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In Reply to: Re: What happens when you expose yourself to loud noise without hearing protection? posted by Soundmind on August 23, 2006 at 18:14:03:
I'm sorry, but when you learn what audio quality is, you always seem to know the difference. I doubt that you even know what it is, as yet. FYI, I ALWAYS depend on the listening input of others, because I might just like a product that I have designed, just because I designed it. It's possible. So far, I have been fortunate that this isn't so.
Follow Ups:
"FYI, I ALWAYS depend on the listening input of others"Have they also been exposed repeatedly and for prolonged periods to loud rock? Do they also prefer to listen to music which is performed through electronically amplified instruments? Why would their opinions be any more reliable?
"I'm sorry, but when you learn what audio quality is, you always seem to know the difference."
What a self serving, and pretentious statement. For someone who makes judgements ultimately based on audible evaluations alone, not only don't you keep your ears calibrated by constantly feeding them a diet of unamplified musical instruments, not only is the accuity of your hearing in question if due to nothing else than your age, but you have a self admitted history of having exposed it to abuse which might have led to permanent impairment. Your listening instruments are hardly of the caliber of your electronic instruments yet these are what you rely on. And then you ask me to trust your hearing and that of your acquaintenances who for all I know are in exactly the same boat you are in.
" I doubt that you even know what it is, as yet."
There's hardly a day that goes by when I don't listen to or play my 1927 Steinway, or hear live violin music. Sometimes I'll even sit at my Baldwin. That's the quality of sound I have the good fortune to listen to and use and use as a reference. And I must say that at the VTV show as in most other consumer audio shows I've ever been to and at most retailers I've ever been to, ALL of the audio equipment on display is invariably demonstrated using types of music which will tell me absolutely nothing about the equipment's relative merits and shortcomings and the other people who frequent them don't even bother to bring their own recordings. If I don't take this industry or the people who work in it seriously, perhaps this partly explains why.
Soundmind, I perhaps should have said to you: " Appreciation of reproduced sound quality" as you obviously know what real musical instruments sound like, BUT is virtually every example of reproduced sound to your liking? That is my problem and challenge. By the way, what do you know about Strads?
As each individual instrument has its own characteristic sound, you can only generalize but of course there are exceptions. The greatest violin whose sound I am most familiar with is a Guanari del Jesu. It's power is absoultely phenomenal. It is hard to believe you are hearing a violin which sounds as loud as a trumpet. I have heard this instrument in my own home, in other homes, and in concert halls including Carnegie Hall. And like all such instruments, it has a well documented history of its former owners. I am not going to mention the owner's name. Generally Strads have a reputation as being sweeter sounding but less powerful. They are therefore preferred in smaller venues or when playing with smaller groups or solo recitals. The Guanaris are preferred for their big sound when the performance calls for a major concerto with a symphony orchestra in a large hall. They usually have a greater ability to "cut through" and give people in the cheap seats up in the clouds their money's worth. The secrets of the great violin makers of Cremona died with them. Violin makers ever since have been trying to figure out how they did it but to this day, nobody knows for sure. Sadly, many of them are reaching the end of their lives and we will probably never see their like again.BTW, there is a recording made by Rugerio Ricci called "The Glory of Cremona" on Decca which showcases many different great violins. On a companion disc, he plays the opening of the Bruch concerto on each one. When asked to comment about this recording, an artist I knew well said what difference does it make, his playing style tends to mask their differences.
Thanks for the input, Soundmind. Personally, I prefer Strads to Guranari, but I don't think that I ever listened to the 'Guranari del Jesu'. Have you ever been to Cremona see and hear what is there, especially how they build violins?
"Have you ever been to Cremona see and hear what is there, especially how they build violins?"No, the year I wanted to go to Italy, fall of 1973 just before returning to school in Bordeaux France after a summer break....Italy had a cholera epidemic. I got a cholera shot and went to Spain and Portugal instead.
I've known a few violin makers in the US and have seen at least one workshop on several occasions.
