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For those of you who may not be aware, Paul McGowan of PS Audio publishes a free daily subscription blog called Paul's Posts. No, this is not an advertisement nor a means to promote his products. In fact, he rarely even mentions PS Audio in his daily blog.
He writes about all things audio in a very concise, easy to understand and thought provoking style.
Thought some of you folks might also find his blog as worthwhile as I do.
Here is an example with today's blog,
"Getting a piece of it
I’ve written before that in the long run I find that we are very far away from reproducing live sound in our homes. We stress over cleaning and polishing the fine details of our systems when, in reality, they are very far away from live sound reproduced in our home. We can fool our senses by closing our eyes and imagining we’re in a concert hall but we always know we are not.
I believe that the biggest hurdles to achieving live sound in our homes are to be found not in digital vs. analog recording and playback but in the transducers themselves: the microphones and loudspeakers. These are archaic contraptions that will hold us back from reaching audio nirvana for as long as we insist on using them. Not that I have anything better to offer.
But can we get a piece of it right? Is it possible to reproduce some of the live qualities of music in our homes? I think the answer is yes and I would like to touch on the qualities of some of what we have right over the next few days.
My purpose in writing this isn’t to be a naysayer but rather to poke the box as my friend Seth is fond of saying. Poking the box means to me that I bring to light that which some of us may find uncomfortable. That which challenges our cherished beliefs.
Follow Ups:
....nudge, nudge, wink, wink....say no more, say no more, say no more!
A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat Colonel....know what I mean, know what I mean??
What's it like?
then the major problems of room / transducer interaction and distortion will vanish.
There is an insurmountable divide between live and reproducing live in the home. The hope of closing that particular gap is quite laughable.
years from now the same crude tools used today will be all there is to record reality?
nt
First, all natural sounds are heard via the transformations of the external, middle and inner ears and, so, bypassing them by direct auditory nerve stimulation would only require that we simulate their effects anyway.
Second, in order to stimulate the auditory nerve electrically, we would still need mechanical transducers to encode the sound into electrical signals.
We have to go beyond a vibrating mylar or paper membrane and a coil of wire if we wish to replicate reality at some future date. We must be able to record all the neural data going into the brain and then reproduce that in another individual. Take the current crude cochlear implants or auditory brain stem implants and extrapolate a hundred years of development with nanotechnology. Instead of today's mere couple dozen electrode array, implants would have a million electrodes in the device array. Where every individual nerve cell could be stimulated.
If the starting point is a live acoustic performance, the energy produced is mechanical. So, if your end-point is direct electrical or magnetic brain stimulation, at least one transduction step is necessary. What one does in between is moot.
Most of the noises that we hear in this world are created by mechanisms. Should crickets and frogs stop what they now doing and learn how to telepathically beam noise across open space and into our eardrums? How do we "directly stimulate the auditory nerve" without the aid of mechanical transducers?
"He was one of those men who live in poverty so that their lines of questioning may continue." - John Steinbeck
If one can tolerate a large physical size, one can also use directivty to make he room problems largely vanish but this still leaves the problem of capture / recording and the loudspeaker not being faithful to the input signal.
Let's say someday being able to beam the signal directly into the brain bypassing sound waves entirely.
WE use our ears and brain to hear, they work in 3d too, all we need to do is present them with something close enough to fool you into believing it was a different acoustic environment and this can be done.
The way we record and the fact that we for the most part fully ignore how sound radiates and how we hear is what is limiting what we have now and that driven by the common denominator in the market.
True that, DrChaos.
Timbre, dynamics, low IM/TH-distortion, and low noise, in the context of a system and room...for me -- is a recipe for suspending disbelief. Transducers, e.g., microphones and loudspeakers, have an immense contribution to the overall sonic experience.
If you are drawn into the music...THAT matters -- whether you're in your car with the top down travelling PCH or in a live venue with peaks hitting 117 dB...it can happen...OR...not ;-)
Vbr,
Sam
Posted by JayG :> We can fool our senses by closing our eyes and imagining we're in a concert hall but we always know we are not.
If you were you would not only hear the distractions of a room full of people, but you would have the taste and smell of humanity moving all around you.
Posted by JayG :> I believe that the biggest hurdles to achieving live sound .. microphones and loudspeakers.
In that case you could get speakers just like those blearing music at the concert. They should reproduce just fine.
~~~
The Driver smiled when he lost the car in pursuit...
I'm far from being an expert so this is just an uneducated opinion, but I think another big reason why we can't experience live sound in our home - at least in my small home - is that the space is so very limited vis-a-vis a concert hall, club or similar space. Even if we turn the volume up to club levels, our rooms aren't large enough to give similar acoustics.
Paul must post on Asylum, preferably on Critics Forum where right now there is a severe dearth of posters. No new posts for 3 weeks almost. Paul will provide some thought provoking ideas, not just critical comments on the new issue of certain audio magazines.
