The most inadequate design of earphones is such that the diaphragm interacts with the in-ear volume like a speaker box. I think it's even sub optimal for hearing tests.
Listening tests are mainly good for detecting whether there might be a problem or not, but is a very unreliable way to identify where the problem is. This is why it's necessary to do measurements to help determine what needs to be fixed. Also in listening tests, the preferred sound may not be the accurate sound. So one needs to be carefull how they use the results of any listening test. If the listening test leans towards identifying the preferred sound, then the results only apply to the preference of where the listeners came from, and may only be favorable in that region of the world. However, if the listening tests were designed to identify what parts of the music cannot be realistically reproduced, then we have a different story.
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Olive wrote an interesting blog entry about that. One of his conclusions to which I wholeheartedly agree is...
"If the audio industry takes an “audio science in the service of art” philosophy where the goal is to faithfully and accurately reproduce the art as the artist intended, the question of cross-cultural preferences becomes moot. If certain cultures don’t like the sound of the art, then that becomes an issue between the artist and the recording producer/record executive - not the audio manufacturer."
That's an oddly naive thing for a guy as sophisticated as Olive to say. I won't give any more animal gedank-experiments (even that very very very obvious dog proof failed to reach Markus76). But some cultures have frequency tuning for their language or different instruments with different ranges being important. Therefore, different cultures might buy different speakers and set them up differently to address their different listening aims.
Even around here, big differences in the reverberation times for opera sound as compared to instruments. Not much debate about that. So it would follow that some HUMANS will want one kind of reverberation at home while other want another, depending on their tastes in music.
So why don't we have adjustable reverberation in the electronics or physical acoustics? Engineers pronounce that based on science and objective measurement it isn't important? Harder to design than a moving coil phono stage or woofer motor? More fuss than 5.1 home theater with Dolby? I don't think so. I'd say it was nothing but a historical oversight that reverberation adjustment hasn't been implemented more than the hall choices you have on a few AV receivers.
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Actually adjustable reverberation is a must in karaoke. It does a great job masking the terrible sound of the singer.😉
My point exactly. What we expect from our systems, the strengths and the compromises, is not an engineering decision but a matter of HUMAN preference.
I hope to say nothing more on this as a generic issue.
Why?
There is no proof in your "animal gedank-experiments". It's completely irrelevant to the discussion. Or maybe you just didn't express yourself in a way even I can understand?
As I mentioned earlier, "we" do. It is done while recording and mixing. There are concert halls that add artificial reverberation through loudspeakers. Aren't you familiar with the work of David Griesinger? http://www.davidgriesinger.com/
As I mentioned earlier, "we" do but there's no such simplistic thing like a reverberation knob. Number, direction, delay, spectrum and angle of reflections are crucial. You should know that after reading and understanding Toole's book.
What you're talking about is that you want to be your own mixing engineer. You have to accept the fact that as of today there's no technical solution (besides a karaoke machine and up-converters like Audyssey DSX) available to the consumer like you. But you can always start a career as a mixing engineer...
By the way, it's not a matter of HUMAN preference. The physical properties that lead to the perception of "green" are the same for ALL humans. So are the physical properties that lead to ASW (apparent source width), LEV (listener envelopment), etc.
If you just don't like the canvas on which Picasso painted his pictures then you have a problem that can't be solved.
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4534 quotes 4533 before it was corrected. As corrected, it's a point in Toole confirming Geddes -- we WANT the delayed, low IACC contralateral reflections as spaciousness cues, but not the early ipsilateral ones, which degrade imaging as well as spectral and spatial quality....
Incorrect - and I blame it on Toole's editor.
Go back to the very definition of IACC (pg. 102), and work through the logic. 😉
If you decide to post a response.. please switch to the "Spatial Quality, Hall Sound, Soundstage, ASW & LEV" thread. (..it's more appropriate to that topic.)
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/147145-spatial-quality-hall-sound-soundstage-asw-lev-4.html
Well, when talking about multichannel sound reproduction over loudspeakers in acoustically small rooms, there's no scientific proof for either claim.
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We certainly have loudspeaker designs with this specific intent, "max dispersion" and "direct reflecting" being conceived to emulate the concert hall experience.
By the time Allison got it to happen, technologically, that sensibility was all but dead in the marketplace, comprising somewhere between 3% and 5% of listeners today.
