Well, I believe that this way of thinking is a erroneous & why there are many disagreements. We can judge the relative portrayal by different systems of an acoustic illusion without having experienced the original performance (if such a performance existed). One example of this is the blind listening tests of speakers conducted by Harman - ALL (normal hearing) groups scored their preferences in the same order. What this tells me is that our auditory perception evaluates the signals according to the same inbuilt analysis & come to the same conclusions irrespective of whether they heard the music before (or were at the original performance).
The same evaluation criteria exists in evaluating any reproduction of an audio event - we can judge the relative realism because our auditory perceptual mechanism has this ability learned through exposure to the many examples of sound behavior in the real world. Much the same as we evaluate the illusion of images on TV, we can evaluate which produces a more realistic illusion by reference to our internal perceptual models related to sight
You miss the possibility that we could stumble upon something that produces more realism without intentionally planning it & this is why I say we are missing an opportunity for investigating what these factors might be - instead of dismissing them as "pleasing distortions"
This might be just a confusion - maybe the term "accuracy", to people in the "illusion camp", actually mean accuracy to how realistic the illusion is being perceived by them?
Yes, added distortion is not a good thing and it does not help and does not make "better" sound. It is a false belief of some people that it could make a better sound. The case is much more complicated and people tend to find wrong (and simple) causation of sound difference.
Or someone who is very curious as to why these factors are being perceived as a better illusion from their playback system?
from one narrow perspective, it would seem so, wouldn't it & yet.....
I didn't say anything about measurements - in fact I would love to see measurements that better match to what we hear & my whole argument is to try to move towards that.
There is the idea that the more you listen to live music and real world sounds generally the greater your ability to perceive the reproduced sound as more realistic. This should be regularly refreshed
Probably so but I think at a certain age we have laid down the internal models for how sounds behave in the real world & can judge reproduced sounds with this framework of auditory models.
I've no doubt that people who work with music on a daily basis are more confident & nuanced in their evaluations but I still believe we all have a certain level of auditory evaluation 'expertise' - we are steeped in a continuous flow of real world sounds on a daily basis - hard to not internalize this
But I also remember Katz talk about comparing headphone amplifiers, not just bad mastering
"We'll be comparing the AMB fed by the Blender against the Mjolnir Pure Bipolar"
Read more at Katz's Corner Episode 25: Adventures in Distortion | InnerFidelity
I am not going to pick on any one... that is others expertise area.... but I am going to name names now.
years ago, I was listening at Dave Wilson;s home his big new creation and told him there was a serious issue with them. I described the problem to JC who told DW. Well, that wasnt received well and dave didnt talk to me again for many years until one day he fixed the problem thru the cross-over and then he talked to me and said I was right and now it was better etc.
Recently, a similar issue... the headphone designer at Pass Labs was visiting me and picking my little pea brain for design info and direction to go with topologies and doing same with JC. When the HPA came out to great fan fare, I saw his distortion was higher than we talked about. I went over to the company at lunch and talked to him. I gently chastised him for the high distortion and said he had to do better if he wanted to be a great designer. I have not herad from him also since my criticism. After all he reminded me that it was selling briskly. But I let him know that I know why he left the distortion higher than necessary for spatial affect it creates.
In the long run, He, as did DW, will learn that doing your best will last longer and be recognized as better.
THx-RNMarsh
years ago, I was listening at Dave Wilson;s home his big new creation and told him there was a serious issue with them. I described the problem to JC who told DW. Well, that wasnt received well and dave didnt talk to me again for many years until one day he fixed the problem thru the cross-over and then he talked to me and said I was right and now it was better etc.
Recently, a similar issue... the headphone designer at Pass Labs was visiting me and picking my little pea brain for design info and direction to go with topologies and doing same with JC. When the HPA came out to great fan fare, I saw his distortion was higher than we talked about. I went over to the company at lunch and talked to him. I gently chastised him for the high distortion and said he had to do better if he wanted to be a great designer. I have not herad from him also since my criticism. After all he reminded me that it was selling briskly. But I let him know that I know why he left the distortion higher than necessary for spatial affect it creates.
In the long run, He, as did DW, will learn that doing your best will last longer and be recognized as better.
