Agreed. I'm not sure much has changed since page 20 or so of this thread, really. In just the same way that the real requirements for good audio reproduction haven't changed very much since 1950, and have hardly changed at all since 1980. That was 35 years ago!🙂
-Gnobuddy
Interesting. I wonder how it was done. In a theater with the speakers and performers behind a scrim?
If something like that, then maybe so. Enough room reflections and distance-related HF attenuation to obscure details. There is typically some obscuration due to a scrim, as well, if present.
Although, I would expect some people who like to go to the symphony today to hear the real thing wouldn't like to think they could be fooled so easily.
Hard to understand how such a test could have been done with near field monitors, at the other extreme. Aside from the difficultly of hiding live musicians, no reflections or HF loss to obscure the sound.
Also, I would expect it easier to fool people at high volumes. Some of the most sensitive listening is done at low volumes. Although, far enough away from the source and it might not matter.
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Some Of us don't take ourselves too seriously. The subject, yes, our exalted position, no.
Jakob2's original link is quoted in my post (#891) if you feel like reading the symposium (a collection of papers in one PDF).
The big 1934 event was using a three-channel audio system (left, center right) in one concert hall to reproduce the symphony orchestra playing, at the same time, in a different concert hall miles away. But that big finish was based on a lot of separate research programs, each with it's own research paper in that one single symposium PDF.
One of the papers discusses attempts to recreate positioning of sounds on a stage using loudspeakers. Fascinatingly, people in the audience (behind a scrim, as you said) didn't do terribly well at placing actual (human) speakers on the stage, particularly when it came to depth positioning. The researchers found that using three loudspeakers (left, center, right) allowed reasonably accurate lateral and depth positioning - but they concluded that two speakers was insufficient.
I expect so. Nobody likes finding out how limited one's own abilities actually are!
There have been a few times when I thought I could hear something in reproduced audio, got a friend to help me do a blind test, and found out I was merely imagining things.
I didn't like it either, but that's the beauty of the scientific method. It doesn't tell you what you'd like to hear, it tells you the truth! 🙂
Very true. One of the papers even referred to the need for considerable distance between speakers and audience (I think it was around 30 feet!) to allow the sound from the three audio channels to integrate and provide the illusion of an actual orchestra spread across the stage.
There was also a mention that it was necessary for both the original performance space, and the reproduction space, to be about the same size (both were actual concert halls). Back in 1934, nobody gave serious credence to the belief that you could convincingly reproduce a symphony orchestra in a tiny living room. Probably with very good reason!
Remember, this was very high dynamic range symphonic music. Very soft, very loud, and everything in between.
My own experience is that my ears become deafened and less discriminatory at very high volumes. But also less discriminatory at very low volumes - no surprise, since we know our hearing suffers badly at low volumes, severely losing the ability to hear both low and high frequencies (Fletcher-Munson contours).
I would not be the slightest bit surprised if it turned out that our ears are, in fact, at their most capable, for sound levels roughly comparable to the natural ambient noise levels on the African savannas where our ancestors evolved.
-Gnobuddy
Okay, given that people probably can be fooled under certain conditions, including being a fairly long distance away from speakers, and in a reverberant concert hall enviornment, where a problem may then arise is when people make general claims in forums that people can't tell live music from recordings, without specifying the conditions under which that might be true.
Not saying it happened here, but it seems that it has happened in the heat of various arguments at times.
Anyway then, are the standards for what it takes to accomplish Hi-Fi different close up in a living room, or using headphones, as compared to 30' away in a concert hall?
It seems to me they might be, and most likely are.
Not saying it happened here, but it seems that it has happened in the heat of various arguments at times.
Anyway then, are the standards for what it takes to accomplish Hi-Fi different close up in a living room, or using headphones, as compared to 30' away in a concert hall?
It seems to me they might be, and most likely are.
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Me too - although I have always been accepting of it rather than not liking it. As I've always been aware of it since becoming interested in hifi, it became so frustrating to read people on forums insisting that everything they think they hear is the truth and really was there..
I only get to do pseudo blind tests where I switch so much I forget which is which and then find the imagined sound is now on the opposite source.
While it is very true that people can and do imagine hearing things from a stereo, it's also true that trained mastering engineers can hear details most untrained people can't. Let's not throw every report into the same bucket, just because so many are not trained and may not have reproduction systems as good as they might wish to believe (as least as compared to what might be found in a mastering room), that doesn't mean only the lowest possible denominator of hearing is what is truly possible.
