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In Reply to: RE: An innocent question... posted by geoffkait on December 19, 2014 at 03:46:20
"What happens when a resistor that measures very good sounds worse than one that measures worse?"
It depends on who is judging. Some people prefer noise and distortion, thinking that it improves the sound. Since artificially induced noise and distortion are the norm in some musical genres, IMO people who listen mostly or only to those genres are not qualified to judge whether sound is "better" or "worse" as they lack a true reference. I listen to acoustic music, preferably recorded with a minimal number of microphones in a concert space and not a studio. I am not inclined to pay much attention to reports of how other musical genres sound "better" on particular equipment, as this is not relevant for my purposes.
If one concentrates on whether the sounds are "the same" or "different" then these questions of taste disappear.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
While I like most of your posts this one sort of seems to say things I don't like. I never prefer noise or distortion in the recording process. That is completely different than the few types of "purposed" distortion I can tolerate in electric music. I listen to acoustic and electric music. I do like some preamp level distortion on electric guitar (except some tube amps) for instance but never at the power amp level or by recording at levels or in a way that would distort even acoustic instruments recorded via microphones.
I know the kind of "space" that can be created by using a mic to record sound in a "room". I've also heard plenty of recordings in all genres that have a large noise floor using only mics to record acoustic sources. I also know that some things recorded direct with no mic can sound good too. I have many 2 mic acoustic recordings and they vary widely in quality. Some are not so good and it has some to do with the room and improper mic placement. Studios in my opinion are like restaurants in that they vary in quality some are good and some are sterile.
You just can't generalize on this. You can say what music you prefer as you did. And that's it. But how you went from the OP's topic of how one might determine if electric components used in reproduction of sound may differ to passing judgment on what music or recordings people use is totally beyond me and a little snooty as I see it.
His question had nothing to do with music or different types of recordings.
E
T
"I never prefer noise or distortion in the recording process. "
You might want to look up something called dither.
Dither is noise added to a digital recording when making copies to get the threshold up to one bit of information so the quantization is abated. It started with the original CDs, people said the DDD ones sounded funny, grainy or something. Dither took care of that.
The dither is exactly at the level at which it will not be reproduced, just brings up the floor to the minimum quantization level. On AAD or ADD recordings the slight noise was already there and no dither was necessary. In fact I suspect the quantization process removed some of that noise losslessly.
I said "some people" prefer certain distortions. I guess you are not one of them. :-)
As to an electric guitar, in this case the distortion is part of the instrument construction and the artistry of the musician. All musical instruments have distortion. For example, my wife's grand piano would clearly distort if one attempted to play too loudly and the keyboard would make annoying noise if one banged on the keys.
The type of distortion that I really object to comes from distortion that affects the sound of all the instruments. If this is added to the recording (an extreme example is clipping distortion) one will get intermodulation from the separate instruments and their individual realism will disappear. In some cases, BTW, this can happen in a live acoustic concert setting turing very loud passages. In this case it is one's ears that are distorting. Again, this may be intentional on the part of the composer or performers, but I prefer to sit back far enough so that this effect does not happen often.
All the different causes of distortion have their unique effects on the sound that we perceive, as will be appreciated by experienced critical listeners.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I agree.
People think that 'preferable' must also be 'better'. If something sounds preferable that must because either:
1. It conveys some quintessence of the music that another system cannot
2. It adds something that makes the sound more pleasing.
IMHO #2 is by far the most likely reason that many prefer vinyl and tubes. Preferable is correct for that person (but not objectively better)
To answer Geoff's comment about 1970's SS amps - those generated a lot of distortion too but dynamically, though they tested great on sine waves. It was a rather unfortunate time, especially as dynamic limiting in feedback systems had been analyzed for decades before that time.
Regards
13DoW
That was exactly the same argument that those horrible sounding solid state amps made back in the seventies and eighties, that if you preferred the better sounding Tube Amos you must like distortion. That's the ugly sister of the argument, speakers have 4% THD so distortion figures for amps, preamps, etc. don't matter.
Not my experience at all. I found those "horrible" SS amps that I heard to be ugly compared to tube amps. Later, there were good SS amps. This is with acoustic music, which is just about the only kind of music that I listen to.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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