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In Reply to: RE: Let me get this out of my system... posted by Phelonious Ponk on February 28, 2010 at 05:45:57
Sometimes when I listen to "Sunday At The Village Vanguard" late at night in my listening room, with a good glass of wine in my hand, I can feel the ambiance of the room and locate the other patrons talking softly and clinking their glasses around me; I enter that physical space and wonder if the reproduction of a performance gets much better than that.
Other times, when I put on my headphones in the clear light of day, I understand that Scott LaFaro's bass is panned too far to one side, that the microphones must have been too close to really record the ambiance of the room relative to that performance, that the room sounds may have even been captured by a separate mic, that the ambiance is an illusion and that it was my emotions, desire and expectations that translated that extra mic into the palpable space and contents of the Vanguard.
Headphones don't create a soundstage like stereo speakers do. It's as simple as that. Plus, the hard panning is much easier to tolerate through speakers than headphones. I don't know why you assume the headphone experience is correct and discount your earlier observations when the headphones can't possibly provide the same experience from that recording.
I know the recording well. When played back on a system with good imaging, there is a clear separation between the players (close) and the crowd (distant) and the crowd is captured in stereo.
Follow Ups:
I don't assume the headphones get it right and understand that they image very differently. What I'm saying is that the headphones reveal the likelihood that the crowd, the bass and the piano all had their own mics, that the ambiance I feel sometimes when listening is a well-constructed illusion, that when I feel as if I'm sitting at a table in the Vanguard, a good bit of that feeling was created in my head, not in the recording..
P
Everything you "hear" from a stereo system is constructed in your head: ambiance, instruments, singers, everything. The reality is that there are two transducers producing pressure waves, your brain does the rest, interpreting the result as a reproduction of a live event. Different systems will make the reproduction more or less convincing, as you found out when comparing headphones to speakers. It's not just your state of mind, the sound waves reaching your ears are different.
Yeah. I get that. The line I was trying to draw was between the many things our minds "hear," to construct the illusion of playback, and the some of the differences we hear, where there should be none, between computers, files, players, etc.
Analogy: drawing a comparison in order to show a similarity in some respect; "the operation of a computer presents and interesting analogy to the working of the brain"; "the models show by analogy how matter is built up"
P
"differences we hear, where there should be none, between computers, files, players, etc."
Come on. If you don't know better, you should. I can see that you don't grasp electronics or computers to any depth, just where does your expertise lie? Actually the question is largely rhetorical because if you actually do understand ANYTHING well, be it a product, process, person..., then you are surely aware that you are aware of many factors affecting it's performance, however it's established, and nuances of it's performance that are likely lost on the casual observer.
With effort instances of computers, files and players can be optimized to produce results sufficiently identical to each to other to obscure identification by a single observer. If the best observer is available or an entire population then it can be extended to the population. Once the maximum error is well below the thermal noise floor then they can be considered identical for the application. Naturally using techniques to reduce the bandwidth will allow further differentiation but that shouldn't be detectable in actual operation.
Pragmatically NO two components are identical off the line (but they both meet specs). No two instances of the same media are identical. No two people are identical and neither are any two environments, even if the difference is only temporal.
The name of the game is to get differences between instances of a product small enough that most people don't care. It's NOT to get them small enough that an astute user can not sense a difference under any condition.
I mentally cringe when I read posters saying that they did a test using two IDENTICAL (fill in the blank)s. One that I recall from years ago was when someone was doing a test and bought two, brand new CD's and unwrapped each one right before conducting the test to insure that they were identical. As you can see from the above, that indicates not a high level of care, but rather an extreme level of incompetence. I stopped right there because anything further would be literally incredible.
I reckon that horse is beat enough. Your 'should' is wishful thinking trying to masquerade as reason.
Regards, Rick
PS: If, as sometimes happens, my computer eats this rather than sending it, the odds that I'll be able to faithfully recreate it are low, very low. However, I can do one of generally the same ilk...
I can see that you don't grasp electronics or computers to any depthRick, that's an outrageous thing to say - you should be ashamed of yourself. The man knows more about engineering than the engineers on the list, more about bits than the programmers on the list, more about psychology than the psychologists on the list (the other one I know of has the good sense to keep quiet).
He's an asset to us all, a calm oasis of common sense in a topsy-turvy world of people who think that a life-time of study counts for something and, outrageously, that what seems is not always what is.
Really - the conceit! Send them up to Marketing right now and we'll tell them a few home truths about who knows what. Dammit! We've paid for big-time Market Research in our day. We've even got clip-boards.
Edits: 03/02/10
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