Links collected over the years. A couple below, many containing links to peers. John Hartog also has samples and a Bandcamp site.Where do you find these folks?
http://rockscallop.org/gear/
http://www.minnesotasoundscapes.com/mic_rigs.html
Make a casting of your head. Put mics in the ears. Clamp that in a vise at the optimal listening position. Feed the output of that into an amplifier, driving headphones. Wear those, fully reclined on the sofa. It sounds just like your speakers in your room, when sitting up at attention and your head is clamped in the vise...Maybe one day in the future we might all give time to calibrating individual HRTFs, and sit with motion detection devices compensating for our natural and continuous head movements? I know already which engineering route I would advocate.
I did it with cheap electret mics glued to hearing protector plugs in my own ears. Sat my wife on the stool where I made the recording. Wholly tricked her perception into thinking the speakers were playing, when they werent - it was just the recording I made of the speakers playing, played back over headphones.
Put a good bluetooth transmission system in between, now you can cook at the stove and "hear" your stereo at the same time. Here's the kick - I can catch a sense of preferring the sound of my speakers in a room recorded like that, over the direct music signal from player to headphones. Ever like something that makes no logical sense?
Thanks! I'll have to check those out.Links collected over the years.
It deserved killing... because that was back in the early 70's when a quad channel was imposed on 2 sides of an LP record, and whereupon the 4 channel recordings could also be played back on a 2 channel system. "Advancements" in the improvement of publishable spec's resulted in actual sound reproduction becoming unlistenable, as the overall gain of the channels was being modulated to satisfy the published specs. That seems the worst case whereupon spec's ruled over sonics that I have ever come across in my recollection.I blame the Industry Bstrds who killed quad all those years ago. Could be 16 discrete channels in every recording file as a standard by now. Mixer built right into the player; reads an initial "master" setup then you're free to alter levels, EQ, Delay any way you'd like. Send / mix any channel to any speaker - say, up to 8; ignore them all except the mono mic if that's what floats you.
Which of the 3-4 formats are you referring to? Not that I know anything about it, beyond frustration over instead of more channels, we get sample rates pushed toward 1MHz, still on just two. Whatever they can sell in the old "you'll hear the difference" marketing scheme.That seems the worst case whereupon spec's ruled over sonics that I have ever come across in my recollection.
You know, I'd kinda like to hear what Alan Parsons did with dark side of the moon in quad at least one time in my life, but it would be such a specialty thing to invest in for just one recording...
This has always been a point of contention with me. Forums parrot go sealed for bass....always have. In the studio, the mix being recorded is monitored via ported speakers and it adds colour that is not in the recording. With headphones, one is not listening to the mix as the engineer heardMake a casting of your head. Put mics in the ears. Clamp that in a vise at the optimal listening position. Feed the output of that into an amplifier, driving headphones. Wear those, fully reclined on the sofa. It sounds just like your speakers in your room, when sitting up at attention and your head is clamped in the vise...
I did it with cheap electret mics glued to hearing protector plugs in my own ears. Sat my wife on the stool where I made the recording. Wholly tricked her perception into thinking the speakers were playing, when they werent - it was just the recording I made of the speakers playing, played back over headphones.
Put a good bluetooth transmission system in between, now you can cook at the stove and "hear" your stereo at the same time. Here's the kick - I can catch a sense of preferring the sound of my speakers in a room recorded like that, over the direct music signal from player to headphones. Ever like something that makes no logical sense?
Your description corrects that for the headphones!!!!!!!! Puts that colour back in, well as long as you have a ported system not too far off what the engineer heard
This raises today's ponderings," some smart cookie should go ahead and release a "Walkman" that can load Studio monitor sims" 😀
Soundbloke replied: I would contend that the often-cited term holographic is misplaced. With loudspeakers, there exists the attempted reconstruction of the recorded sound field around one or more listeners. Holography works via a different principle.Geoffkait wrote: In a perfect world you should be able to reproduce a large, holographic, high, deep and wide soundstage but in reality that is rather difficult because, I am contending, too many things can and do go wrong during playback
>It’s only a word, words mean different things to different people. What I mean by the word holographic is a deep, wide, high expanding sphere of sound, x, y, z and t.
Soundbloke replied: This statement I disagree with completely, and for a number of reasons, not least its sweeping and unjust generalization...[...] especially for CDs. That’s why CDs frequently sound thin, congealed, bass shy, generic, compressed, electronic, synthetic, threadbare, two-dimensional, closed in, airless, bland and like paper mache.
