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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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In Reply to: Tony - with all due respect, posted by jult52 on October 21, 2010 at 08:34:01:
This is not a difficult demonstration. It has been done many times. It was done publicly in the 1960's. Acoustic Research sponsored a live vs. recorded demonstration involving the Fine Arts Quartet, which I heard in Payne Hall at Harvard University.
When I did it, the speakers and the piano were not in the same location, as I wasn't about to move the heavy piano about on the carpet. So the location of the piano and the location of the speakers were not exactly the same, hence it was possible to tell a difference between the two by the directionality. However, at a normal listening distance (20 feet) in the back of the room this was of little effect and the room was sufficiently reverberant as to cover up for these differences. The key thing to recognize is that the equipment was not attempting to reproduce the ambiance of the original room. It did not have to. That was provided because the recording was made with minimal reverberation (the microphones were just inside the opened lid, and then played back in the same room as the live instrument.) It was necessary to get the tonal balance correct. This was done by adjusting the microphone positions and tweaking the speaker aiming. It was also necessary to get the levels well matched and the polarity correct.
There was some tape hiss from the two track 7.5 ips recording. (It was necessary to record with very conservative levels, otherwise tape saturation would have introduced audible distortion, hence the hiss. As it turned out in the back of the room there was room noise that drowned out the hiss. Incidentally, it was not possible to achieve the desired effect with a Nak CR-7 cassette deck. If Dolby was used it was not transparent to the dynamics of the instrument. If Dolby was disabled the piano sound was accurately reproduced with lots of hiss at low recording level, but if the recording level was increased to make the hiss inaudible then tape saturation distortion destroyed the effect. (In the AR demonstrations they avoided a problem by continuously playing the tape during the live portions so the tape his would not be a give-away.)
One conclusion that I reached was that room acoustics are the critical factor. The room and its effects are vastly more important than any other component of a good record-playback system. Same room comparisons side-step this problem by canceling out room effects.
One thing to keep in mind: Even with this degree of accuracy, which I would say is "good enough for all practical purposes," listening to recorded music is not the same as listening to live music. The musical performance and intent differs on each live event, while a recording is always the same. To me as a music lover, this is vastly more important than any minute differences in sound quality between live and recorded music.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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Follow Ups
- RE: Tony - with all due respect, - Tony Lauck 09:19:22 10/21/10 (1)
- Really interesting post - jult52 12:26:43 10/21/10 (0)
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