"Generally Strads have a reputation as being sweeter sounding but less powerful"This is not mine nor my girlfriend's impression when we DIRECTLY compared a Guarneri del Gesu to a Strad. The strad sounded sweeter, brighter, and most definitely more powerful. The Guarneri sounded darker and still powerful. Her sister also played a Guarneri for some time and the one she had was also darker in character. The prettiest sounding violin she had was the Guadagnini but it was less powerful and more suitable for chamber concerts. The Strad she had sounded absolutely wonderful in Tonhalle's smaller concert hall (still pretty big for a solo violin). In my apartment it could make your ears pulsate (literally). No violin is as loud as a trumpet or trombone.
That being said it varies greatly from instrument to instrument as one would expect for such handmade devices.
"By the way, what do you know about Strads? "My girlfriend had one on loan for a year. Amazing sound and unbelieveable acoustic power. When she played in our apartment I could feel the pressure waves from the instrument inside my ears. Like eardrums Flapping!! And the tone! WOW! She has had other really nice instruments to play(Guarneri del Gesu, Guadagnini, Kappa, and Rocca) but none of them could sound like this one. She was fortunate to have it when she did a concert tour last year playing all 24 Paganini caprices solo in concert. At Tonhalle (smaller auditorium) she needed an instrument with this kind of projection of sound. A lesser violin would not have had the same awe factor.
Well Morricab, since you've heard that violin in both small rooms and presumably when she performed at a concert in a hall, you know that the sound is very different. In a small room, the power of that instrument expresses itself in being very loud but when you are sitting farther away than you could in your apartment or a practice room, while the instrument is softer, it sounds every bit as powerful because it fills a vast space in time, a second or more for each note to die out. And the tone is different too, it's just as clear but mellower. That's the effect of the acoustics of the hall. And if you had a sound system capable of it, and most are not, you might get it to sound like you heard it in an apartment but I assure you with our current technology, you will NEVER get it to sound like it does in the concert hall. That's because unless and until you can duplicate the acoustics, you will not duplicate the tone. I've been working on that problem on and off for 32 years and it is a far more interesting one than which cable or how much feedback sounds better or whether tubes or transistors are better. I can tell you this much from data on about 200 concert halls, the integrated ILG fan response for just about all of them starts falling off at about 2 to 4 khz and is down about 7 to 10 db by 10 khz. Put another way, the RT at 10 khz often runs about 1.2 seconds but at 1 khz it's often 1.8 to 2.5 seconds. Until you can duplicate that, you won't duplicte the tone and until you can duplicate the sense of space and the insturment filling it up in time, you won't duplicate the power of a live performance either, especially a large instrument or group like a symphony orchestra, a chorus, or a pipe organ. If you want to hear that sound, you'll have to hear it live.
I agree with most of what you are saying here except for this:"And if you had a sound system capable of it, and most are not, you might get it to sound like you heard it in an apartment but I assure you with our current technology, you will NEVER get it to sound like it does in the concert hall"
From my experience it is possible to get a sound very close to what is heard in a concert hall AND what would be heard in a small room. The key to the concert hall is low level resolution of the entire reproduction chain. This means speakers that are extremely responsive to small signal input (like an electrostat or horn)and source in electronics that TRULY delve deep into the recordings. IMO, typical mid to low sensitivty speakers will never achieve the resolution of very small input signals due to mechanical resistance and losses in the cones and cabinets. Also, the low level resolution needed to get everything from the electronics is muddied by crossover distortion, which is most problematic at low levels) and feedback smearing over these subtleties (I know you don't believe this but it can clearly be heard when one knows what to listen for). I can tell you from plenty of experience (I grew up with gear similar to what you have) the kind of gear you live with will not dig deep enough to recreate the ambience that is recorded ON THE CD with the right recording.
The next thing it relies upon is naturally recorded ambience and that the microphone wasn't shoved in the f hold of the violin. If they close miked the violin or piano and sections of the orchestra then all bets are off unless the Tonmeister is exceptionally gifted and even then it won't be the real acoustic signature of the hall the recording was made in but the Tonmeister's memory of that venue.