[The rest of us imagine ourselves as being "conductors...." 😉 ]
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repro
All
I came to a defining moment a long time ago. Just what are we doing when we listen to music/home theatre audio systems? For me, I wanted to hear what the mix engineer/producer/mastering engineer/musicians heard in the control room of the studio. Anything else is just a "distorted" version of the original. Unfortunately space and finance require a compromise. Whilst it can sound OK anywhere else, just how OK is a a subjective issue. Of course we also need to remember that the majority of recordings are artificial sound fields, created from relatively close miced sound sources with added EQ/Dynamic/Fx etc. Recordings of real sound fields are very rare. From personal experience, WFS can provide a realistic representation. But I am not sure if the mass population could ever afford, or want to build the required acoustic environment. I think we always need to remember that our hearing system is not just a simple transfer function, but a complex adaptive and learning system. On the OT, this pdf from the link below, from Dr's Anhert and Schmidt might be one to put in the library.
Renkus-Heinz Inc. - Professional Audio Systems - EASERA
All
I came to a defining moment a long time ago. Just what are we doing when we listen to music/home theatre audio systems? For me, I wanted to hear what the mix engineer/producer/mastering engineer/musicians heard in the control room of the studio. Anything else is just a "distorted" version of the original. Unfortunately space and finance require a compromise. Whilst it can sound OK anywhere else, just how OK is a a subjective issue. Of course we also need to remember that the majority of recordings are artificial sound fields, created from relatively close miced sound sources with added EQ/Dynamic/Fx etc. Recordings of real sound fields are very rare. From personal experience, WFS can provide a realistic representation. But I am not sure if the mass population could ever afford, or want to build the required acoustic environment. I think we always need to remember that our hearing system is not just a simple transfer function, but a complex adaptive and learning system. On the OT, this pdf from the link below, from Dr's Anhert and Schmidt might be one to put in the library.
Renkus-Heinz Inc. - Professional Audio Systems - EASERA
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Applehorn
Dr. Ahnerts paper is on "room acoustics" and in his context that means "large" rooms. As Toole mentions, and I agree, not much of that is applicable to "small" rooms. And clearly the requirements for a large listening space do not have much to do with the requirements for a playback loudspeaker.
But you are quite correct in saying: "I want to hear what the mix engineer/producer/mastering engineer/musicians heard in the control room of the studio. Anything else is just a "distorted" version of the original." You are also correct in noting that this isn't always possible. But where I get annoyed is when people throw out this entire concept because it can't be "perfect" and say "whatever sounds good to me is right." That is not High Fidelity, its preference and, let me call it boutique (for lack of a better word.) It's like buying shoes - if I like them and they fit then they are the right thing to buy.
True audio system evaluation should be more like evaluating a lens on a camera for its "resolution". The pictures that you take, how you print them, the subject matter, etc. have little or nothing to do with the lens performance. Its "quality" is entirely independent of any of these external factors. This is also true of the loudspeaker - the musical genre and performance, the CD quality, etc. - have nothing to do with the "performance" or "sound quality" of the loudspeaker. This can be evaluated entirely free from these external factors.
Dr. Ahnerts paper is on "room acoustics" and in his context that means "large" rooms. As Toole mentions, and I agree, not much of that is applicable to "small" rooms. And clearly the requirements for a large listening space do not have much to do with the requirements for a playback loudspeaker.
But you are quite correct in saying: "I want to hear what the mix engineer/producer/mastering engineer/musicians heard in the control room of the studio. Anything else is just a "distorted" version of the original." You are also correct in noting that this isn't always possible. But where I get annoyed is when people throw out this entire concept because it can't be "perfect" and say "whatever sounds good to me is right." That is not High Fidelity, its preference and, let me call it boutique (for lack of a better word.) It's like buying shoes - if I like them and they fit then they are the right thing to buy.
True audio system evaluation should be more like evaluating a lens on a camera for its "resolution". The pictures that you take, how you print them, the subject matter, etc. have little or nothing to do with the lens performance. Its "quality" is entirely independent of any of these external factors. This is also true of the loudspeaker - the musical genre and performance, the CD quality, etc. - have nothing to do with the "performance" or "sound quality" of the loudspeaker. This can be evaluated entirely free from these external factors.
Should read "Number, level, delay, spectrum and angle of reflections are crucial."
The claims were:
Skipping the first claim,
The second and third claims are with respect to IACC, and more specifically IACC in context of loudspeaker reproduction.
There is actually a fair body of work from the Japanese contingent on this subject. That the work "proves" or "disproves" the conclusions here.. well, I'll leave that up to each reader.
Would you mind posting those references? I don't know them.
There's a lot of papers on single reflections under anechoic conditions with special test signals. To my knowledge nobody ever investigated the influence of reflections on multichannel sound reproduction over loudspeakers in small listening spaces. This investigation would need to take recording techniques into consideration as well.
