" Correct " hifi fan, or we can say " maniac ", will be never satisfied. Absolutely most of them don't know, what they can listen and have tendence to think : new thing = better thing. Also absolutely most of them compare only one apparatus against second one and have only little experience with sound of " natural instruments ". Ask sometimes some hifi fan for account of natural sound " of some instrument - results are in most of cases very sad 
. Second problem is, that signal source is as a rule some digital recording, with his " plastic and unisonic " trebles - what do you can find in this case ? I'm making " hifi " over thirty years and I am very sceptic in look at hifi community .
. Second problem is, that signal source is as a rule some digital recording, with his " plastic and unisonic " trebles - what do you can find in this case ? I'm making " hifi " over thirty years and I am very sceptic in look at hifi community .Hi UE,
to repeat my question about your comment on "uniform treble" from CD: what exactly do you mean by this, and in your opinion, what causes the problem?
I am asking because I have noticed many times that in live venues, the (amplified) live band will sound great, but some CD played during interlude will sound flat. Some may be due to compression etcf, bu thte live band likely uses compression too. So, what is it that makes a CD sound so much worse *through the exact same amps and speakers as the live band*?
to repeat my question about your comment on "uniform treble" from CD: what exactly do you mean by this, and in your opinion, what causes the problem?
I am asking because I have noticed many times that in live venues, the (amplified) live band will sound great, but some CD played during interlude will sound flat. Some may be due to compression etcf, bu thte live band likely uses compression too. So, what is it that makes a CD sound so much worse *through the exact same amps and speakers as the live band*?
lumanauw
------------------
It is very interesting (or out of my rationale) how people who have money, but do not understand electronic, willing to pay USD27.000,- for active Xover, USD40.000,-for power amp, etc.
What is the "magical" sound that makes them willing to pay that so..so...soooo.... much money for audio equipment?
---------------------
well, for one, the Engineer who Designs it is magical
highend, hifi is art that is expensive everybody knows
that so if you wonder why people buy it, i must tell you
that art is highend, hifi, all other audio equipment is
audio equipment, i think art should be more expensive cause
the rich are getting it for free at $40000
cheers
the one and only Mastertech
------------------
It is very interesting (or out of my rationale) how people who have money, but do not understand electronic, willing to pay USD27.000,- for active Xover, USD40.000,-for power amp, etc.
What is the "magical" sound that makes them willing to pay that so..so...soooo.... much money for audio equipment?
---------------------
well, for one, the Engineer who Designs it is magical
highend, hifi is art that is expensive everybody knows
that so if you wonder why people buy it, i must tell you
that art is highend, hifi, all other audio equipment is
audio equipment, i think art should be more expensive cause
the rich are getting it for free at $40000
cheers
the one and only Mastertech
AKSA said:- and Pavel, Jan, this is categorically the commercial paradigm.The designer, if he is to sell amps successfully, MUST sell to the market in preference to the technically correct solution, though it should be said that it may be these requirements are NOT mutually exclusive. I might add ruefully that he might get away with a purely specs-based product at the very high end, but at the mid-fi sector of the market it had better 'sound good', whatever that might mean.......
Pavel, you make the point about classical music. I agree that any distortion with this genre is clearly evident, particularly orchestral, but it is apparently true that some distortions are euphonic at low levels and that as long as the intermodulation is kept very low, which to me means H2/H3 should not be more than about 0.1%. There is also the issue of distortion masking to consider.
The fact is that from a technical standpoint we strive vigorously for very low measured distortion, yet the single ended triode beloved of a significant number of audiophiles does fly in the face of this endeavour. There is clearly a need for a psychoacoustic correlation between distortion levels/spectra and euphonic sound, if only to give guidance to those who are resolved to design a commercially successful product.
That said, I know pretty well what Stan Curtis is saying. At this stage, and until we analyse with precision what it is that people like in their amplifiers, it is fair to say that audio design is as much art as science. And this casts some doubt on the math and measure approach, and this needs to be recognised and acted upon by many in the engineering fraternity who believe the solution lies with linearity, the so-called 'straight wire with gain'.
