Georg Neumann GmbH - Products/Current Microphones/KU 100/Description
This will do exactly what you described. Two microphones and no processing required, just headphones to listen to what's been recorded. Or in-ear mics like these:
BSM-8 True & Natural Hook On In-Ear Binaural Stereo Microphones: Discount Discs
Hold on a second...you're not on your laptop sitting in front of your stereo listening to tunes while posting??? Sheesh. I am😉.
Not critically mind you...but XM works just fine for this (or my XDR-F1HD)
Sorry AJ, I have to actually walk from the TV showing the olympics to the office where the computer is to ensure the quality of this thread doesn't drop off the map. I'm glad you're helping. Heck without you, I might not be needed around here.
Back to the olympics. I see your team is leading my team by a few medals.
I set up hundred of systems over the years and travel a lot.
I do not feel that i live in a cocoon.
Most of us working on realistic sound disagree in the details but when we hear good sound we can recocnise that.
I did not have a single person in my listening rooms that was not genuinly impressed about the sound i got. I am playing cheap systems, i am playing expensive systems, i mix and match. One party trick of mine was to use the cheapest CREEK amp ( the one with the green lettering in an MDF case with plastic veneer) to develop the Medea. A speaker that cost 40.000,- DM in the early 90th. I used a Platine Verdier Turntable and put the amp under a blanket. When i lifted the blanked, listeners where quite shocked.
And my system does not sound the same all the time. I am testing a lot of prototyps.
Basic realism is acceavable with very little expense nowerday and i always had a weak spot for small systems that sound good. I also love DIY out of a lot of reasons.
I have a different problem i encounter that may surprise you.
I am known in my quarters as beeing very strict and measurement and simulation based.
Most typical audiophiles experience me as too scientific !
I do not feel that i live in a cocoon.
Most of us working on realistic sound disagree in the details but when we hear good sound we can recocnise that.
I did not have a single person in my listening rooms that was not genuinly impressed about the sound i got. I am playing cheap systems, i am playing expensive systems, i mix and match. One party trick of mine was to use the cheapest CREEK amp ( the one with the green lettering in an MDF case with plastic veneer) to develop the Medea. A speaker that cost 40.000,- DM in the early 90th. I used a Platine Verdier Turntable and put the amp under a blanket. When i lifted the blanked, listeners where quite shocked.
And my system does not sound the same all the time. I am testing a lot of prototyps.
Basic realism is acceavable with very little expense nowerday and i always had a weak spot for small systems that sound good. I also love DIY out of a lot of reasons.
I have a different problem i encounter that may surprise you.
I am known in my quarters as beeing very strict and measurement and simulation based.
Most typical audiophiles experience me as too scientific !
You are putting words in my mouth. Look back, I never said that. I never even stated that I've heard Genelec speakers. 😉
Ah, pro audio mags and reviews don't accept ads or bribes, I see......
You haven't cleared up anything, sorry.
FWIW, I do remember a very nice mixing console that came out in the 90s. The literature DID talk about high quality caps, clean signal paths, low phase error and other such things that I was very surprised to see in pro audio lit. Sounded like audiophile talk to me.
And you know what? I was a great sounding console. Really was.
Having done a lot of correlation attempts between what we hear and what we measure, if the "what we hear" is not done blind, then it needs to be thrown out immediately, since in the end it will almost always be misleading and inaccurate. I have learned volumes by trying to find out how to measure "what we hear", but be very clear that the "what we hear" that I am refering to must be a double blind group average of perceptions and not any single persons visible listening test. Correlations with measurements of the later is an entirely pointless endeaveour to attempt.
It is sometimes hard to decide who is an objectivist and who might be a subjectivist. 🙂
I am not sure, that the marketing loves this situation, it might be just the fact, that results of double blind tests for example are more addressing the ratio of a customer and marketing people simply know that emotional reasons sell better.
I´d say that is the reason why in other product groups where test results do exist they nevertheless weren´t so much used in marketing. An exception was of course the famous pepsi/cola thing, but even that expired one day.
I would further argue that the reliability of the human sensory system isn´t a matter of black and white. It is prone to errors, but one shouldn´t dismiss the the subjective evaluation.
It is an interesting fact, that in so many fields, where subjective evaluation plays an important rule, the producers/inventors obviously don´t have to rely on controlled double blind testing to get very good results.
Just for example take small manufacturers of acoustical instruments, take great cooks vs. food industry. While the latter heavenly relies on controlled tests (my opinion is not always to better the quality 🙂 ), the appraised star cooks doesn´t seem to need them.
Take tea tasters in factories, small groups of 3 or 4 persons tasting literally hundreds of different flavors in a row, only relying on their knowledge and their senses.
These are examples where sheer subjective evaluation obviously works; error free? Presumably not, but invalid? Certainly not either.
Of course it doesn´t meet scientific requirements, but we shouldn´t dismiss it; just take these experiences as working hypothesis.
