Sounds more apt for modifying soundstage reproduction than tailoring overall reproduction to one’s liking. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.894232/full
Hmm, tailoring sound or reproduction. Soundshaping?
Adjustment?
For me its like when u buy a new washing machine, and u have to adjust the legs of it to take into account floor inclinations so the motor is balanced. Ideally floors are flat but not a single floor is real flat, its just a human abstraction.
Or say u bought a wonderfull Mercedez yet you live in the countryside so you will have to lift it a little and change the suspension.
The same happens with Electromechanoacoustical systems, but its even more complex, because everything ends at a subjective sensation. Source directivity, room charecteristics, musical program (ultracompressed music or acoustic music), and even preference (say we all agree +-1dB is flat, does -1dB at 30 Hz and +1dB at 3kHz sound the same as the other way arround? def not...). So the equation becomes really complex real soon. Perfection exists in our minds, to think the absolute ultimate system exists is just marketing, and that's why one needs to "adjust" the system to the actual situation. The more clear example is low freq where room will dominate by far the response.
In this regard, is it even coherent to try to "transparently" represent a signal as a "pure" (things get religious quite fast in this matters) representation of some musical phenomena, when the bass was getting in every mic it wasn't welcomed in, then someone applied his aesthetic criteria, created new phase issues with eq, added tons of aliasing thru massive ammounts of compression (worst case example here) and deliberately added distortion to the master so one hears it more full? Maybe i love the artists but not the producer... Maybe i even think, behind some aesthethic selling criteria, hides the true artist, and that's why i usually like awfully recorded albums. But this is another idealization in itself, when u see a Picasso in the museum, u also see the museum curator who thought this or that another detail was important, and took a lot of decisions upon that.
Objective measurements as an absolute representation of how a system sounds would be meaningful if we enjoyed listening to white noise and maybe pure sine waves inside an anaechoic chamber (which sounds more like a form of torture to me). They are a really good guide, but what matters is the subjective experience. And that depends even on how much sleep u had last night. Maybe the best system is the one listened with the right intention... Our hearing works in the most mysterious manner...
Sorry, my english side is my Cynic side...
Best regards!
For me its like when u buy a new washing machine, and u have to adjust the legs of it to take into account floor inclinations so the motor is balanced. Ideally floors are flat but not a single floor is real flat, its just a human abstraction.
Or say u bought a wonderfull Mercedez yet you live in the countryside so you will have to lift it a little and change the suspension.
The same happens with Electromechanoacoustical systems, but its even more complex, because everything ends at a subjective sensation. Source directivity, room charecteristics, musical program (ultracompressed music or acoustic music), and even preference (say we all agree +-1dB is flat, does -1dB at 30 Hz and +1dB at 3kHz sound the same as the other way arround? def not...). So the equation becomes really complex real soon. Perfection exists in our minds, to think the absolute ultimate system exists is just marketing, and that's why one needs to "adjust" the system to the actual situation. The more clear example is low freq where room will dominate by far the response.
In this regard, is it even coherent to try to "transparently" represent a signal as a "pure" (things get religious quite fast in this matters) representation of some musical phenomena, when the bass was getting in every mic it wasn't welcomed in, then someone applied his aesthetic criteria, created new phase issues with eq, added tons of aliasing thru massive ammounts of compression (worst case example here) and deliberately added distortion to the master so one hears it more full? Maybe i love the artists but not the producer... Maybe i even think, behind some aesthethic selling criteria, hides the true artist, and that's why i usually like awfully recorded albums. But this is another idealization in itself, when u see a Picasso in the museum, u also see the museum curator who thought this or that another detail was important, and took a lot of decisions upon that.
Objective measurements as an absolute representation of how a system sounds would be meaningful if we enjoyed listening to white noise and maybe pure sine waves inside an anaechoic chamber (which sounds more like a form of torture to me). They are a really good guide, but what matters is the subjective experience. And that depends even on how much sleep u had last night. Maybe the best system is the one listened with the right intention... Our hearing works in the most mysterious manner...
Sorry, my english side is my Cynic side...
Best regards!
If you are talking about modifying the music tracks themselves, I would use the same language that the pro's use--translation--except personalized for one user (you in your listening room on your setup)--re-translation,
If you are talking about modifying the amplitude response of your setup for a specific track or album, that's just custom EQ.
Undoing most of what was done during music mastering (usually on lower quality mastering monitors like NS-10M Studios, etc.), which includes translation EQ, limiting/clipping, and perhaps compression, etc., to regain a more neutral result--is what I call "demastering".
Chris
Can you actually do 'de-mastering'? It would never get back to what it was before, would it?