Cheers,
Hugh
Hugh,
Maybe I should make it clear that I have a lot of respect for people like you who are basically trying to do a very difficult balancing act. We pure engineers have an easy job talking about damping and THD and whatever, but if nobody buys your amp, it´s all pretty irrelevant. I think I could never do what you or Lars C or whoever do. So, even if I sound sometimes critical, I know pretty well that only a few have the guts to go out and put their lives where their mouth is and being successfull. For the record.
Jan Didden
Tarasque said:
Tarasque,
I don´t think you can say that in general. Just an example: if you take a typical Vas stage, and you add a buffer between it and the output stage, you add active devices but your overall OL transfer curve becomes more smooth with less discontinuities. It all depends on how you use the active devices.
Jan Didden
Not with my friend. He is a drummer, guitarist, have his own recording studio, with all musical instrument inside. (But he got his money from other business)
I can tell you, the system in his house actually sounds a "little different" than the original musical instrument. Like Cymbals, hit-hat, crash in drum set, they sounds a little different than in the system in his house. He MUST know this, because he is a drummer from his teenager age.
But what can you say, HE LIKES his sound system, although it has a little different sound than the original musical instrument.
And these kind of people is not the one who you can easily tell : "Hey, this is the correct amp should sounds like....." They are VERY STUBBORN about their preferences about how a sound system should sound. If he likes something, he will buy it, now matter how expensive it is. But if he doesn't like it, no matter how many technical books you bring to tell him about "This is how an Audio amplifier is supposed to be.....", he will not buy it.
About plastics/digital source. He has the very expensive CD player (top line of RAIMYO), and state of the art phono player. He has 2 rooms of phono plates, and he is still buying new ones.
It seems he still prefers the "stone age" phono than his CD player.
UE, PMA,
I agree with your assessments of the problems of CD in the higher frequency range... But, I am somehow surprised, because this has been a long standing battlefield of "audiophiles" vs "engineers" , and it was long held that redbook CD was technically correct, the phase shift unimportant, that the Nyquist theorem held by extension for transients as well etc etc. Your reply makes you stand in the "audiophile" camp here
I see an analogy to the recent discussion about "delay" vs "phase shift" on the forums. In my half-technical understanding, abstractions such as phase only hold for periodic signals the same way as Nyquist holds for periodic signals only; it seems to me that time domain / wave form are important and that abstraction into phase and frequency (which loses the time domain information) does not fully adress the issue. The same way, it seems to me that Graham is onto something with his "first cycle distortion" idea. Yet in the forums we mostly saw a barrage of ridicule for the idea, I suspect, mostly because of the wording...
In any case maybe the old fashioned "audiophile" concern for PRAT (pace, rythm and timing) is really a crucial factor for realism, even at the expence of maximum FR flatness or other forms of distortion. Maybe PRAT and by extension, anything that happens in the time domain , are really the key as to what we perceive as "reslistic" vs waht we don't. It makes perfect sense to me at least, both from what I know about acoustics, perception etc, and from personal observations. See also SY's comment earlier (maybe in a different thread) about how we can immediately pick a real instrument from a recorded one even under the worst noise/absorption/distorted FR conditons, such as, walking down a street and hearing someone play inside a room. I have made this observation many times: you just *know* it's a real instrument.
I agree with your assessments of the problems of CD in the higher frequency range... But, I am somehow surprised, because this has been a long standing battlefield of "audiophiles" vs "engineers" , and it was long held that redbook CD was technically correct, the phase shift unimportant, that the Nyquist theorem held by extension for transients as well etc etc. Your reply makes you stand in the "audiophile" camp here
I see an analogy to the recent discussion about "delay" vs "phase shift" on the forums. In my half-technical understanding, abstractions such as phase only hold for periodic signals the same way as Nyquist holds for periodic signals only; it seems to me that time domain / wave form are important and that abstraction into phase and frequency (which loses the time domain information) does not fully adress the issue. The same way, it seems to me that Graham is onto something with his "first cycle distortion" idea. Yet in the forums we mostly saw a barrage of ridicule for the idea, I suspect, mostly because of the wording...
In any case maybe the old fashioned "audiophile" concern for PRAT (pace, rythm and timing) is really a crucial factor for realism, even at the expence of maximum FR flatness or other forms of distortion. Maybe PRAT and by extension, anything that happens in the time domain , are really the key as to what we perceive as "reslistic" vs waht we don't. It makes perfect sense to me at least, both from what I know about acoustics, perception etc, and from personal observations. See also SY's comment earlier (maybe in a different thread) about how we can immediately pick a real instrument from a recorded one even under the worst noise/absorption/distorted FR conditons, such as, walking down a street and hearing someone play inside a room. I have made this observation many times: you just *know* it's a real instrument.