Wishes
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Tea tasting, beer tasting, whatever, is a subject that does not have a reference. There is no "perfect" beer or tea. But audio is a "reproduction", a recreation of an event and there is a perfect reproduction. This makes its "subjective" preceptual relationship quite different than that for wine, etc. If you believe, as many subjectivists do, that the evaluation process is purely a matter of taste, of "what I like", that it is independent of "accuracy", then "personal taste" is all that matters, but then it's not "Hi-Fi" and not what I am talking about.
Really?
Gee - I must have missed that.
Can you provide a link to an example?
Just one???
Hmm... the diyAudio search function must be broken, I can't seem to find that anywhere in this thread (except in your post).🙄
Hmmm... I use to think so, too. But now I'm not sure at all.
I mean, what would that perfect reproduction be? How would you define it?
Sean Olive is a subjectivist? While I agree with you in principle I've yet to see listening tests that aren't preference based. If you know of any, I'ld love to read some that compare, say, a loudspeaker to even the simplest repeatable live sound: a whistle, a snare hit, triangle.....
While that is certainly a point, i´d nevertheless think that it is a different topic; stereophonic reproduction is (as we all know) a totally illusionary thing, that might have an inherent appeal of reality.
Some aspects can be reproduced with quite high accuracy while others are obviously out of reach.
Multichannel reproduction can be better and we have to wait what wave synthesis might be able to do.
But in the same moment that we try to capture a real sound event with a microphone we step into a circle of uncertainty; we try to approximate reality, but have limited possibilities and therefore, yes up to a certain degree it is a matter of personal taste what kind of errors (and what amount) of errors seem to be acceptable/bearable.
But the point of my argument was, that human senses (because combined with brain activity to form a perception) are of course not working perfectly, but obviously a lot of professional work is done by people that have to rely on their sense and have to produce repeatable results.
While a certain taste might be unique, once it is established it normally works as a reference and future taste impressions will be compared to this reference.
But what about the mentioned manufacturers of acoustic instruments, conductors trying to get the best sound quality from the string section of their orchestra; recording engineers creating the sound illusions, that tries to mimic reality?
I´d argue that all this work couldn´t be done, if the human sense works in such a unreliable way that everything has to be thrown away if not done in a controlled test. That would just not reflect reality in a proper way.
But of course it must be possible to reproduce these results in controlled tests, but sometimes it takes a bit more effort to find the right test conditions then just to involve the same test design that was used over and over.
Wishes
What i like is the tests that where done in england in the 50th.
A live concert was set up and recorded. Then it was played back in the same room over speakers. That whould be a kind of reality test.
Cabasse was doing that too and i attended a performance ( that must have been in the 90th).
The problem with that test is that it is not played back in the listening room and the exitement of the event made the audible differences quite small. i sat quite far in the audience. Maybe in the 15th row of a big hall that was setup like an amphitheater.
The brain seems to fill in the missing information that it has just gathered during the life event.
A live concert was set up and recorded. Then it was played back in the same room over speakers. That whould be a kind of reality test.
Cabasse was doing that too and i attended a performance ( that must have been in the 90th).
The problem with that test is that it is not played back in the listening room and the exitement of the event made the audible differences quite small. i sat quite far in the audience. Maybe in the 15th row of a big hall that was setup like an amphitheater.
The brain seems to fill in the missing information that it has just gathered during the life event.
An interesting and telling assessment. So, you brain tricked your ears then?
Stereo is surround sound and wave synthesis (to an extent) people just haven't realized it yet.
I brought that up way back in the thread that Wharfedale with QUAD amplification did that live vs recorded thing. I was also trying to figure out how they cheated. The best explanation on how they cheated is that Briggs used live instruments with the roughly the same directivity as the speakers he was using.
As far as reproduction goes I don't think it will be "perfect" until I can conjure Jimi Hendrix in the middle of my living room to perform a personal concert and smoke a doobie with me afterwards.
While I'm being redundant a relink to my favorite lecture on reproduction. Alan Watts on Reproduction.mkv - 24.02MB
I brought that up way back in the thread that Wharfedale with QUAD amplification did that live vs recorded thing. I was also trying to figure out how they cheated. The best explanation on how they cheated is that Briggs used live instruments with the roughly the same directivity as the speakers he was using.
As far as reproduction goes I don't think it will be "perfect" until I can conjure Jimi Hendrix in the middle of my living room to perform a personal concert and smoke a doobie with me afterwards.
While I'm being redundant a relink to my favorite lecture on reproduction. Alan Watts on Reproduction.mkv - 24.02MB
Not at all. The ears monitored the event and the brain filled in what it wanted. This is all well known stuff. If you guys are still arguing about this sort of thing the next thing you're likely to argue about is that cables make a big difference.
While I agree with your assessment of whats happening Cal, I'd suggest the existance of this thread is proof that its NOT well known, or more likely not universally acknowledged.
This effect is the one thing that explains satisfactorily the various differences "heard" in cables and the conditions under which those who claim to hear differences can or can't hear them.
I suspect thats your point.
Sense of sight easily overrides our sense of hearing. Nothing new. That's why sighted listening tests are pretty useless: Audio Musings by Sean Olive: The Dishonesty of Sighted Listening Tests
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