Orchestral not designed for live performance? Apparently Beethoven favoured Denon equipment.
One of the main ones is the audience itself, which acts as a HF absorber. The room acoustics are key - Professor Lord of Salford Uni told us how he designed the 'mushrooms' on the ceiling at the Royal Albert hall to control the early reflections, or was it the flutter echoes - can't remember.
You misread. I used orchestral as an example of music that *is* designed for live performance.
Have only been to the Albert Hall once - to see John Barry (and an orchestra!) performing his stuff. I was sat near the HUGE percussion section. Best concert, sound wise, I have ever been to, but JB was a bit of a perfectionist I believe. Correction, probably the best concert I have ever been to, sadly never to be repeated.
Sadly for many years i fell into the first category , reading the magazine reviews, believing the "experts" and spending thousands on 5 star equipment that ultimately left me dissatisfied spending more wasted money on snake oil tweaks etc.
I owned all the audiophile recordings , much of it music i didn't even like and enthusiastically bored any visting friends to death ranting about things such as hearing the sound engineer ask if anyone wanted a kebab after the session so faintly that " cheap " Hi-Fi didn't pick it up ,coming home from work religiously measuring the speaker angles/distances and levelling my Turntable in case any earth tremors had knocked things out of alignment while i was out . For someone suffering acute ocd i couldn't have picked a worse hobby.
This went on for several years until ultimately it cost me a marriage break-up and i found myself living in a tiny bedsit with no job and the equipment sold to pay rent and eat.
For several years i made do with a boombox and realised that despite the cheap and distinctly " non hi-fi "
sound i still enjoyed my favourite music.
20 years on and although i still enjoy experimenting with the interaction between various components this is secondary to the musical experience and i now fall into the second category .
As for the ocd i no longer suffer , it took a long time but with the help of a good friend who had suffered herself i was able to break the programming that caused my brain to behave that way.
I'm not sure quite where I am other than I enjoy building equipment and listening to it. I enjoy the music.
An example is a differential line driver/receiver I built 20 years ago.
It's purpose is to take a signal and convert it into a differential signal using a transistor equivalent of the Cathodyne phase splitter to drive a twisted pair to a diff amp to recover the signal and feed it to a power amp in another room. This originally allowed me to play the same music in every room in the house, from the den.
I was using it in the kitchen of my new(er) house to drive my old Sony STR-5800SD in the dining room when I was using my computer for playing you tube videos. OK,not exactly HI-FI.
There was excessive hum and a low volume level. My son suggested I should give up and just buy a Bluetooth interface and be done with it.
Admittedly, this would probably have been just as effective.
However, I redesigned the power supply for both the receiver and transmitter, and changed the gain of the AD620 to approximately 4X by adding a 33K Gain Resistor. Now the hum is gone and the gain is sufficient so that with the computer volume set at 50% the receiver plays at about the same level as the radio.
My ex claims I'm OCD, but I think most engineers probably are.
😱
An example is a differential line driver/receiver I built 20 years ago.
It's purpose is to take a signal and convert it into a differential signal using a transistor equivalent of the Cathodyne phase splitter to drive a twisted pair to a diff amp to recover the signal and feed it to a power amp in another room. This originally allowed me to play the same music in every room in the house, from the den.
I was using it in the kitchen of my new(er) house to drive my old Sony STR-5800SD in the dining room when I was using my computer for playing you tube videos. OK,not exactly HI-FI.
There was excessive hum and a low volume level. My son suggested I should give up and just buy a Bluetooth interface and be done with it.
Admittedly, this would probably have been just as effective.
However, I redesigned the power supply for both the receiver and transmitter, and changed the gain of the AD620 to approximately 4X by adding a 33K Gain Resistor. Now the hum is gone and the gain is sufficient so that with the computer volume set at 50% the receiver plays at about the same level as the radio.
My ex claims I'm OCD, but I think most engineers probably are.
😱
There is no such thing as a mono acoustic instrument. All instruments send different sounds in different directions. The only purely mono instruments are fully electronic, wired straight into the mixer and definitely not using a loudspeaker in the performance space.number7 said:
It is difficult for me to attach meaning to this statement, as orchestral music is a textbook case of something originally intended for live performance alone.gpauk said:
Obviously even the best hi-fi cannot reproduce the experience of travelling to the venue, finding your seat, queueing for the loo or an ice cream in the break etc. It ought to satisfactorily reproduce what you would have heard had you been there.
As I clarified above, that was what I meant - orchestral as an example of music intended as live - though it was worded a tad ambiguously I thought my meaning would be obvious... I guess not! 🙂
Yes, I saw that after I posted!
Incidentally, I see the refurbished Birmingham Town Hall now has some flying saucers too, although they look a bit cheaper than the RAH ones in Londond.
Incidentally, I see the refurbished Birmingham Town Hall now has some flying saucers too, although they look a bit cheaper than the RAH ones in Londond.
Our Town Hall needed that, it was so-so acoustically.
The Symphony Hall on the other hand is one of the very best globally.
The Symphony Hall on the other hand is one of the very best globally.
Back in the day when I worked in acoustics, someone had proposed filling the ceiling void of a building with a huge bag of helium, to drastically alter the reverberation time...
IIRC it was a hall in Leeds.
IIRC it was a hall in Leeds.
The Birmingham Symphony Hall has tunnels to adjust the halls reverb time and an adjustable ceiling height.
The doors for the tunnels were the first thing they fitted during building the hall because they had to be in place before the roof went up. They were something like 5 tons each.
The doors for the tunnels were the first thing they fitted during building the hall because they had to be in place before the roof went up. They were something like 5 tons each.
Yeah. movable ceilings were all the rage at one time. The biggest I ever saw was the Palace of Culture in soviet era Prague, back in the early 80s. Colossal - 3 separately movable sections, adjustable in height - a lot - and angle. Typical soviet heavy engineering! They has electro acoustic adjustments too - which is why we were there. It was an astonishing experience - we saw the corruption involved, and were followed all the time by security...
in my last house one of the speakers had to be placed close to a sidewall, which caused all sorts of problems. In the end I made some frames with acoustic tiles and placed them on the wall, which worked very well. Room acoustics play such a massive part, yet receives so little consideration - and yet it is cheap to fix! I'll post some pics tomorrow of the frames I made.
I was very miffed to not to find out early enough about the UK premiere of John Luther Adams 'Become Ocean' in May this year. The conductor when interviewed said very impressed by the size and accoustic.
It is really rather good, best in Britain surely.
Wiki has good read on it:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_Hall,_Birmingham
Wiki has good read on it:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_Hall,_Birmingham
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