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In Reply to: RE: With all due respect, editors shouldn't be editing for 'opinions' posted by Ivan303 on September 16, 2015 at 07:04:52
With supposedly golden eared "experts" disagreeing very sharply about a particular product's worth and I think that is what we have here, it seems to me the entire matter is very confusing. I think you could probably pick any piece of audio equipment and find those who hate it and those who love it even if it's only the designer's mother and father. So what is the point? Panels, horns, in phase, not in phase, tubes transistors, single ended, push pull, this wire, that wire. Where does the silliness end and the science begin? Steven you were there, you heard it. Note to self, never contradict your boss in public if you want to keep your job.
Follow Ups:
and you claim not, you would begin to see a pattern emerge and learn which writers prefer similar sound characteristics as you.
Perhaps in time with some writers you would buy everything they don't like. =:-0
"It is rare to find a loudspeaker that offers this combination of clarity and neutrality....will provide Class A sound for those with small rooms. Recommended. Highly." versus "LS50 has a damped, almost metallic thickness or membrane-like quality, a hesitant or squeezed-hose restriction of musical flow"
Say it ain't so JA, say it ain't so. Tell me the people at KEF aren't really deaf. I'm so confused about this. Opinions that are worlds and worlds apart. Well you said it measured well. That's something....I suppose. BTW I watched your entire YouTube video on how you measure speakers RMAF11....twice.
I wrote one reply but I think it was a poor response.
There are several problems with the hi-fi industry and press and from readers who seem to expect more than what is possible.
First you have all sorts of camps from listeners who prefer all sorts of things whether
digital
analog
solid state or tubes
(Within Tube amp world is it PP or SET - AND within that what kind of tube output stage and indeed, what is the transformer wired with and what material is it made from).
Torroid versus EI versus C-Core
Speakers? Oh my - you have the "it has to be a (panel, horn, omni-directional, single driver, Dual Concentric, Wide baffle, narrow baffle, two way, coaxial, open baffle, line array, active, passive, sealed box, ported, passive radiated) ----- it's dizzying.
Now you could look to the measurements will tell you about 15% of something useful - the speaker is easy to drive or hard to drive and it may lean bright or it may be good off axis (good as in frequency response good but not necessarily good as in it actually sounds good and you want to listen to it for the next 30 years good). And it will generally tell you how much bass it will put out. But plenty of gear with plenty of problematic measurements sound better AND win in blind level matched testing - No feedback SET amps continually win blind level matched tests in spite of their horrific measurements (well compared to SS anyway).
Regardless - the point is there are camps at the listening end.
All magazines have writers who are, whether they admit it or not, in one or more of the camps. And that is why you have a magazine that will rave about the sound of 1000 watt per channel High Negative feedback amplifier that another reviewer on the same staff wouldn't be caught dead with. Conversely, that reviewer has a 3 watt no feedback 2A3 Single Ended Tube amplifier driving one or two way high sensitive loudspeakers that the 1000 watt reviewer rolls his eyes at.
I give Stereophile SOME credit for at least trying to separate the camps by having class A tube amps and class A SS - but don't for a second believe they sound alike or are equal.
Indeed, anything that sounds different is automatically not equal. Basic logic.
A $100,000 KRELL doesn't sound remotely like a $100,000 Audio Note Ongaku. And you can give them both class A all you like but if you're in the latter camp the Krell will sound like a giant pile of poo even if some other reviewer on the staff gives it the biggest rave in the world. Sorry but it doesn't REMOTELY do what the Ongaku does. And the other guy on staff may listen to the Ongaku and wonder why Bong I was smoking to like it.
Don't mistake being a good writer, or being technologically proficient, or even someone who is a recording engineer as being "EXPERT."
I liked Roger Ebert - a lot of the time (maybe most of the time) I agreed with him - but for Pete sake - his opinion of a movie doesn't trump yours or mine on a movie. He may be able to articulate his position as to why for example he hated the Usual Suspects or A Clockwork Orange (or enter name here of a movie you like that he hated) but that doesn't mean he was right.
And you really should not treat any audio equipment reviewer with any more depth (and I mean that) than a movie reviewer. Experts generally have absolute or very high standards of knowledge in a field that you don't possess and that's why you take their word for things that are over your head. If a bunch of astrophysicists tell you to dig a hole and hide from the meteor about to land on your head you trust them - if some nutter on a forum tells you wear the tin foil hat for the rest of your life - well maybe you're going to check what the experts say first.
You can hear just as good as the reviewer can hear.
So what are review magazines good for? Saving your time and introducing you to something new.
Once you figure out what camp of sound you're in - find the reviewers out there who generally are in line with your listening preferences. So at Stereophile I probably read Herb and Art Dudley over anyone else. The SS guys to me are deaf - the don't get - they don't know what good sound quality is about and so the fact that they like a giant refrigerator amp for $100k is worthless to me to even bother reading. Of course I will read them if they are entertaining like Michael Fremer but to be honest whatever he likes I am probably filing in the "I'm going to probably utterly hate this thing" drawer.
