Propeller Head Plaza

Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

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RE: conflict between accuracy and impressive

Posted by rick_m on May 18, 2012 at 21:35:14:
"It was universally panned, so much so that Doug Sax quit recording direct to discs, claiming that the "audiophile" clamor for realism was mere words."

I've got quite a few of them and think they are super. They were around at a time when regular records just sucked with deformed grooves taking you from one regrind lump to the next so about all I bought were "audiophile" records. Probably a successful marketing ploy because I was an early adopter of CD's due to the wretched quality of vinyl!

I enjoyed the Belafonte at Carnegie Hall when I was young and may actually have my sister's record of it stashed. I bought a CD of it but it's nothing to write home about, sound-wise.

"It truly pains me to look at Stereophile's speaker test results because if such results were posted for a piece of electronics, they would be laughed out of existence."

'Tis true. But speakers seem to get by with gross problems while electronics can sound bad with seemingly trivial errors. At a guess I think it has to do with the nature of nature. Many of the distortions in electronics don't have close counterparts in nature and so get noticed while many of the speaker problems are easy to ignore. The ilk that stand out are time smears, resonances that vex the Z-axis localization, and driver breakups. Diffraction also seems a serious problem.

My neighbor has a band and a few weeks ago a Clarinet? player was working with them. At the very first honk it didn't sound like it came out of a speaker. Once they got going I just hung out on my porch and listened to them work on a jazzed-up version of stranger on the shore while I watched the thunderheads build up over the mountains. I wish I could have recorded it but I doubt that my speakers could come close to doing those waveforms...

Regards, Rick