THx-RNMarsh
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My understanding it's not about judgement as such, more about "making" us perceive it as more realistic. That's why I used the words that I did
I'm not being funny, is English your first language?Hey, don't jump on me so quickly - if I misunderstood DF96 or it was too nuanced for my small intellect then please help me understand what he said?
My understanding it's not about judgement as such, more about "making" us perceive it as more realistic. That's why I used the words that I did
Ah, come on, enough of the language barbs & accusations of misunderstanding - it's a forum dialog & if we don't understand one another then let's try to have more clarity in our posts, right?
My point is that we actually do make a judgement - how can you perceive what is "more realistic" if not using judgement?
Aw come on yourself
You often misinterpret what other people say, I wonder why. Is it somehow offensive to ask if it's a language issue?
I think there are two issues being conflated in this discussion:
1) The innate ability to determine direction and proximity based on aural clues which becomes part of the processing in our aural cortex.
2) Familiarity with the timbre and other characteristics of specific sound sources.
The first factor everyone with binaural hearing possesses to one degree or another, the second only develops with exposure to the sound sources being recorded for the comparison. Of course this makes the comparison site and time specific to that actual event.
I found out while mastering recordings that what artists want on a recording is usually very different from their live sound...but that is another issue...
Howie
If you are judging preference then hi-fi is not your interest. Hi-fi means high fidelity. High fidelity to what? It can only be the original sound. What other 'original' can there be?mmerrill99 said:
You can only judge how much this illusion sounds like a violin/piano if you know what a violin/piano sounds like in real life; people are not born knowing what a violin/piano sounds like. Ideally, that performer playing that violin/piano in real life. My own experience is that live instruments sometimes sound 'rougher' (i.e. less pleasant!) than recorded instruments. A hi-fi enthusiast wants to reproduce that roughness, even though it sounds worse. That may seem strange to some.
What that tells me is one (or possibly both) of the following:
1. most of the speakers were sufficiently bad that their distortions were audible
2. most people prefer the same distortions
Given that transducers remain the weak point of audio option 1 is not surprising.
Given the popularity of low power SET with little or no feedback option 2 is not surprising.
In the long run, I suspect that "added distortions" might help us better understand the workings of our auditory perception mechanism & what it considers important & what it doesn't
But we all agree that our whole recording/playback chain doesn't capture the soundscape as we would hear it (if it was a live performance) & that what we are listening to is an illusion using this limited signal data - we are already dealing with something which isn't accurate to the original event so why do we suddenly have an issue with trying to figure out if some of these added distortions are a compensating factor for what's missing - again, this is all being evaluated/analysed/judged (whatever word you want) by our auditory perception whose analyses is based on models which are based on the FULL audio signal data from the real world.
I agree that accuracy is a confusing term except when people narrowly define it to mean measurements based on set of measurements which generally do not tell us how something sounds.
I think that's stretching it since to me judgement requires a conscious effort. And it's not perceiving it is more realistic, it's making it seem more realistic, if that makes sense?
You have accused me of this many times but other than make the statement "That is not what he said" you never outline where I went wrong in my understanding of what was said. I would be grateful for this explanation/correction rather than just the accusations & no, I don't have a language issue - maybe just a small intellect?Aw come on yourself
It's an observation and I'm not the only one to have noticed. I think you have a larger intellect than me, I mean it, hope that makes you feel better. Now I know it's not a language issue and it's not an intellect issue..........
I'm not so sure i fully agree although I'm open to being wrong (or misinterpreting what you said - just saying it before scottjoplin posted it
)We certainly have a number of the basic auditory perception building blocks such as location cues, etc. inbuilt at birth & the rest is learned from exposure to sounds from birth onwards.
Through our continuing development we are exposed to a wide variety of sounds, including the timbre of various instruments, often enough to have modeled their characteristics such that we can identify different instruments but not necessarily the make/model of different instruments based on their timbre differences - that's what I meant by people who worked with music on a daily basis have a better ability for these nuances.
I guess my concept of a "better illusion" is limited by this experience (or lack of) & this applies to everyone - so you may evaluate a playback system as unrealistic because it doesn't sufficiently capture/playback the timbral nuance of some instruments you are familiar with whereas I, not knowing these nuances, would evaluate it as realistic sounding.
But if we both sat down together & you pointed out its shortcomings I'm sure it wouldn't escape my perception.
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