Like, you can't unscramble an egg.
Jan
Like, you can't unscramble an egg.
Jan
You can unscrew a lightbulb, but not a blonde….
Music can to some extent be unmastered though, like correcting strange EQ.
Music can to some extent be unmastered though, like correcting strange EQ.
OK. My original Q had to do with 'modifying' the sound to make it more pleasing for personal preference.
I think in speakers they call it voicing.
Jan
I think in speakers they call it voicing.
Jan
If setting up loudspeakers having full-range directivity control down to the room's Schroeder frequency (below which the concept of directivity control in-room loses meaning), typically the loudspeakers are set up for flat amplitude response at 1 m measurement distance. If you've read and retained what Floyd Toole, et al., have said, you will achieve a downward sloping SPL curve vs. frequency when measured at the listener's position, which is almost always further away (most often between 3-4 m for home hi-fi).
"Voicing" occurs when the loudspeakers fail to achieve good directivity control vs. frequency (like all loudspeakers incorporating direct radiating cone and dome drivers), necessitating some complex EQ vs. frequency to compensate for the strong nearfield reflections just around the loudspeakers (and strong reflectors just around the listener's positions, too). This was a mysterious subject years ago--but perhaps not so mysterious nowadays using the methods that Toole mentions in his book: the "spin-O-rama".
Chris
The idea of demastering is to significantly improve what you've got. To get back to "what is was before" requires the mixdown tracks that were the result of the prior mixing process (without limiting/clipping, EQ or compression used in stems). I have very successfully used the techniques listed below on both stereo and multichannel (5.1) audio/music tracks--on greater than 20K music tracks--mostly from CDs, DVD-As, BDs and downloaded tracks. (I don't use lossy formats.)
Some mastering actions are easily reversible--like EQ. The link I provided above discusses this in some detail.
Other heavy-handed (destructive) mastering actions include limiting--clipping. The effects of this include the introduction of an infinite series of odd-order harmonics that were not in the original recording (non-harmonic). These instances of clipping sound excessively harsh. Running ClipFix within Audacity, then Normalize to normalize the newly restored tracks with peaks to below the maximum level (magnitude of "1"), will eliminate this harshness. Any higher frequencies clipped off during clipping cannot reconstruct the higher harmonics that were shaved off during the mastering clipping action, but the result of declipping can be extremely effective.
Additionally, by using a multi-band compressor/expander, the nonlinear compression of dynamics can be partially recovered via the compression/expander plugin expansion capability within music tracks that have been compressed during mastering. This requires the most time, money (for the compressor/expander plugin) and skill to get a good result, but the results can be the difference between listenable tracks and unlistenable ones.
There are more techniques that can be used but the above techniques, particularly the first two listed, can significantly improve listenability and enjoyment of music tracks that were deliberately damaged during mastering. Since these operations are arithmetic in nature, there is no other degradation or introduction of noise that's associated with analog techniques.
Chris
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De-mastering? Are you sure you are not over-thinking?
The only eq i do is 31band digital eq to correct the room response in my listening chair to flat. I am correcting for my room, not the recording. If i move my hifi to another room, i will correct again, or do change in speakers. Luckily there is 100 memories, so i can quickly swap speakers or amps or preamps and set the eq.
I am not de-mastering anything. Gentle eq to approach the balanced sound. Other people may preffer downward tilt ot lift in bass or highs, i do flat. But calling this de-mastering is delusional.
Even boomboxes in 80ties had eq.
I am not touching the recording itself. I try to have best sound quality signal source and do the least amount of harm to it.
Simple active crossover with almost unmeasurable distortion, no feedback. Buffer with step up transformer, no feedback. ClassA or low distortion classAB amp with minimum or no beedback.
All open baffle 4way speakers with figure 8 pattern to minimize side reflection, but provide clean first arriving signal plus spatial delayed back signal for great soundstage.
De-mastering? No way.
The only eq i do is 31band digital eq to correct the room response in my listening chair to flat. I am correcting for my room, not the recording. If i move my hifi to another room, i will correct again, or do change in speakers. Luckily there is 100 memories, so i can quickly swap speakers or amps or preamps and set the eq.
I am not de-mastering anything. Gentle eq to approach the balanced sound. Other people may preffer downward tilt ot lift in bass or highs, i do flat. But calling this de-mastering is delusional.
Even boomboxes in 80ties had eq.
I am not touching the recording itself. I try to have best sound quality signal source and do the least amount of harm to it.
Simple active crossover with almost unmeasurable distortion, no feedback. Buffer with step up transformer, no feedback. ClassA or low distortion classAB amp with minimum or no beedback.