Now I have a few recordings of this caliber and they do sound impressively like hearing the music live up to a medium loud level with my system. Naturally recorded chamber music (Beethoven quartet I recorded of my girlfriend's old quartet) can sound spookily real. I made some other recordings of her and a pianist and a cellist (two separate occasions) in a medium/small concert hall that was empty during the recordings. The reproduced sound is very close to what I heard when standing by the microphones some 4 meters from where she stood on stage and the tonal balance is spot on with proper echoes from the walls and hall decay. Very natural. Is it perfect? No because for sure the room is convoluting and polluting this hall information. But it is still audibly quite close.
"From my experience it is possible to get a sound very close to what is heard in a concert hall AND what would be heard in a small room. The key to the concert hall is low level resolution of the entire reproduction chain."The key to reproducing what the concert hall does is duplicating hundreds of reflections resulting from each note arriving at you uniformly from many different directions in rapid succession over a period of a second, two seconds, or more where the high overtones die out nearly twice as fast as the lower and mid range tones. There are few if any sound systems in the world other than highly experimental ones which can do that. I have one such system. It is extremely difficult to set up, calibrate, and operate properly especially with different recordings. Try a binaural recording instead of a stereophonic recording made around Row "M" or Row "R". Listen to it through headphones. You'll hear two scalar fields so you won't get the spatial aspects of a true vector field but you will get the right musical tone of the instruments at least. That's better than what you normally get from other recordings.
"The key to reproducing what the concert hall does is duplicating hundreds of reflections resulting from each note arriving at you uniformly from many different directions in rapid succession over a period of a second, two seconds, or more where the high overtones die out nearly twice as fast as the lower and mid range tones"Yes this is why low level resolution is of the utmost importance because each successive reflection from a single event gets lower and lower in level, especially in higher frequencies which provide more spatial clues.
In addition, it requires an electronics chain that will not smear the time information of that low level signal. As you noted implicitly it is not just frequency repsonse but timing and low level resolution.
"I have one such system. It is extremely difficult to set up, calibrate, and operate properly especially with different recordings. ... but you will get the right musical tone of the instruments at least."
I simply don't believe you sounndmind. I don't think your system will do a credible job, not with the speakers you have and not with the electronic you are using. I can't put it any plainer than this. As to instrument tone, my system sounds very right to me, my fellow audiophiles and my girlfriend and her musician friends all seem to think so as well. Since I can't get to hear yours nor you mine then I guess we will have just not believe each other.
First of all, the sound associated with the acoustics is NOT on the recording.Secondly, there is no known and likely no possible way to record it if for no other reason than the sound due to the acoustics cannot be separated from the sound directly from the source instruments at the microphones.
Third, it would require at least 4 more channels in addition to the two stereophonic channels to record them if it could be recorded at all, channels only multitrack recorders have.
Today, the only method avialable is to process the existing channels through electronics based on mathematical algorithms designed to emulate the physical relationships of the acoustic itself in order to recreate the kind of field the listener hears at a live concert. This takes many speakers strategically placed around a listening room. This is not the same as quadraphonic or home theater systems and it doesn't sound like them.
There are no special requirements in the sense of "low level resolution" whatever that means for these "auxilliary" sound channels. You can believe whatever you like to believe and fool yourself into whatever you want to fool yourself into but to anyone with normal hearing who is honest, there isn't even a remote comparison between what you hear at a live concert and what you hear from a stero system....any stereo system. While fools waste their time tweaking amplifier circuits, wires, cd players deluding themselves that they are actually doing something valuable, acousticians are tweaking the architectural shape, materials, and baffles in concert halls to mold sound to their conception of ideal. Their supporters contribute millions, even tens of millions of dollars on often dubious expectations of improvement while the audiophile tweakers proclaim every change as a major breakthrough. I've offered this link in the past but nobody has taken me up on it even once, however if you want to actually learn something instead of just your usual yammering and what you get from ad copy, listen to Leo Beranek's lecture on the link below. He was a founder of Bolt Beranek and Newman, the leading architectural consultant in the US, probably the world and his lecture deals specifically with concert hall acoustics.
