Live vs. Recorded - can you hear a difference?

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I am sure that we have all walked down a street and heard (say) a saxophone being played a long way off, round a corner, down an alley with traffic roar and street bustle going on, and known instantly that it is live.

I walked into a Macy's once and thought they had a phenomenal stereo set up; so good that I had to track it down. It turned out to be live piano.
 
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I am sure that we have all walked down a street and heard (say) a saxophone being played a long way off, round a corner, down an alley with traffic roar and street bustle going on, and known instantly that it is live.
Yes, but I've also walked down the hall at at least 3 different audio shows and thought "Is that a real sax, or a recording?" "Is that an actual trumpet, or a speaker?" and even "is that someone playing a drum solo here at the show?" None of them were live, they were speakers playing a recording.

When I had my little TQWT 6.5" fullrange speakers, my neighbors would say "Hey, you're getting pretty good on that saxophone." Yep, as good as Stan Getz or Paul Desmond. ;)
 
I am sure that we have all walked down a street and heard (say) a saxophone being played a long way off, round a corner, down an alley with traffic roar and street bustle going on, and known instantly that it is live.

Assumed instantly it was live based on previous experience.. and because it would be the most likely scenario, be proven correct.

After a while, in your head, it becomes a belief that it is live (because your brain is acting on experience) and your concious has reasoned that you believe it is live because of how it sounds. The reality is more likely sounds live because it is a) solo sax - how often would you hear that other than live? b) has elements of being poorly played so why would it be recorded and played back.. on the street? c) any playback on the street is going to be poor, normally through a treble-deficient guitar amp from a busker d) you will envisage a busker playing so that will be the immediate image/thought etc etc

Wait until you're proven wrong and see how it feels - you won't ever be proven wrong because the occurance of hearing the sax is rare in the first place and secondly very very rare someone will be blasting out recorded sax *on it's own with no backing track* in the street anywhere near you, ever. So the belief grows stronger and stronger..

This is textbook bias - not sure what specific bias you would call it but it is a bias.
 
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No, I am not agreeing with your second point. If you have a recording of a solo violin, put it on one speaker at what you would consider a live level bearing in mind the distance, and the size of the room. Now put your left ear 4 inches away from the tweeter (better with a full range). Have your head turned about 45 degrees away. That approximates to what a violinist hears. I would much rather hear what the audience hears than what the violinist hears.

I see what you're saying ..

If a speaker is any good, then listening to a far-field recording of a violin with your ear up to the tweeter should still sound like a far-field recording.

Similarly, if you close mic a violin and listen to the replay from a good distance, you should still be able to hear that it is close mic'd with all it's hard grating metalic sounds..

The idea of a speaker changing tone depending on the distance of the listener is not how speakers work - that would require some kind of tracking, a virtual-reality/surround sound set-up .

A speaker should only be expected to replay whatever hits the microphone diaphragm and be able to replay exactly that same sound everywhere , physics and evironment permitting. That should be the test.

If you want the resulting soundfield in a space to be more similar then you need to pay attention to microphone placement and speaker placement being the same in relation to both soundsource and listener position in both environments. And you will need to pay attention to speaker dispersion recreating the same dispersion pattern as in the orignal - that's all very complex and why placing the microphones on your ears and the speakers on your ears cuts out a lot of the complexity, i.e. binaural recording.
 
Yes, but I've also walked down the hall at at least 3 different audio shows and thought "Is that a real sax, or a recording?" "Is that an actual trumpet, or a speaker?" and even "is that someone playing a drum solo here at the show?" None of them were live, they were speakers playing a recording.

When I had my little TQWT 6.5" fullrange speakers, my neighbors would say "Hey, you're getting pretty good on that saxophone." Yep, as good as Stan Getz or Paul Desmond. ;)

It that environment the likelyhood of it being a recording is massively increased so your beliefs adapt to your previous experiences.
 
...and in real space, not truism at all

because when instruments are individually closely miked in an unnaturally dry acoustical environment and recorded on separate tracks and only then mixed together with added space effects - such recording can be exciting and aesthetically satisfying but it's not the real thing and as such it is useless for purposes of testing the quality of HiFi reproduction

in fact one cannot talk about reproduction in such a case because what really is being reproduced when there is no original live event at all?

You are reproducing what was being heard in the studio, the mix.

If you take interest in how your music was made, studio techniques then hearing those techniques - the delayed double tracking on a voice say - and you can pick them out, it's a great test of a speaker. When most of the music one listens to is studio music, then it is a better test !

You have to make a guess as to how it sounded in the studio - exactly the same as making a judgement of how something sounded live. It can still sound live but it might be a completely different "live" than was originally.

If say a hall has a resonant peak and that peak is removed in the mastering , and then you have speakers that cause a similar resonant peak due to bad design/the room... and you think "hey I can hear the resonance of the hall! " Or the opposite - a resonant peak isn't there normally whereever you sit, but where they placed the mics there *was* a peak - poor mic placement - and you sit at home thinking "hey you don't normally hear resonance in this venue! The speakers are bad..." . You do not know what has been recorded... unless you recorded it and monitored it. More likely, one will think "hey it sounds live" and be completely unaware of whether it is a true representation of the venue/live event.

In both cases we are back to knowing what was being heard on the monitors essentially. All you really know is if you like it and if it roughly fits with what you believe you ought to hear.

Of course, if you can A-B compare live with speaker in a situation then you'll have a better test...
 
not so fast

suppose You are listening to some music in Your room - please define the original direct sound in the constant "streams of superimposed air pressure variations at your eardrums" (as Linkwitz put it)

Basically the Nearfield(Fresnal field) before reaching the critical distance. After that the level of reverb from reflections in the room exceed the Haas Effect. And you can hear them. Linkwitz understand the Haas effect.
 
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Why?

A good playback down a hall or in another room can, and does fool people. That's the point, you know, to sound like the thing that's been recorded. It's great when that happens because you know the playback chain is doing it mostly right. And people can get fooled into thinking that live is recorded, although that probably happens less often.

No ears tarnished - sorry to disappoint you. ;)
 
PLEASE look up "The Haas Effect" on google.

A special appearance of the precedence effect is the Haas effect. Haas showed that the precedence effect appears even if the level of the delayed sound is up to 10 dB higher than the level of the first wave front. In this case the range of delays, where the precedence effect works, is reduced to delays between 10 and 30 ms.
 
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The precedent effect is useful for delay speakers in PA work and is described in the Wikipedia article. It's extremely common in PA work and fun to set up so that the sound seems to come from the stage but is mostly coming from the delay speakers. A fun and useful illusion.
 
No, I am not agreeing with your second point. If you have a recording of a solo violin, put it on one speaker at what you would consider a live level bearing in mind the distance, and the size of the room. Now put your left ear 4 inches away from the tweeter (better with a full range). Have your head turned about 45 degrees away. That approximates to what a violinist hears. I would much rather hear what the audience hears than what the violinist hears.

Only if the radiation pattern of the speaker was the same as the violin. It's not.
 
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