I missed the cites on that (and still haven't got the living room to myself to do the tambourine test). But just to be clear we are not talking about training making the ear any more sensitive, just tweeking the DSP in the brain in the same way that any training forges new synaptic links?
Good point. The most popular mastering speaker is Dunlavy, which is truly time / phase aligned, while 99.99% of the consumer speakers are NOT time aligned. In this regard, I don't think we can call our speakers HiFi, because trained ears can clearly hear the difference between time aligned and not, and it is measurable as well.
Hifi is a dated term from the days when audio was an expensive hobby, so you could be correct. TV sets today would qualify as hifi.
Hi-Fi is a term that dates to the 1930s (1938?).
If tv audio is Hi-Fi, why can I understand it better when played through an external amp and speakers? The electronics may have low distortion and wide bandwidth, but the speaker suck!
My daughter is waiting for me to finish her amp to use with her TV. I just hooked it up to a Dac to it and am driving it from my linux system, and it sounds pretty good through a set of FE125WK ported speakers like the pair I made her and her husband.
If tv audio is Hi-Fi, why can I understand it better when played through an external amp and speakers? The electronics may have low distortion and wide bandwidth, but the speaker suck!
My daughter is waiting for me to finish her amp to use with her TV. I just hooked it up to a Dac to it and am driving it from my linux system, and it sounds pretty good through a set of FE125WK ported speakers like the pair I made her and her husband.
I certainly hope so. We can improve the internal DSP to an extent, for sure.
But we certainly can't train our eyes to see as well as an eagle's, or train our digestive system to match the ability of a goat's. We would have to be rather silly to imagine we could train our ears to be literally more sensitive than nature created them.
I have the impression that some people acquire a (mental DSP) bias towards one sense or the other while they're still very young. For me, as for many musicians and mix engineers, the bias is towards hearing. For another person, it might be towards visual processing, and that person is more likely to end up an artist, photographer, costume designer, or something along those lines.
When I say I have a bias towards hearing, I mean by this that I tend to notice things about sound that most people around me don't notice. Not that I have magical hearing abilities beyond the normal ability of the human race. 🙂
-Gnobuddy
I was about to make a similar comment. When flat-screen TVs arrived, speakers shrank to absurdly small sizes. In many cases, even the pretense of any sort of actual bass response disappeared.
The process has gone to its absurd limit in contemporary tablets and phones. The built in speaker often sounds as though there is almost no output below 2 or 3 kHz. Even so, it's not uncommon to see someone watching, say, a You Tube clip on their phone, without earbuds or headphones.
When I was a kid, a couple of our neighbours still had old 1950's era valve AM radios in regular use. Decades-old memories are untrustworthy, but my impression is that many of today's TVs have less pleasant sound than a 1955 table-top AM radio - and certainly, far less bass response.
-Gnobuddy
I would certainly agree with that, unless some new research were to come along to demonstrate something else, or perhaps, multiple factors working together.
If you can't measure it, at least in principle, you are not doing engineering. Audio electronics is a branch of engineering.awkwardbydesign said:
Yes. That is a good thing. Who could object to making something easier, apart from those who for some reason want to keep it complicated? Reasons for complication:
- someone can make more money
- someone can boast
- someone can feel different from the crowd
Sadly, you are right. A lot of very mid-fi equipment gets called hi-fi.stvnharr said:
Yes, but that is of little interest for this discussion. The issue is not what some official body says is hi-fi, but what do careful listenings tests say is hi-fi i.e. we are talking about science/engineering rather than consumer protection. In an ideal world the science would inform and constrain the marketplace.
The frequency response of am radio is typically 40HZ to 5KHZ and the one note bass of an open back cabinet adds up to, well..........
The devil is design, everything must look neat, so loudspeakers are shrunken and moved to the sides of the frame instead of facing the human being. These loudspeakers do not beam rite, and the little beaming they do goes into the wrong direction. Furthermore, the stuff still does not come with a center channel, so all important content, which is usually mono, such as talk is impaired by deep interferences. Therefore people need to turn up volume, and loudspeakers do not burn, because voice coils have grown, driven by Neodym and Class-D. Fifty years ago Die Zeit wrote, that even mono content sounds better when played over a stereo, which they had defined as two loudspeakers placed quite far apart. This is untrue, at least above the bass range, due to interferences. Within the bass range, multiple loudspeakers may improve things, but only if adjacent loudspeakers are not farer apart from one another than half a wavelength.
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