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In my earliest days as ‘one of us,’ an audio salesman who was in it mainly for the music and so less the salesman than his boss might have preferred, said to me that he was more critical of amplifiers than speakers. (His preference was the C-J Premier 8’s.) ‘Amplifiers can get it dreadfully wrong,’ I paraphrase him as saying, ‘but all (good) speakers are just different concert halls.’ I take this as being a more radical version of what Anthony Cordesman was getting at when he began to call certain speakers “mid-hall.” A way to get us thinking more about listening to music than about audio physics when we’re confronting gear. Or a version of the dreaded impressionism/subjectivism.I’ve had that thought in my mind for years from where it emerged recently as I was trying to help a customer get a grasp on why he liked both JMR Orfeos and Tocaro 42's which sounded so different from each other. The customer was from this area (Massachusetts) and so I posed the following:
The Orfeos bring to mind old (1903) upholstered, woody Jordan Hall in Boston, whose acoustics let you hear everything but the everything seems to proceed from a wonderfully beguiling context. The Tocaros sound like relatively new (1968) Amherst College’s Buckley Recital Hall, which is smaller, un-upholstered, and hard-surfaced though acoustically treated, giving instruments a wonderful immediacy and clarity. Jordan Hall is not excessively warm or soft, Buckley is not in the least hard or cold sounding. But Jordan seems to give music a nineteenth century patina, while Buckley gives it a crisp, modern clarity. I love them both.
The customer said, “Yes, I get that. But I love both halls too, so what do I do?”
“Go to both,” I said with a smile.
Edits: 11/14/14 11/14/14Follow Ups:
I would rather see speakers as instruments, because they each have their own "sonic signature", aka fingerprint. The room is an acoustic space and has it's own attributes too.Imagine this scenario:
Quartet recorded with two mics in an anechoic chamber.
Played back with near-flat time-accurate speakers, in a different anechoic chamber. Then you convolve impulses from various acoustic spaces during playback!! Your quartet could play in a SPECIFIC church, hall, or stadium! Of course, the location of the quartet would be a function of the locations of both the sound source and the mic location used during creation of the impulse... hehehehe. Gets interesting fast...(Aka, there is no original time-related information on the recording being mixed with time-related anomalies caused by speaker and/or room.)
What an experiment/experience that would be...
Cheers,
Presto
Edits: 11/17/14
Two mics in an anechoic chamber - only represent the sound propagating in the direction of the microphone. An instrument, Cello, violin, trumpet, etc. radiate sound in all directions and differently in most directions. so you need to have a different recording space or more microphones or both.
On the other hand, the brain is easily and willingly deceived when we imagine performances in our listening room. And the impulse responses of many performance venues have already been assessed
"The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat" - Confucius
"Two mics in an anechoic chamber - only represent the sound propagating in the direction of the microphone. An instrument, Cello, violin, trumpet, etc. radiate sound in all directions and differently in most directions."
Very true. We had a discussion about this over the summer. Do a search for the word "radiate" in, I think, the Speaker Asylum. In that thread, I made this very point, and noted that loudspeaker radiation patterns are "fixed" with regard to dispersion vs. frequency and don't vary according to the instrument(s) being reproduced, e.g., the radiation pattern is the same at, say, 1,200 Hz, whether the speaker is reproducing the sound of a trumpet or a flute or a snare drum.
These are two reasons why loudspeakers, in ANY room, will never sound like a real instrument in that room.
:)
So true - and one of the keys to understanding "the truth" here in the Asylum: That all we experience in listening to performances (by the artists and recording engineers) is contrived, a figment of our imagination, driven by the desires and obsessions to optimize something that we believe is based in reality. We will argue about maintaining some sense of fidelity - after all it is "Hi-Fi" - a connection between that imagined event and our actual response to the pressure variations that meet our ears.
I was reminded of this when watching this video about old time radio sound effects. Enjoy.
"The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat" - Confucius
Similar experiments have been conducted for decades. The one thing about your idea is that the playback doesn't require an anechoic chamber. This is because the sonic signature of the original space depends upon us receiving sound from many directions, and in order to believably recreate that space, there would need to be many loudspeakers, and as a result, it would no longer be an anechoic chamber.
Back in 1975, I had the idea of building a room where virtually the entire walls, floor and ceiling would be covered with loudspeakers, with a large number of channels. Surely, other people, smarter than I, had similar ideas. One guy, Michael Gerzon, was on a similar track. The problem has always been the expense and complexity of the large number of playback channels. Gerzon developed the soundfield microphone - a tetrahedron of microphone capsules, from which you could synthesize the sound from any direction (bandwidth limited by the size of the array). But I don't think he ever got to develop what I call the "massively multi-channel" playback system before he died.
