What we can never achieve

[Madmike2]

What we can never acheive

Just came from Chapters in Toronto downtown. AN older very well appointed woman and her daughter were just sort of loafing around a Yamaha Baby grand they have there.

As i went to get a magazine they must have decided to sit and play. I heard a mediocre piano player who was more then lifted up musically by the younger girls incredible voice. She sang an old Billy Holiday song and was beyond quite good. I may be new to you all but i have been in some of the best clubs and heard the best singers around and this lady was a Chritina Aguilara class vocalist. ( excellent singer bad song selector )

My point was, as i came back and just stood and listened, i realized that no matter what i build, no matter how much money i spend. I can NEVER duplicate the sound that i heard today. Same goes for anything else i have been in and heard. I have said a few times in my posts that i wanted big sound. This is what i am talking about. Standing in a huge room, 10 feet from a piano with a vocalist weaving lyrical magic. Not the SPL but the reality.

I can already hear a few saying "BUT" there are no buts dudes. I can go back there right now and put the WORLDS absolute best Fullrange speaker and enclosure there with the worlds purest and cleanest signal source and amplifier, close my eye's and ............ it would still sound like a reproduction.

Gotta go ..... i depress myself now.

Michael

Worker Bee sound grunt for various live artists in the 90's

 

[dhaen]

Real or Memorex?

Michael, I agree 100%
Of course this is fuel for the "Live Music" debate. But I'd go further and say that amplified acoustical instruments "grate" to my ears. There is nothing better than the sound of instruments making music, without technological interference.

Much the same applies to Theatre v Cinema. Although of course the art forms have diverged, I'd trade 20 cinema seats for 1 live performance.

What we see and hear at home is a facsimile, and we must not forget that. But it shouldn't stop us from striving to make that facsimile as accurate as possible.

 

[Mr Evil]

In my experience, binaural recordings can be impossible to distinguish from reality. I see no reason why it could not eventually be possible to achieve the same level of fidelity through speakers. It may take some radical advances in technology, but who knows what may happen in the future.

 

[Cal Weldon]

I think that no matter what means you are using to attempt reality in a reproduction, you will not ever come close due to the nature of the attempt.

You can't take room ambience and toss it through a speaker. If you could...

Bose would be a good speaker.

I'm with dhaen and Mike. There's nothing, I repeat nothing that sounds like real.

This is coming from a guy who has played around with speakers for the last 30 years. I came to grips with it a long time ago.

Cal

 

[Madmike2]

I am just praying to any audio god i can think of that DI pole arrays or OB speakers come close. Since thats where alot of my energy is going right now. I think my TL hybrid 3 way is going to tank. i am still building it anyway though

 

[Mr Evil]

I think that no matter what means you are using to attempt reality in a reproduction, you will not ever come close due to the nature of the attempt.

You can't take room ambience and toss it through a speaker. If you could...

I see no fundamental reason why it couldn't be done. The system would need to know the listener's position and orientation and the room's acoustics. The sound emanating from the speakers could be processed with that in mind to achieve any result at the listeners ears. Not practical now, to be sure, but one day...

 

[Madmike2]

I didnt make myself clear back there. Forget processing and DSP .... just take the worlds BEST speaker, full range or whatever . Put it in the worlds best designed enclosure or OB if you like and stand it exactly where she was standing and you still would know it was NOT her.

Thats my point. Forget about various rooms because thats gonna take it even further from what the original sounded like.

Its just maddening to hear something that beautiful and know that you cant take it home.


ANd all you sick puppys thinking i am a nut bar who collects singing girls ............... bahhhh

Michael

 

[scott wurcer]

Ain't it the truth. I did a favor for someone that I never met (I recorded a couple of rare records onto CD). It turned out that he was part of the 60's guitar mafia (Fahey, Basho, Ackerman) and he returned the favor by giving me a private 12 string concert in my hotel room. 200 grand won't give you that sound. The other side of the coin, I went to hear Leo Kottke for the first time since 1977 he was about 80/20 amplified/direct and it seriously detracted from the whole experience for me.

 

[BassAwdyO]

I didnt make myself clear back there. Forget processing and DSP .... just take the worlds BEST speaker, full range or whatever . Put it in the worlds best designed enclosure or OB if you like and stand it exactly where she was standing and you still would know it was NOT her.

Well of course not. The recording process isnt perfect. The playback isnt perfect. The amplification can be pretty close, but the speakers will plain murder it!

I am a bit more optimistic than some.... I believe with the right technology. Everything can be done right starting with the recording and ending with the speakers. At that point the difference may be noticeable, but a blind test would probably make it impossible to tell.

