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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: RE: that brings up more questions??? posted by BigguyinATL on August 15, 2014 at 08:57:07:
I made the same basic point in my reply to your earlier thread "Relevant loudspeaker tests" about 5 weeks ago. See http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/speakers/messages/33/335392.html. For convenience, here it is:
"Rooms and loudspeakers are only part of the problem. Musical instruments and microphones are two other parts of it.
With current "practical" technology, we cannot reproduce a musical instrument sound via a recording and subsequent reproduction system. It cannot happen.
Start with the source - a musical instrument. The sound is different at every position around the instrument. This sound is radiated into a room, which imparts its own aural signature. Couple that with the fact that every instrument has a different radiation pattern.
A microphone only picks up the direct sound of the instrument from one point in space, and picks up the room ambient sound, and imparts its own signature due to frequency-dependent and other characteristics. This then is "reproduced" through a single point via a loudspeaker which has a singular radiation pattern, and re-radiates the single-point sound into another room!
Given this, it's amazing that stereo systems sound as good as they do - even if they don't sound like real instruments!"
***
As a follow-up, as long as we're back on this topic, some people misunderstood my use of the phrase "single point via a loudspeaker" in that post. The microphone which picks up the sound is a single point in the room (unless someone wants to nit-pick microphone diaphragm size - which DOES matter, but not for this dicussion).
What I was referring to with regard to the loudspeaker was the loudspeaker location - i.e., a "single location", as opposed to emanating from the entire room, not specifically a particular type of speaker or "point source" speaker. I would have thought that everyone here would have understood that, and hope this clears up any misunderstanding.
This simple fact that a microphone captures direct instrument sound at only one point around the instrument, and also picks up the room's ambient sound (which has the room's sonic characteristics) from a multitude of directions, AND imparts its own sonic signature due to its directional characteristics which vary with frequency, AND its own tailored on-axis curve, and crushes it all together to be "reproduced" from a SINGLE LOCATION VIA A LOUDSPEAKER in the room, which has a singular fixed radiation pattern which does not vary based on the instrument being reproduced, renders futile any attempt to make a cello sound like a real cello, or a trumpet sound like a real trumpet.
Back to the OP's original question:
"Some of us look for speakers that excel at reproducing certain types of instruments or sounds in music. Which ones?"
Rock 'n rollers seem to prefer "boom-sizzle".
:)
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Follow Ups
- Live vs recorded - Inmate51 13:18:10 08/15/14 (2)
- I give up - cloudwalker 17:37:21 08/15/14 (1)
- RE: I give up - Inmate51 19:03:52 08/15/14 (0)
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