More recently (within the past 10-15 years), other researchers have built 32 microphone spherical arrays.
Way back, at RCA and Bell Labs, and maybe at Electro-Voice, etc., experiments like this were done. They continue to be done at places like MIT and IRCAM (is IRCAM still around?), as well as at many other places - typically universities and manufacturers.
Ok, gotta go.
:)
I like this thread and agree. Once you get past a certain “performance” threshold beauty truly is in the eyes of the observer.
"A pound of perspiration is equal to an ounce of inspiration"
Edits: 11/16/14
There are other aspects of speaker performance to consider but *listening perspective* is possibly the major aspect, at least for me. The reason why I've always preferred to own more than one pair of speakers is because I prefer to match speaker perspective and recording perspective.Because listening perspective is mostly a function of the recording style, a good speaker system will reveal the differences between recording perspectives. That said, "listening perspective" sounds more thoroughly realistic when my speakers partner well with my recordings.
Edits: 11/15/14
Back in the day there was discussion in the audio press about whether playback represented a window to the original event, or was a new event in itself. Anyway, this reminded me of these sorts of philosophical debates. For me, it depends on the recording. Something carefully crafted in the studio really doesn't exist as a single event until it is played back. The speakers might as well be the venue, because there's no other point of reference.
With recordings of live music I'd like to think I can be transported to the original venue with everything intact, but in reality the result would be something a bit more complicated.
The "venue" is in your mind. Sure, the signals were contrived in a different venue - by the producers and engineers (through their playback system... in their minds?)
I love reviewing some of the old Heyser articles, with definite Einsteinian influences of individual manifolds that we base our observational frame of references upon, each with folds and potential catastrophic effects as they relate to the imagined performances we build this hobby around.
Imagine life in Audio if there had never been a microphone...
"The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat" - Confucius
Joan Baez, Odetta, etc. in the 60's.
Observe, before you think. Think before you open your yap. Act on the basis of experience.
Excellent story Bob.
I'm waiting for someone to call me a simple minded idiot!
when it comes to high energy sub-atomic particle physics (or you might not), but your thoughts on different speakers sounding different and still being desirable are correct.
As a musician, I get where you're coming from. It's very true that different speakers are 'voiced' to sound good with different kinds of music, just as different performance venues are. Think of placing a string quartet in a 2,300 seat concert hall, versus placing them in a 100 seat recital hall. Further, not only the size of the hall, but also the reverberation characteristics, makes some halls more or less desirable for various types of music. Baroque music with lots of counterpoint and fast/delicate notes tends to sound better in a more dry hall, so as not to obscure the detail, whereas the larger symphonic music of the Romantic period tends to sound better in a more live hall, to enhance the dynamics of the music.
Similarly, speakers bring their own characteristics to various types of music.
:)
You're the last person here that I'd call a simple minded idiot, Bob. The "speaker as venue" concept is an interesting one to ponder; after "playing around" in the audio world for the last fifty years, one tenet has not changed: the most significant change (i.e. hopefully improvement)one can make in a system is via speakers. Of course, there will be the obligatory naysayers.
"The "speaker as venue" concept is an interesting one to ponder; after "playing around" in the audio world for the last fifty years, one tenet has not changed: the most significant change (i.e. hopefully improvement)one can make in a system is via speakers. Of course, there will be the obligatory naysayers."
I agree with your comment, "The "speaker as venue" concept is an interesting one to ponder." But I guess I need to change my screen name to "obligatory naysayer."
We both have about the same years in this hobby/passion/addiction, etc. I used to believe that the speakers were the most important link in the chain. Now I believe that the most important link is at the other end: the source. Why? Simply this: What do you think you would hear with the finest equipment possible (whatever you think that is) playing a scratched 78 rpm record?
"What do you think you would hear with the finest equipment possible (whatever you think that is) playing a scratched 78 rpm record?"
Yes indeed, playing a scratched 78 rpm record as "source" would make whatever system sound horrible to most people including me. Of course, there are always exceptions such as the throwback who actually prefers and enjoys the sound of scratched 78's especially through hand cranked gramophones. All sensible things considered (including ruling out poor recordings of all formats), I was attempting to be reasonable and your point is well taken nonetheless.
Do not treat yourself so bad, Bob.
You are listed as a Dealer- which brand(s) do you represent?
Resolution Audio, Audio Note, JMR, Crimson, Blue Circle, Tocaro.
Very nice! The Audio Note gear is on my short-list to demo (someday).
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