Cheers
bill
nt
You are right about loudspeakers being a very very weak link but also the stereo recording process does not capture a live event well.
Studio recordings are normally contrived stereo and not a capture of the real event.
So far as the weakness of loudspeakers, our hearing process automatically seeks to “hear through” and largely ignores problems and flaws, this is how we can listen in abysmal conditions and still enjoy the sound. On the other hand, with one measurement mic, one can make recordings at home which can make the hair stand up on the back of your neck especially using headphones. The problems capturing real stereo vanish when one records in mono.
One need only measure typical home hifi loudspeakers at the listening position to see how much our brain can overlook too. It is not uncommon to see what was a flat measuring loudspeaker measure + - 10 or even 20dB at the listening position. We hear through all that transmogrification but on the other hand, those are also the flaws which stop us from suspension of disbelief and reach the point where it really does sound like “somewhere else” like the original event.
The recording half has a solution which is too involved to go into here but the huge problems loudspeakers generally have are very audible if one does a generation loss recording using a measurement microphone and a loudspeaker. Doing this eliminates the “hearing through” process we experience when listening normally with both ears. The “generation loss” recordings were very popular in the days of analogue tape but is largely forgotten now.
The idea is one records the loudspeaker playing music, this can be done in a room to include room effects or on a tower (like we do at work) so that only the loudspeaker is captured.
After recording the loudspeaker, that is played back through the loudspeaker and re-recorded. Each generation is an exaggerated caricature of “what is wrong” with the loudspeaker, revealing to your ears all the things which prevented it from being faithful to the input signal.
While any part of the modern electronic chain can tolerate many generations before it’s flaws make it unlistenable, with loudspeakers it is very rare to go three generations, most loudspeakers sound bad at generation one or two and some sound bad just hearing it through a precision microphone without the hearing processor (two ears and brain constructing one image).
With modern sound cards being quite good and measurement microphones being ubiquitous I would urge anyone interested in how we hear to make their own recordings. Nothing beats listening to sounds that you also heard first hand as a reference.
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley sound labs
Here, these recordings of loudspeakers might be fun at least as examples of speakers that were refined in part with gen loss recording I mentioned. While much larger than home speakers, you will get the idea especially if you have also heard conventional loudspeakers captured by microphone. Use headphones fwiw.
http://vimeo.com/40148645
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk54IFD4znw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MOG_sPejGA&feature=related
I recorded quite a few bands when younger I would use just 2 microphones tube pre and a reel to reel or HI VHS. I had to take much care in setting up the bands but the recording are wonderful. You get a great sense of space plus the feel of real musicians playing off each other in real time. You can feel this energy. This coming together that's greatly missing in studio recordings.
"One need only measure typical home hifi loudspeakers at the listening position to see how much our brain can overlook too. It is not uncommon to see what was a flat measuring loudspeaker measure + - 10 or even 20dB at the listening position. We hear through all that transmogrification but on the other hand, those are also the flaws which stop us from suspension of disbelief and reach the point where it really does sound like "somewhere else" like the original event."
Yes, that's true, but nevertheless psychoacoustic research shows that people can distinguish speakers with +/- 2 db difference depending on the width and location of the frequency change.
So even though listening rooms may cause such large changes, it doesn't meant that there is a big leeway in transducers.
It's like color perception somewhat. The brain corrects for external illumination in perception. You can have two patches of different colored paint in two rooms and then equalize the ambient lighting in one room so that technically the frequency response appears identical. And nevertheless all people will see them as being colored differently---meaning that the brain figures out the reflective properties of the intrinsic object (the paint) correcting for the environment.
Good thread, JayG, and excellent reply, Tom.
I would add the recording process, in and of itself, is quite fascinating...decisions are made whether to preserve, as best possible, the original sound or to deliberately change it so as to enhance the listening experience or achieve the producer's/artist's aesthetic.
Personally, I'm pursuing direct-to-two track recording of live, unamplified acoustic music performances with one of the objectives being the approach to converging "hearing of the original sound" with "hearing the sound" as captured via the record chain and reproduced over my rig a home. At that point, I would hope to develop a better reference.
Vbr,
Sam
I've heard big planars sound pretty real on moderate sized acoustic instruments.
I've never heard anything that sounds like the Vienna Philharmonic from 3rd row center. Then again, the acoustic experiences at most concerts is often significantly worse than many good recordings and Wilhelm Furtwangler has been unavailable for a while now.
True that, DrChaos.
Capturing and reproducing timbre and dynamics, with low IM/TH-distortion, and low noise, within the context of a system is often a recipe for suspending disbelief, for me.
With that stated, the ultimate sensation is to be drawn into the music...now, THAT matters ;-)
Whether one's in a car with the top down travelling PCH or in a live venue with peaks reaching 117dB -- IT can happen...or...not.
Vbr,
Sam
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