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RE: Adjectives vs. Measurements

>JA's inability to understand, let alone hear for himself and identify the
>difference between the sound of a Steinway grand piano and the sound from
>Vivid speakers even though his audience could and tried to explain it to
>him, shows me that however honest he is, he does not meet my standards as
>a reliable critical listener.

Please stop repeating this falsehood. Of course I could identify the
difference between the live sound of the piano and the recorded sound.
While the audio system could match the spl and was true to the
instrument's tonal quality, it still didn't sound like the real thing.

As I wrote at the article linked below, "the Esoteric-CAT-Vivid-Stealth
system got right not only the tone colors of the real thing, but, to my
surprise, also both the loudness and the microdynamics. The transients
were sufficiently spiky, and the impact of the recorded piano was as
viscerally overwhelming, as the real things had been. However, the
'bigness' of the 9' Steinway had been diminished. Even with the same
tone colors and sound-pressure level, the instrument and the
loudspeakers were exciting the room very differently."

The two things thus sounded different, something I also said in the
video interview I did around the same time with Scott Wilkinson, and in
both the article and the interview, I went on to explain that this sonic
difference was due to the very different intensities of the sounds - the
sound powers per unit area of the radiating surfaces - of the piano and
of the audio system.

John Atkinson
Technical Editor, Stereophile


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