like this, and trained them, surely many would reach 20 feet. Perhaps a handful might reach 25 ft. How many would jump 30 feet? So far, no human has ever managed it!
So, when it comes to long-jumping, training can't even double the performance of an untrained person. Never mind quadrupling it (a 60 ft long-jump), or doing ten times better (a 150 foot jump).
Hearing isn't jumping. But can we plausibly expect that ear-training will do much better than, maybe, doubling our untrained ability?
Personally, I don't think it's plausible that a group of people who didn't notice 20% distortion can be trained to the point where they can now hear 0.1% THD. I'm also not aware of any well-conducted double-blind studies that show otherwise.
Well, most audio electronics dropped below 1% THD decades ago. Then below 0.1%. Cheap chip amps have been well below 0.1% THD for a cuple of decades now.
The evidence is that audio electronics reached audible perfection decades ago. We also got rid of many of the imperfect mechanical links in the chain - (record) cutting lathes, record playback cartridges. The biggest remaing weakness now are the two remaining electro-mechanical devices: speakers, and microphones. (There are nearly perfect measurement microphones, but they are not popular in music recording. Extremely imperfect microphones like those ancient WWII Neumans are the ones that artists and producers and recording engineers want.)
I certainly didn't intend to deliberately omit facts that I knew. But it's certainly quite possible I wasn't completely evenhanded - what human being can ever be completely evenhanded? As we've discussed extensively on this thread, humans have biases. I can't be the lone exception among 7.5 billion of us! 😀
Anyway, I don't expect to influence anyone else, but as far as I'm concerned, any old audio amp, CD player, and computer sound card is far more than good enough, far better than my hearing abilities.
But speakers - there, I can, and do, hear serious flaws in the vast majority of them.
It took a while, but I found acceptably good sound with a pair of Alesis near-field monitors matched with a Velodyne subwoofer. Not flawless, certainly, but good enough (TM). 🙂
But nobody wants to hear an audiophile story with a happy ending, right? 😀
-Gnobuddy
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