That's why the awards and class A are pointless - too many different sounding things and if you are actually PICKY then being a reviewer is exceedingly difficult. You can be the whore reviewer that likes every damn thing that comes down the pipe or if you are picky then 95% of everything that gets class A you're going to scratch your head and say - no way in hell does that sound any good or at least NOT good at the price. And the reason is that people are generally in camps - if your in the SS camp then all the class A tube stuff is pointless to you and if you're in the tube side or in my case the SET side then anything NOT in the SET camp is highly unlikely to make my class A list or, for that matter, my listenable list.
So going all the way back to the KEF - the question is when you listen to it what say you? I would not give it product of the year because I'd have to hear all the products that came out so I'd want to see the list that it beat. The British magazines liked it but now they like an ATC for around the same price more. The KEF is a very good standmount - in some respects it may be the best in class - in others it's not. If your ear gravitates to the thing it does well you will hold those things as your reference point. If, on the other hand, your ear holds other aspects of sound as the reference point then the KEF may sound clinical and uninviting.
Lastly, Bias has an impact - some will backlash against the KEF just because of all the good press while some will tout it to death because it got all the back-up in the press.
I don't have Stereophile here but the KEF should sound a lot better on a very good SET amp.
Well I never subscribed but I doubt I'd agree with any of them. I prefer the sound of real live acoustic music to recordings of music. None of the equipment in these magazines would sound like the real thing to me. Don't ask me how I know if I haven't heard all of them. Personally I think they're all off on the wrong track. I'm not saying recordings aren't enjoyable or equipment isn't fun but it's just not the same no matter how hard they seem to try.
> I prefer the sound of real live acoustic music to recordings of music.
> None of the equipment in these magazines would sound like the real thing
> to me.
Nothing wrong with that, other than it's not relevant when it comes to
judging the performance of an audio component. See my comments on this
subject in the essay linked below.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
John, I thnk I have to disagree with your essay. Not most of it, of course -- audio equipment and recordings almost never successfully emulate reality, designers do have to make engineering and price/performance trades, different listeners have different needs and value different sonic characteristics, and in the case of electronic or heavily processed music, there's nothing to compare the sound to except perhaps what the mixer heard on his monitors.
But when listening to recordings of acoustical music, my primary reference is how real it sounds, and my main goal is to make it as real as I can, and in my experience almost everyone -- including people who know nothing about audio -- recognize and responds to realism in music reproduction. And I think research tends to support this, that despite popular notions to the contrary, most people rank equipment similarly in blind comparisons, and that the ranking can often be traced back to qualities that correspond to accuracy -- not necessarily faith to the recoording, since conventional two channel stereo is so inadequate, but faith to the live performance.
It can be argued of course that we should aim for a sonic result that suits the practical limits of our technical oapabilities, and to some extent that may be true. Or that we should aim for better than real. The thing is, more than a few recordings have been made on the basis of that philosophy, e.g., a conductor may decide to bring up the level of the strings, and in my experience, they almost uniformly sound awful on a good system.
Conversely, the recordings that sound best to me are generally the less processed, simpler ones -- that is, the recordings that are most accurate, the ones made with a few good microphones, that seek to produce a realistic balance, that keep the signal path as clean as possible. (I think you yourself wrote recently that if you were to ask a listener what they'd like, they'd probably go for a recording made with spaced omnis.)
So call me a purist, but when listening to acoustical music recorded in a good acoustics, I think accuracy can be heard by most people who are familiar with the sound of live music and that it sounds best, even though it's far from perfect.
One of the many audiophile mantras I hear is that live sound can never be duplicated from a recording. I think this is not only nonsense, it's a very unrealistic view considering the things that can be done few would ever have imagined possible only relatively recently.
Instead of being a statement of fact, it is an apology for those who have tried and failed. As I said previously I've met many of these people who work in this industry as well as a lot of people who work in far more technically challenging industries and frankly the one's I'm aware of just aren't up to it. They are not that good. They focus their efforts on doing the same things that haven't worked in the past only doing them better. This is why for me, every new and improved product on the market, hyped in the reviews, whether they are of any real value or not is just ho hum.
Well, i don't think anyone has ever said that live sound can't be duplicated perfectly -- in theory. But there are enormous barriers to doing so, including:
1. Customers how don't want realistic sound
2. Conductors who aren't audiophiles
3. Tin-eared producers in the Kazdin mold
4. The cost advantages of multitrack recordings, mixers who think they're Toscanini, poor engineering
5. Technical limitations of existing transducers, converters, etc. -- some a consequence of poor equipment choice and maintenance, some a consequence of cost and practicality, some a limitation of the state of the art
6. Commercial pressure to accommodate cheap playback gear -- and even most audiophile gear can't reproduce the full dynamic range of live acoustical music
7. The inability of two-channel stereo to fully recreate the original sound field; existing multichannel systems are only marginally better (object oriented recording shows promise)
8. The stick-in-the-mud attitude of some audiophiles, who just want to improve 1950's technology rather than moving on -- I've heard from manufacturers that they'd love to do this or that, but their customers won't buy it -- sometimes this is a great frustration for them, because they know they could be delivering better sound
9. The conflict between the practical acoustics of a real-world living room and the requirements for realistic playback -- this is a biggie, along with wife acceptance factor -- how do you recreate an acoustic space within a second acoustic space that you can't turn into an anechoic chamber?