"I simply don't believe you sounndmind. I don't think your system will do a credible job, not with the speakers you have and not with the electronic you are using."
What do you know about it? You never saw it, you don't understand it, and you aren't really interested in it anyway. OTOH, the US Patent office was interested enough to grant me a patent and at least one company was interested enough to steal it. Funny, even though it offers real hope, few have even bothered to explore what possibliities it offers.
Here's the link to real knowledge nobody will use anyway. Go back to your ad copy, your stereo system, and your delusions.
"First of all, the sound associated with the acoustics is NOT on the recording."Can you actually be serious?? The acoustics and decay of instruments in a real space is easily heard on recordings. How is possible that this information is NOT on the recording?? This information comes to the microphone in the same manner as the direct sound, just softer and shifted in frequency balance. The microphone doesn't care when it arrives nor does the recorder. On the playback if your gear and speakers preserve the phase realtionships between direct and reflected sound and preserves the lowest level signals then your brain does the same thing to separate the reflected from direct just as it would in a real concert hall. I can clearly hear reflected sounds in the hall as well as the settling of instrument decay. It is a pity that you don't even reailze this information exists on the recording.
"There are no special requirements in the sense of "low level resolution" "
Of course there is. Do you deny that reflected sound and room decay are not much lower in level than the main signal? Sometimes more than 50db below the main signal. Information retrieval is crucial to creating an accurate acoustic space of the original recording, whether you have 2 or 10 speakers.
"acousticians are tweaking the architectural shape, materials, and baffles in concert halls to mold sound to their conception of ideal."
Again and again you are confusing the real thing with reproduction. No one here is doubting the benefit of a properly prepared room, whether for listening live or listening reproduced. The only way to have a truly correct reproduction of a venues acoustic is to have zero contribution from the room you put the stereo system into. IMO, puttnig more speakers all around the room could possibly exaccerbate the problem by exciting more room modes and generating even a greater contribution of the listening rooms own acoustical properties. Either way you haven't taken the listening room out of the equation so the soundfield is still a convolution of the recorded space and the actual listening room space. Nobody follows up your link because it is simply irrelevant to reproduced music. It is great if one wants to make their own music hall for live concerts but the criteria are most certainly different.
"What do you know about it? You never saw it, you don't understand it, and you aren't really interested in it anyway."
I know AR speakers from the past (and they were off the pace even in the 1970s with the exception of good bass). So you tinkered and added a better tweeter. I bet the integration between the drivers is less than ideal. Did you at least use a good active crossover? It might interest you though to know that I find 90+% of the things I heard at shows to be less than convincing. Many designers have crap for ears or don't really care about sound. That doesn't mean that the SOTA hasn't improved, it has in many ways, especially in electronics (I too have older speakers...from the late 80s early 90s).
"Funny, even though it offers real hope, few have even bothered to explore what possibliities it offers."
Well, soundmind it can mean only two things: 1) it was ahead of its time and maybe if you are lucky it will be rediscovered and used or 2) No one cares because it is not all you think it is and others dismiss it. Care to give the patent number so I can look it up?
"The acoustics and decay of instruments in a real space is easily heard on recordings. How is possible that this information is NOT on the recording??"Only a small percentage of the reverberation heard in the audience gets on the recording, what is there is inseparable from the direct sound from the instruments and, very importantly it is missing at least one of its most critical aspects, vectorization. In the audience, 90% of the field or more comes from the acoustics. On a recording it's usually far less than 50%, even far less than 25%. This is because the microphones are much closer to the instruments than the audience sits in a live performance and are often highly directional having a cardiod pattern and pointed directly at the musicians. If this weren't true, playing a recording which actually had that much reverberation such as a binaural recording made in the audience through one pair of speakers would make it sound like the performers are inside a tunnel. Most important of all, the recording contains reverberation in two scalar fields, the real reverberation is a vector field. My experiments show that humans are relatively but not completely insensitive to percepion of vertical differences in direction as opposed to horizontal differences to which they are very sensitive. If this were not true, the minimum criteria for reproducing reverberant fields would be eight auxilliary channels, not four and the minimum number of speakers would be 16, not 8. My current setup uses 16 auxilliary speakers in 4 lateral quadrant channels, a previous prototype used 20. The radiating patterns for the reverberant field are very different from the direct field in order that their source be undetectable. (Your friends can't help you out on this one, I literally wrote the book on this problem...so far only a small part of it has been published as part of my patent.)