All open baffle 4way speakers with figure 8 pattern to minimize side reflection, but provide clean first arriving signal plus spatial delayed back signal for great soundstage.
De-mastering? No way.
Probably more to the point of this thread, I stumbled on a particular aspect of demastering and soundstaging (...really imaging and ambience within the established dimensions of the subjective soundstage of the recording and what your loudspeakers/room acoustics support). It's the effect of collapsing the phase shifts of the loudspeakers' crossover filters and by extension, the music tracks themselves. I was dumbfounded when I found the effect. It wasn't subtle; it was dramatic. But it is difficult to describe. See the link for a better subjective description of the effect.
Three conditions were simultaneously required to experience the effect of phase-flattening filters:
1) full range directivity of the loudspeakers (to avoid early reflections in-room from destroying the direct arrival sound field at the listener's ears),
2) flattened transfer function of the loudspeaker--primarily with its crossover filter(s)--both amplitude and phase responses of the loudspeakers. Phase swings need to be controlled within ±90 degrees from 100 Hz --> 20 kHz, and amplitude response flattened to within ±2 dB from 100-16000+ Hz (using psychoacoustic smoothing)
3) Additional application of absorbent material within 1-2 metres of the loudspeaker mouths to further suppress nearfield early reflections from just around the loudspeakers.
When this effect occurred, it opened up a new chapter in my demastering efforts.
I found that the induced phase shifts of the crossover filters had previously caused me to add too much bass amplitude below ~100 Hz, thus causing me to go back and demaster most of my FLAC library to rebalance the bass. By that point, I had accumulated over 15K demastered tracks, and had to start from scratch again using the original tracks off my physical disc library.
Additionally, the listenability of all the music tracks suddenly took a step upwards, enabling me to listen to music genres that I previously found laborious to listen to in their entirety. Now I was intently listening to entire albums with no desire to stop or change the albums. This was particularly true of 19th century Romantic Era music, starting with Beethoven, and working forward to the present--even on popular music tracks of good as-mastered quality. I had to go back to the physical discs to start from scratch again to preserve the naturalness/ambience of the recordings, with much lighter demastering EQ settings.
I found this effect to be so overwhelming that I have changed my viewpoint on what condition the setup of loudspeakers/rooms should be. It's also causing me to begin writing a book on home hi-fi "how to", which includes this subject as one of the chapters.
YMMV.
Chris
Three conditions were simultaneously required to experience the effect of phase-flattening filters:
1) full range directivity of the loudspeakers (to avoid early reflections in-room from destroying the direct arrival sound field at the listener's ears),
2) flattened transfer function of the loudspeaker--primarily with its crossover filter(s)--both amplitude and phase responses of the loudspeakers. Phase swings need to be controlled within ±90 degrees from 100 Hz --> 20 kHz, and amplitude response flattened to within ±2 dB from 100-16000+ Hz (using psychoacoustic smoothing)
3) Additional application of absorbent material within 1-2 metres of the loudspeaker mouths to further suppress nearfield early reflections from just around the loudspeakers.
When this effect occurred, it opened up a new chapter in my demastering efforts.
I found that the induced phase shifts of the crossover filters had previously caused me to add too much bass amplitude below ~100 Hz, thus causing me to go back and demaster most of my FLAC library to rebalance the bass. By that point, I had accumulated over 15K demastered tracks, and had to start from scratch again using the original tracks off my physical disc library.
Additionally, the listenability of all the music tracks suddenly took a step upwards, enabling me to listen to music genres that I previously found laborious to listen to in their entirety. Now I was intently listening to entire albums with no desire to stop or change the albums. This was particularly true of 19th century Romantic Era music, starting with Beethoven, and working forward to the present--even on popular music tracks of good as-mastered quality. I had to go back to the physical discs to start from scratch again to preserve the naturalness/ambience of the recordings, with much lighter demastering EQ settings.
I found this effect to be so overwhelming that I have changed my viewpoint on what condition the setup of loudspeakers/rooms should be. It's also causing me to begin writing a book on home hi-fi "how to", which includes this subject as one of the chapters.
YMMV.
Chris
For those that are perhaps time constrained reading through the linked thread on the subconscious effects of phase-flattening crossover filters, here's a link that describes that effect reducing sound quality harshness (and this is even before I removed an additional 2-3 dB of outright clipping from the DTS 5.1 tracks of Porcupine Tree's Fear of a Blank Planet):
https://community.klipsch.com/index...ar-phase-loudspeakers/page/5/#comment-2389261
Chris
https://community.klipsch.com/index...ar-phase-loudspeakers/page/5/#comment-2389261
Chris