Idk if I’d call live music ‘audiophile’ either but I do tune my system to sound ‘live’ so I suppose that proves it........I’m not an audiophile!😀
Speaking of live music, I’ve been a fan since childhood; concerts/festivals etc.
Got heavy into live recording sometime in the late 90’s...put a good amount $$ into equipment....marantz pro portable digital recorder, rode nt-5 mics, Tascam cd recorder, aphex and tc electronics effects. Still have most of the stuff but haven’t used it in yrs.....I need to revisit that, it was quite fun.
One of my favorites was recording bluegrass bands off porches!
And then everyone can concentrate on what is outside our minds 🙂 In other words, that which is common to our experiences and perceptions.
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Getting people to agree on anything is like herding cats, I think some actually disagree for sport.....take my wife for example 😀
Very true, of course agreeing too much is kind of boring, BTW, I was alluding to measurements being what is outside our minds (in case you were wondering) 😉
I'm not sure you understand what they are saying or do you? AFAIK, what they are saying is it doesn't really exist in the waveform - it's a delusion of the listener's imagination. IMO, that's just an excuse used by those who are shackled to measurements & don't understand the limitations of their measurements, hence anything which they can't see in their limited measurements are necessarily categorized as delusion
People still have to agree on the measuring equipment used, protocol, interpretation, etc......there’s always gonna be sumthin!
Beware, you are on the way to turn in a subjectivist.
Let's take the example of photography. You have a digital very good sensor.
You take a photography with daylight. You get a well balanced photo.
Now, with the same, you take a photo in an artificial light, or early in the morning, night, sunset. Everything is false and unnatural. Despite the colors are recorded flat at their exact value. For everybody looking at the result.
Now, you do an manual adjustment of the color balance, following your taste. Means you apply a totally non linear curve to the original, and you can get a believable natural and nice result.
Same thing for the dynamic in the white or the black and the local contrast (linearity of the light levels, micro dynamic) .Sometimes, it will be good, sometimes not at all: horrible losses of details in the whites or & blacks. Then, you adjust them in a very subjective way: done.
A good photographer only worry about the result. he only works referring at his feelings. And, don't tell-me that it do not work for the public..
It work so well that manufacturers had spend a lot of time to make statistics of our visual perceptions in order to provide automatic white balances and good curves of sensitivity, depending of the dynamic of the scene. The progress those 10 last years are huge and it works, most of the time, very well.
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Measurements limitations are negligible compared to limitations of our ears and hearing capabilities. And delusion is everything what in reality does not exist, independent if someone claims to "hear" nonexistent stimulus. So "simple"is it..
When the final use for a photograph is to be viewed then visual perception, its workings & expectations are an essential part of the art of photographic capture of images that represent a naturalistic take on the visual world. The whole process works in obedience to the working of visual perception & its workings. The same applies to the art of capturing & reproducing audio - it is not JUST about a set of limited measurements but rather producing audio which works according to the framework imposed by auditory perception's rules & expectations.
KSTR is one of the few that seems to have an equally good knowledge, understanding & balance between measurements & psychoacoustics - a rare quality not often found on audio fora
Audio reproduction equivalent of that would be recording & mastering process. When it comes to replaying the album, the term hi-fi is about the accuracy to what's on the album, not what the listener wants it to sound like.
all these arguments about how bad our hearing is makes me wonder how blind people manage to function at all?
How do we know another’s mood just from slight inflections in speech?
How does the sound man operate his sound board or master a recorded track?
Listening seems to be the common factor.
Given that 2 channel stereo is an limited version of what would have been heard at the original performance & that it is being played in a variety of different rooms, different equipment the job of the whole process is to produce an auditory illusion which manages to overcome the inherent limitations of this approach. The listener decides how successful the resulting illusion is & that also applies to how the playback system as a whole behaves in producing what's on the recording. So measure the full system including speaker & room with real music not test signals & then evaluate how closely the reproduced waveforms match to the recorded waveforms before declaring the Hi-Finess of a system.
Limited measurements of devices in isolation (not in system) with simplistic test signals is just a game of specmanship, ultimately fooling oneself with a veneer of scienceyness but not really chasing the truth of the matter
Reminds me of these ‘remastered’ albums are getting so far removed from the original... some are unlistenable imo.
Don’t know if they actually listen to it or just run it through a program?
Any way.....it’s certainly not what this listener wants.
If you read Pavel's words literally which you should, the inclusion of the words "...not necessarily..." intentionally modifies the sentence so it does not exclude the possibility of the audio event actually existing outside one's mind. It just means it may not which can be the case in my experience as well as I have related here more than once.
I believe anyone being honest will never claim every thing they perceive is an actual event occurring outside their own brain. This applies to every sense as well. Look at a bright light for a second then close your eyes. You see a dark spot. Does that spot exist outside your brain?
Step into a chicken coop for a while and notice the smell is diminished. Has the actual airborne ammonia decreased, or is it your perception that has changed?
Listen to an AM radio for a while that initially sounds dull. After a while you will fail to focus on that, has the HF program level increased?
Our ability to re-normalize to long-term stimulus is one of the greatest survival adaptations our brains make. It allows us to discard steady-state data and concentrate on changes. With this in mind, Pavel's statement of:"What we hear does not necessarily means that it exists, it exists in our mind only" is accurate.
It may exist as we perceive it outside our heads, but not necessarily. Without external verification, all you know is what is in your head. This is why humans have developed metrics and instruments, to quantify the world outside our perception. Of course we have to pay attention to our senses, but then the important thing is to try and find out what the nature of the sensation is. This leads to the audio maxim of: measure, but then listen, and the corollary: listen, but then measure!
Cheers!
Howie
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