Lumanauw,
re: your friend who prefers "non realistic" sounds: maybe he just prefers one distortion to another. See above - maybe FR and HD are less important than we think, and the arrival time of the relevant (!) transients in music matters most. So maybe your friend prefers music that is colored frequency wise, yet represents a more accurate approximation of the real thing , to him (the "spirit" of the music), in the time domain.
Another factor: too much detail distracts from the message. I have read comments more than once on forums where recording professionals had very detailed audio systems at work yet chose more "forgiving" systms for their home stereos....
re: your friend who prefers "non realistic" sounds: maybe he just prefers one distortion to another. See above - maybe FR and HD are less important than we think, and the arrival time of the relevant (!) transients in music matters most. So maybe your friend prefers music that is colored frequency wise, yet represents a more accurate approximation of the real thing , to him (the "spirit" of the music), in the time domain.
Another factor: too much detail distracts from the message. I have read comments more than once on forums where recording professionals had very detailed audio systems at work yet chose more "forgiving" systms for their home stereos....
MBK,
I am an engineer who also builds and listens . And a bit experinced, 26 years after graduation. I do not close my eyes and ears .
Regarding CD, I have always considered 44,1kHz as unsufficient, as one of my jobs is to measure real-time transient signals and I have to choose sampling frequency.
Regarding phase shifts/time delays, it was explained here. When well under F-3dB, we have a good but delayed copy, for system operating from DC to Fh. This may be unacceptable for our young engineer colleague, but reality if she ever had to collect real-time signals .
Take care,
Pavel
I am an engineer who also builds and listens
. And a bit experinced, 26 years after graduation. I do not close my eyes and ears .Regarding CD, I have always considered 44,1kHz as unsufficient, as one of my jobs is to measure real-time transient signals and I have to choose sampling frequency.
Regarding phase shifts/time delays, it was explained here. When well under F-3dB, we have a good but delayed copy, for system operating from DC to Fh. This may be unacceptable for our young engineer colleague, but reality if she ever had to collect real-time signals
.Take care,
Pavel
Yes, they do
And at home, they do not try to imitate what they do in the studios (I can understand, it will be boring). They want to enjoy music
Their system sounds "more sweet" than studio sound. And they enjoys it, nothing to complain about the sound in their home that is not exactly like in the studio.lumanauw said:
MBK said:
lumanaw said:
And probably here is the root of the impossibility to agree on a universal solution to the problem of audio reproduction.
We grew accustomed to listen to something unavoidably different from real life.
We grew accustomed to tweak how we listen to suit our personal tastes.
Hopeless to agree on a single way to do it that fits all tastes.
Rodolfo
Jorge:
We are in an unfairly advantageous situation, when we build something, measure and improve to staisfaction, we are rewarded with the best sounding equipement this side of the galaxy.
Others are not so fortunate, must wade through murky subjective asessments (including "it is lower priced, cannot be very good") never knowing for sure (unadmittedly) where they are really standing.
Rodolfo
We are in an unfairly advantageous situation, when we build something, measure and improve to staisfaction, we are rewarded with the best sounding equipement this side of the galaxy.
Others are not so fortunate, must wade through murky subjective asessments (including "it is lower priced, cannot be very good") never knowing for sure (unadmittedly) where they are really standing.
Rodolfo
I take it differently. Engineers will always have more advantage than people who is not engineer in making anything (including audio gear).
Who do I mean by "engineer"? Is it the ones who fortunate enough to finish their college? No, I don't think so. To me, a "trouble shooting mechanic"in the field, that only graduates from High School is more "engineer" than S2 graduates that never touch a wrench. I'm an engineer myself (Mechanical Engineering, not EE), and I can see that real "engineers" do not necessarily have to finish college, it is more in their way of thinking and trouble-shooting a problem.
What it have to do here? I want to say, that engineers will always have more "chance" to make good power amp (or sellable power amp or to-be measured power amp), because they KNOW how to achieve a certain goal. If they want to cancel harmonics, they know how to do it. If they want to leave harmonics, they also know how to do it. They know that TIM exsisted, IM existed, Crossover distortion existed, and how to take care of each of them.