Soundbloke wrote: In the early days of digital recording, the new-fangled technology was not well-understood. Analogue recordings from the 1980s are often superior to their digital counterparts for this reason. Dithering, for example, is well-known to remove problematic artefacts of digital recording, yet it was not properly established in recording equipment until the 1990s (and then often appearing as a hard-to-find switchable option and left switched off!). This period of CD releases cast an unfortunate shadow (audible glare?) on digital technology, but one that no longer has any validity.It was not really a sweeping or unjust generalization. I said frequently. You don’t really think the sound is always perfect, do you? Perfect Sound Forever. Ha ha
>I submit the compact disc technology is still not understand for the reasons I’ve been describing - (1) scattered laser light, external and internal vibration, RFI, instability of the spinning disc (including disc nit level during play and physical disc frequently out-of-round), not to mention the transparency of the polycarbonate layer of the CD is only about 90%. Ever hear of SHM CDs from Japan, they have higher transparency than bog standard CDs?
Soundbloke wrote: Much so-called hi-fi equipment is still not suited to the dynamic range of digital recording. Valve power amps with single figure power dissipations are a good example. Here we would expect soft-clipping of peak SPLs to be the norm if we want an average SPL to establish reasonable fidelity. And music devoid of its considerable peak SPLs sound subjectively dull at best. I would suggest this is a genuine reason for further discussion if we wish to reveal some of the "imaginary".
>Ironically, as I pointed out, the perceived dynamic range is actually often much less than either cassette tape or LPs. There are a number of reasons why I say this, including but not limited to, the reasons I just listed in the paragraph above, but also because of the widespread aggressive dynamic compression (Loudness Wars) that has going on for the past 20 years. Hel-loo!!
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Speaking of binaural recordings I have some Maxell II cassette tapes early print of live Grateful Dead concerts, “audience tapes,“ that sound phenomenal, very realistic presentation even on headphones, very live sounding. I reckon the soundstage is out in front of me about thirty feet. These audience tapes were made by fans who were allowed up close to the stage, even in front of the soundboard. The tapes were often recorded using a tall pole with a left and right mic on top of the pole, the mics separated by, guess what, about 9 inches, the diameter of a human head.
That is not true. The technology is very well understood.I submit the compact disc technology is still not understand for the reasons I’ve been describing
Absolutely not, but the issues are not to do with CD technology.You don’t really think the sound is always perfect, do you?
That is true.There are a number of reasons why I say this, [...] but also because of the widespread aggressive dynamic compression (Loudness Wars) that has going on for the past 20 years
Soundbloke wrote,
That is not true. The technology is very well understood.
Absolutely not, but the issues are not to do with CD technology.
That is not true. The technology is very well understood.
Geoffkait wrote, You don’t really think the sound is always perfect, do you?
Absolutely not, but the issues are not to do with CD technology.
The issues, if I may be so bold have everything to do with CD technology. is is the technology that created the problems in the first place, the fact that CDs use a nanoscale laser beam, a nanoscale data spiral, and a less than foolproof error correction and ineffective laser servo feedback system. it’s very hard to keep the laser on the data spiral when the CD is fluttering and vibrating at high speed. They lucky the stupid thing works at all. 🙂 CD technology overlooked or ignored laser scattered laser light getting into the photodetector, produced errors.
The CD technology also doesn’t account for seismic type vibration interfering with the servo feedback system as well as exacerbating the vibration and wobbly of the disc. Furthermore, many if not most CDs are out of round, which is a rookie mistake. I rest my case.
The CD technology also doesn’t account for seismic type vibration interfering with the servo feedback system as well as exacerbating the vibration and wobbly of the disc. Furthermore, many if not most CDs are out of round, which is a rookie mistake. I rest my case.
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CDs are fine if they are ripped and played properly from a computer. Doing properly isn't so simple though.
A very normal (PC) CD/DVD player with EAC will do a bit perfect job and AccurateRip will confirm that.
Hugo
Hugo
It is correct that bit-perfect reading from a CD to a WAV file is a solved problem.
Where things get complicated is what happens from thereon.
Where things get complicated is what happens from thereon.
Geoff, see? Other that the old, ancient moving parts (hey! Never thought of the Green part of it: 1W motor+ occasional servos+ 20W PSU versus ... monstruos gigawatt servers ahahaha no, terabyte eaters!) the digital is perfect .
Why bother?!
Why bother?!
...and what happens beforehand to generate the recording that is on the CD too!It is correct that bit-perfect reading from a CD to a WAV file is a solved problem.
Where things get complicated is what happens from thereon.
All that mastering Artistry that the performer would freak out if a consumer got to touch, after they spent a year getting the snare drum just right. I saw how many snare drums that YT guy has in his studio; he's not even a drummer. And we think the kind of capacitor matters... Makes you wonder who's the top picayune in Audio / Sound......and what happens beforehand to generate the recording that is on the CD too!
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