 

[leadbelly]

My $0.02.

I can't argue the original premise of the thread. Home audio falls flat when you try to recreate the magic of a small venue live performance, I'll give you that.

BUT, IMHO, I honestly have and will enjoy *some* recordings of rock concerts more than the actual performance. Sure, this is by no means an A/B comparison because the rock concert is more about the show than purely the music. However, the sound quality in these venues is often atrocious and a live recording on a high end system just sounds better to me. My point is that I'm pretty satisfied the way things are!

 

[chris ma]

Have you ever go answer the door or pick up the phone in fact it was the tele that fool you? I think certain type of sound can be played back very well.

 

[DragonMaster]

Have you ever go answer the door or pick up the phone in fact it was the tele that fool you? I think certain type of sound can be played back very well.

Your doorbell model is the same as the one in SFX databases?

If the speakers and the live sound source are in the same room and you record and then play that sound source while you are in a different room can fool you easily.(I experienced this with good computer speakers) If someone decides to play a good record on a good system in a different room if you don't know it can fool you also.

That means that for a record to sound as realistic as possible, a good stereo microphone should be placed right in front of the sound source, and then played with the speakers at the same position in the same place than it was recorded, which is nearly impossible.

You could also use 7+ mono microphones around you and play them on a 7(not 7.1) or + full range speaker configuration. The more speakers there are, the more realistic it is* : you hear the echo that was coming from the rear behind you, you don't just hear the front.(A stereo recording of one acoustic instrument makes a lot of improvement)

Also a problem you might think about is the hyper-sensivity of microphones: There are ways to do this like by lowering the volume at the input and boosting it after.

*Not too much speakers, the difference between 12(too much) and 24(WAY too much) speakers would be really small.

 

[float]

I believe its possible for a system to create a sound good enough to pass for a live performance, although it might not be exactly the same as the actual performance that was recorded.

For instance, I once heard a demo of a solo piano where you could hear the reflections from the room surfaces and this clearly defined the acoustic space so well that you could close your eyes and you were there. I cannot say that the image was the same size as the recording space, or if the tone of the piano was dead accurate, but I dont think this matters. I heard a real piano in a real room, and thats good enough for me.

The system was wadia/rowland 9s/grand utopias, Heathrow '96 I think.

 

[soongsc]

I think you you could try some recordings and playback without processing, you will know how good your system already is. Try the mic setup shown at http://www.linkwitzlab.com/images/photos/stereo-mic2.JPG

It is very similar to what I did before, only I actually used earphones and modified them into mics.

 

[derf]

Ambisonics, anyone?

Talked a lot about it here:

Amplifier thread goes a bit off topic...

 

[soongsc]

Ambisonics, anyone?

Talked a lot about it here:

Amplifier thread goes a bit off topic...

I'm not sure what specific technique Ambisonics uses, but since humans only have two ears, theoretically if the mic has enough sensitivity and located at the ear location during recording, you should get almost the same results when played back though headphones. So I assume that Ambisonics does not have anything specific for headphone playback. Is this currect?

 

[derf]

Ambisonics is meant for speaker replay, that's correct.

What you're talking about in Binaural, which is all well and good, but who really wants to be confined to headphones all the time and who wants to damage their ears trying to replay *realistic* levels through headphones...

Check the links I posted in the other thread, they can explain the technology better than I can.

 

[soongsc]

Ambisonics is meant for speaker replay, that's correct.

What you're talking about in Binaural, which is all well and good, but who really wants to be confined to headphones all the time and who wants to damage their ears trying to replay *realistic* levels through headphones...

Check the links I posted in the other thread, they can explain the technology better than I can.

In the link you provided does not seem to talk the math side of reproduction and recording relationship, so it's really hard to tell how good it is. Or maybe I've missed it.

Binaural recording can be reporduced through speakers if additional compensation is provided for specific speaker/listener relations. But if you move away from that location, then things change. So does Ambisonics handle variation in speaker/audience location differences?

 

[derf]

This is the text I mean

Basically the Soundfield microphone works with 4 capsules mathematically adjusted to become as if a single point in space.

There's a omni directional capsule, which provides a reference to all the other capsules. The other capsules are 3 x figure 8, one for sound from front/back, one for left/right and one for up/down.

 

[derf]

So does Ambisonics handle variation in speaker/audience location differences?

Oh yes, very much so. You use a decoder to retrieve the ambisonic information, you then tell the decoder where you speakers are positioned in your room, so it can compensate and accurately map the sound. The *sweet spot* is very much bigger than stereo, you can actually walk outside of the speakers and still appreciate the image.