The "missing link" is actually in the very first "design criterion".
Who said that The lowest THD or the biggest Damping Factor or the fastest slew rate or amp without harmonic at all is the "HOLY MAIN GOAL" in making an amp. These things usually known by measurement machines, not our ear. Our ear is different than a measurement microphone.
Usually the so called Engineers are not realizing that they are dragged to make audio amp with those superb specs just because "THEY ARE ABLE TO DO IT". The more they see distortion FFT, they more they wanted to make "as clean as possible" tracks, forgetting whether it is better to have"as clean as possible" or differently. Usually when the amp is finished, and it sounds "different" than other amps in the market (that customers fond of the sound), they insisted that "this is how a correct amp should sounds like".
If this "first criterion" about how an amp (that people fonds of the sound) should looks like, I'm sure "engineers" can do much better than people who dont know any EE background.
How about thinking like "Cheever Thesis". First try to recognize what kind of harmonic pattern that customer's ear likes. After finding "what an amp should looks like", then it is continued by math calculations, not math calculations first and then insisting "this is how a good amp should sounds like......."
This way, the same engineer can make "very accurate amp" that recording studio needs, at the same time he is also very good in making "very expensive sound" power amp for high-end market.
I can tell you, the FM Accoustic gears are not "clean" at all. It is full with low order harmonics, and when I see the cct, it is "intentionally" made that way. This shows that the engineer behind it knows "what the customer's ear wants" and he know "how to realize it" (And it takes a REAL ENGINEER to do these 2 things). And he can sell very expensive, and customers are in waiting list for that
Who do I mean by "engineer"? Is it the ones who fortunate enough to finish their college? No, I don't think so. To me, a "trouble shooting mechanic"in the field, that only graduates from High School is more "engineer" than S2 graduates that never touch a wrench. I'm an engineer myself (Mechanical Engineering, not EE), and I can see that real "engineers" do not necessarily have to finish college, it is more in their way of thinking and trouble-shooting a problem.
What it have to do here? I want to say, that engineers will always have more "chance" to make good power amp (or sellable power amp or to-be measured power amp), because they KNOW how to achieve a certain goal. If they want to cancel harmonics, they know how to do it. If they want to leave harmonics, they also know how to do it. They know that TIM exsisted, IM existed, Crossover distortion existed, and how to take care of each of them.
The "missing link" is actually in the very first "design criterion".
Who said that The lowest THD or the biggest Damping Factor or the fastest slew rate or amp without harmonic at all is the "HOLY MAIN GOAL" in making an amp. These things usually known by measurement machines, not our ear. Our ear is different than a measurement microphone.
Usually the so called Engineers are not realizing that they are dragged to make audio amp with those superb specs just because "THEY ARE ABLE TO DO IT". The more they see distortion FFT, they more they wanted to make "as clean as possible" tracks, forgetting whether it is better to have"as clean as possible" or differently. Usually when the amp is finished, and it sounds "different" than other amps in the market (that customers fond of the sound), they insisted that "this is how a correct amp should sounds like".
If this "first criterion" about how an amp (that people fonds of the sound) should looks like, I'm sure "engineers" can do much better than people who dont know any EE background.
How about thinking like "Cheever Thesis". First try to recognize what kind of harmonic pattern that customer's ear likes. After finding "what an amp should looks like", then it is continued by math calculations, not math calculations first and then insisting "this is how a good amp should sounds like......."
This way, the same engineer can make "very accurate amp" that recording studio needs, at the same time he is also very good in making "very expensive sound" power amp for high-end market.
I can tell you, the FM Accoustic gears are not "clean" at all. It is full with low order harmonics, and when I see the cct, it is "intentionally" made that way. This shows that the engineer behind it knows "what the customer's ear wants" and he know "how to realize it" (And it takes a REAL ENGINEER to do these 2 things). And he can sell very expensive, and customers are in waiting list for that
For MBK and others interested - spectral analysis of a vinyl record, Miles Davis. It is up to everyone to judge if the things are hapenning above 22.05kHz or not ....
http://web.telecom.cz/macura/miles.jpg
http://web.telecom.cz/macura/miles.jpg
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