"Information retrieval is crucial to creating an accurate acoustic space of the original recording, whether you have 2 or 10 speakers."
Most of the information just isn't there on the recording, there's nothing to retrieve. As for playing sound softly, most audio systems can do that. That's not the hard part.
"Again and again you are confusing the real thing with reproduction"
And again and again you are clueless.
"The only way to have a truly correct reproduction of a venues acoustic is to have zero contribution from the room you put the stereo system into. "
That's not possible...unless you live in an anechoic chamber. NOBODY DOES.
"IMO, puttnig more speakers all around the room could possibly exaccerbate the problem by exciting more room modes and generating even a greater contribution of the listening rooms own acoustical properties"
Wrong again and if you don't, you cannot duplicate the concert hall's critical function of directing multiple reflections at the listener from different directions. This is so critical that special architectural techniques are used to diffuse them by providing many convex surfaces as one example of many critical aspects of good acoustics.
"Nobody follows up your link because it is simply irrelevant to reproduced music"
Nobody here listens to Leo Beranek's lecture because they are morons. They have the opportunity to actually learn something from one of the greatest acousticians in the world who studied and designed concert halls over a lifetime and they pass it up preferring instead to yammer on about their imbecillic nonsense about wires and vacuum tubes. They reveal not only their ignorance but their determination to stay that way. Me? I've heard this lecture at least 10 times and learned something new about concert halls every single time.
"I know AR speakers from the past...."
This is a non sequetor. This has nothing to do with AR speakers or anyone elses. In fact this invention was born, experimented with, and patented many years before I even owned an AR speaker.
"it was ahead of its time and maybe if you are lucky it will be rediscovered"
Yes it was far ahead of its time. When I discovered the principles behind it and invented it, the technology to fully exploit it was beyond the cutting edge of technology as digital audio processing was still far too primitive and expensive to take advantage of it. The earliest prototypes used multiple tape delays and analog mixers. At this time, nobody is particulary really interested in it anymore. This is an industry which has died not only from lack of any new ideas but from a loss of interest in and knowledge of music itself. It will likely remain nothing more than a curiousity for those who know me personally and get a demo of whatever prototype I care to show them. I've decided that's the way I want it to stay, at least for the time being. There is a certain satisfaction in having something in this world than nobody else can have.
"Most of the information just isn't there on the recording, there's nothing to retrieve. As for playing sound softly, most audio systems can do that. That's not the hard part."Completely false and it is at the soft end of the spectrum where most systems fail utterly. This is why there is so much talk about having to turn up the volume in order to "wake up" the speakers. There is plenty of low level ambient and acoustic field information on better classical recordings. Most systems play well only in a very small loudness window, usually between about 70-90 db. Below that they lose the ability to keep complicated passages clear and above they start to suffer audbile compression and/or distortion. The better a system can play soft often the more realistic it sounds.
An example:
I have a recording made with a single stereo ribbon microphone (from Royer labs) that uses a blumlein configuration. The recording is of a full orcehstra playing Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. The microphone was placed 6 meters from the front of the stage. It sounds very similar to live in a very good system and a disaster in most systems. It has TONS of acoustic information and has such a wide dynamic range that unless your system excels at low levels you have to turn it up way too loud for the peaks (classic problem in a car with classical music). It does not sound like its in a tunnel, it sounds like a concert hall. I would argue that until you have made or heard recordings of this sort yourself then you are merely speculating about the result. I can hear the results and to me it sounds much more realistic than a multimiked session.
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