Time for me to be annoying then. 😉
To hear what the engineer heard while hovering over the console and "mixing" would require you to actually be that engineer listening to that equipment (in it's particular configuration and sound level, and in respect to various environmental conditions), at that time. In fact it's often the case that *they* don't hear it the same way at only a modest time interval and on the exact same equipment in the same room.
It isn't that it "isn't always possible", but rather that it is *impossible*.
More importantly though, most of mixing, while being mixed under certain conditions, IS NOT BEING MIXED *FOR* THOSE CONDITIONS.
This comes from the "Newell/Holland" perspective that spaciousness and resolution are largely mutually exclusive. Their thought (shared by many recording studios) is that spaciousness degrades detail, and when mixing - detail is paramount in their work-process. They do however recognize that spaciousness should be an aspect of final reproduction environment. Again, the manner of reproduction in the studio is NOT intended for reproduction in that environment.
I don't agree. No mixing engineer is able to mix for the average living room without being actually in such a room. That's just wishful thinking at best. So in the end recordings ARE made for the rooms they were mixed in.
This is what Voetmann wrote in his AES Convention Paper 7140 "50 Years of Sound Control Room Design":
"The function of the control room is twofold, which is often overlooked:
On one hand the control room together with the monitor loudspeakers should reproduce as faithful as possible the efforts of the sound engineer and the producer in creating a new recording.
On the other hand the control room should mimic the perceived acoustics of an average living room when checking the final result of the recording. Simply because most musical productions are aimed at the listening environment of a living room."
The non-environment approach of Hidley or Newell does not provide the latter functionality and is therefore not desirable. These rooms do "translate" very well, so does headphone playback 🙂
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reply to gedlee #1314
Earl,
Originally I did a longer post, but I keep losing stuff from the reply to thread form, and pressing preview logs me off the system, weird.
Anyway, the Anhert paper link was to indicate that there are measures which can and have been proven to equate a speaker/acoustic performance to both preferences and realism. You are absolutely right in saying that perfect or nothing, is an incorrect postion.
....get annoyed is when people throw out this entire concept because it can't be "perfect" and say "whatever sounds good to me is right." That is not High Fidelity, its preference...
The reality for me, is that many people involved in these and other forums, appear to never listen to real live instruments. Otherwise their aims for their project speakers would be somewhat different. Having being present when some "boutiqueofiles" came in to a real studio, the shock on their faces was something to behold. The discussion was something else! eg "But that's a compression driver" or "Why don't they use OBs"
For me it's measure first, and listen second. It's all in the impulse response. But I think it's worth emphasising that the hearing system is not a straight transfer function. Most residential listening is done in decidedly questionable acoustic environments. A simplistic view makes me think that the preference folks are just working with the adaptive nature of their hearing to defeat the inherent acoustic problems. Coupled to the fact that our hearing system is also learning in short through to long term. So conditioning results. Then justification sets in. In the pro audio world we have a saying, "point speakers at people, not walls". I find it amusing that people argue with you about using directional speakers. I thought that argument was dead and buried.
Best wishes.
Iain.
Earl,
Originally I did a longer post, but I keep losing stuff from the reply to thread form, and pressing preview logs me off the system, weird.
Anyway, the Anhert paper link was to indicate that there are measures which can and have been proven to equate a speaker/acoustic performance to both preferences and realism. You are absolutely right in saying that perfect or nothing, is an incorrect postion.
....get annoyed is when people throw out this entire concept because it can't be "perfect" and say "whatever sounds good to me is right." That is not High Fidelity, its preference...
The reality for me, is that many people involved in these and other forums, appear to never listen to real live instruments. Otherwise their aims for their project speakers would be somewhat different. Having being present when some "boutiqueofiles" came in to a real studio, the shock on their faces was something to behold. The discussion was something else! eg "But that's a compression driver" or "Why don't they use OBs"
For me it's measure first, and listen second. It's all in the impulse response. But I think it's worth emphasising that the hearing system is not a straight transfer function. Most residential listening is done in decidedly questionable acoustic environments. A simplistic view makes me think that the preference folks are just working with the adaptive nature of their hearing to defeat the inherent acoustic problems. Coupled to the fact that our hearing system is also learning in short through to long term. So conditioning results. Then justification sets in. In the pro audio world we have a saying, "point speakers at people, not walls". I find it amusing that people argue with you about using directional speakers. I thought that argument was dead and buried.
Best wishes.
Iain.
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