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In Reply to: RE: If you had said accurate I would agree in most cases, but I have heard . . . posted by jnr on March 30, 2015 at 16:49:15
I think we are on the same page. I think "tone" is in the eye of the beholder, also.
Observe, before you think. Think before you open your yap. Act on the basis of experience.
Follow Ups:
"I think "tone" is in the eye of the beholder, also."
Not really. The timbre and tone of live instruments is pretty easy to assess and compare against the reproduction. Obviously there is degradation along the way in the recording chain and source but I have found that preamps and amps have a profound affect on the end result.
The one that let's an instrument sound the most like you would hear live is the one that is more accurate to a human. It usually isnt' the one that measures better but this is a side effect of the way engineers normally reduce distortion.
What SS afficianados consider "detail" or accuracy is really an insidious form of distortion caused by negative feedback creating an imbalance between low and high order harmonics. When people complain about "tube sound" this is also form of distortion (usually from transformer saturation).
I find it interesting that when someone says an amp sounds more like live or the real thing that they instantly assume it is "euphonic" rather than simply more accurate than the bleached out sounding "accurate" amplifier.
There is a good Stereophile article where Keith Howard made software to add distortion to recordings. What he found is that none added is the best but as soon as you add something then there is a clear preference for certain distortion patterns and away from other patterns. Since no product is distortion free then you need to look at the one where the distortion is the most invisible to the ear, not to the oscilloscope.
"The timbre and tone of live instruments is pretty easy to assess and compare against the reproduction."
This is exactly how I feel - I'm a professional musician and the sound of acoustic instruments is permanently imprinted in my brain. I keep going on about timbre and tone mostly talking to the void, but it's nice to come across a kindred spirit.
"The one that let's an instrument sound the most like you would hear live is the one that is more accurate to a human. It usually isnt' the one that measures better."
Amen. Exactly. Humans and music lovers do the actual listening, not robots.
Living with and recording an extremely talented violinist for about 3 years will do that to you. At one time we had three very valuable violins in the house (each worth a $1M plus) and we started doing some experiments (I am a scientist...go figure) to see what differences we heard and if we could measure them with my real time analyzer. Long story short, we could see clear differences in the measurements when she played the same notes at about the same levels. We also found we could SEE differences with the analyzer when she switched bows (she had one for dynamic fast pieces and one for romantic pieces).
It was a real chore to keep a single violin from overloading the tape recorded (R2R analog) when played in a modest sized room.
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