So in practice, I don't see how it's doable, except in very limited and carefully controlled circumstances (a violin recording in Carnegie Hall, for example, as in the old Acoustic Research live/canned demonstrations). Someday. We could probably come close today with headphones, head tracking, and HRTF compensation using recordings of individual instruments convolved with concert hall acoustics. Or with a large two-dimensional array that could rereate the original sound field. Or sophisticated crosstalk canceller/HRTF compensation like the BAACH filter. But with the possible exception of BAACH these aren't quite practical/economical yet for widespread use. We're getting pretty close. Most of the components exist, but they haven't yet come together for consumer use.
I pick number 7.
I've heard what is probably the best Ambiophonic system in the world and it was very interesting, a most unusual effect. But it didn't sound like hearing live music to me. It surely took a lot of effort (not to mention money) to bring this concept to fruition and my congratulations go out to Ralph. I've met him and he is very smart and also very likeable and generous.
I think it's a big, big part of it. The other is the effect of listening room acoustics.
Just listening to a binaural recording on headphones is a good way of hearing what we're missing, and even binaural recordings are pretty seriously flawed because of HRTF mismatch and the absence of head movement.
I think we have to go beyond ambiphonics and other multichannel systems to crosstalk cancellation, wave field synthesis, dynamic HRTF compensation, and similar techniques.
Full wave field synthesis isn't yet economical but I think we could do a pretty good job with existing multitrack masters and lateral wave field synthesis with some cheats around the edges. Something I'd love to work on myself but I'm not sure how to commercialize it given the absence of a consumer channel for suitable program material. You could build the box and the speakers, but what would people play on it? The record companies would have to be willing to provide their masters in audio object form, e.g., in the Atmos format, and the recording venue specs for convolving reverb (or identification of a suitable one, no reason you couldn't use a standard library, even pick a hall yourself).
In the meantime, I'd settle for some uncompressed, high bit rate two- or three-mic recordings -- played through line source dipoles they're spectacular and put most commercial recordings to shame.
Most if not all my Direct to disc recordings delivers this pretty well and if digitally , Reference recordings CD's deliver big too, got a couple of Dave Wilson CD's which are fantastic in the way they capture the church , Choir and Organ ...
Regards
Edits: 09/19/15
Yes, they are some fine audiophile recordings out there. If only there were good recordings of everything!
That is quite true. I have pointed out to many people that they do not actually compare the sound of a piece of equipment with live, unamplified, music! It would be a difficult thing to arrange for most and it is questionable how relevant it would be for home audio since the room acoustics at home are quite different from that of a concert venue.
I gather there are multichannel set ups which can result in a stunning sense of space, but how close it is to an actual concert is another matter.
One of the commenters on the article points out that we often play recordings with no way of comparing the result to the actual recording session. He also mentions the enjoyment factor, which has little to do with the original sound, as all we have are the playback system, the recording, and the room, along with individual taste and mood.
-----
"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
""I compare the sound of the product against that of live, unamplified music."
Really? I know this is a common meme, coined by Harry Pearson back in 1973 when he founded The Abso!ute Sound. But, as I have argued in the past, it doesn't hold together with two-channel reproduction, in which the ambient sound at the original event is folded into the front channels."
Actually the promise that one day it would be achieved and that was the goal long preceded Harry Pearson in 1973, in fact it was the goal at the invention of high fidelity sound and even before. Why is that no longer the goal? The answer is simple, the problem has beaten those who tackled it to a pulp. It's hardly surprising to me. I've met many of these people and frankly they're not remotely up to the challenge. They are not the sharpest knives in the drawer no matter how much they think of themselves or each other. The really sharp people are working on much more interesting problems like engineering DNA and how to get a human to Mars and back alive. Their one commercial effort that recognized what they'd been doing wasn't going to work was Quadraphonic sound. It was a commercial disaster because it demonstrated a complete lack of understanding and was therefore a technical failure. And so the industry went back to what it knew how to do and has been doing it in an infinite number of variations since 1958. It didn't work then and it still doesn't work now. And there is no prospect in the offing that this will change anytime soon. And so the goals have become instead doing more of the same only trying to do it better whatever that means. But don't take my word for it, read Gordon Holt's articles on the subject. He went from despondent to crestfallen.
Before anyone can solve this problem they will have to rethink the entire concept from square one and come up with some very different answers. Until then audiophiles will shop and swap 'til they drop, drooling over the newest best offerings which have ever escalating prices. Each one promises to be the silver bullet that will quench all of their frustrations. In the 1960s the most expensive stereo system you could buy was the price of a new luxury car. Today it's the price of not just a house but a mansion. Is the difference really worth the cost? Where does the silliness end and the sanity begin?
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