I don't remember Earl Geddes and me ever sitting together listening to the music of our choice - his place or mine. So I don't know his music preferences and I don't think he knows mine. Not that it matters, because that is a totally personal thing. When he says "Floyd is virtually 100% large venue recordings" he is mistaken. I listen to many kinds of music, with a broad preference for the popular repertoire when I devote time to serious foreground listening. Tidal is a rich resource. For decades I have had the good fortune of being able to enjoy the LA Phil in live performance a dozen or more times a year and, all due respect to loudspeakers of any origin or type, I find stereo to be an inadequate substitute. Just sitting in the hall while the orchestra "tunes up" and practices their riffs is a pleasure in envelopment that stereo cannot replicate.
But the opinions of Dr. Toole or Dr. Geddes are just that: personal opinions of two individuals. The results of hundreds of double-blind listening tests are a different thing, and they can definitely add information to a discussion. I wish there was a budget for definitive tests, but the evidence from my own evaluations many years ago indicated that the recording itself was a powerful factor in listener preference. Stereo is not an encode/decode prsocess. There are no standards, just "common practice" and personal tastes of recording engineers and musicians.
But, in the end it I is "your" opinion, of your music, in your room, played at your preferred sound level that matters. I have a personal opinion, it has changed over the years, and frankly at age 84 I not sure you should care what it currently is (smile).
Hi Dr. Toole!
I have a question which will relate to the subject of speaker blind testing.
When it comes to sound reproduction: "
What makes for Good Sound?"
(In terms of what we tend to
perceive as "good quality sound")
I'm wondering if we can actually answer this to some degree from data or research, or even if you've drawn your own personal inferences on the subject.
To provide some context for the question:
Some will say any SUBJECTIVE judgement of "good sound" will be so variable as to be useless. (Hence: may as well stick to ideals like "technical accuracy" which are more amenable to objective verification such as measurements). However, we know that preference is often studied in science. And indeed the point of the blind testing research you often cite is that there ARE discernible, reliable trends in what people will rate as "good sound" (expressed as preferences).
Given we have the preference-rating data from blinded studies on speakers, there may be an inclination to say
"We can know what makes for Good Sound: Speakers that measure in a particular way (e.g. a Harman Kardon-type curve) are reliably rated for Good Sound. So, there's your answer, it's in the speaker measurements!"
Except of course that can't be the answer. At best it's only 1/2 the equation. The other 1/2 will be in the 'quality'of the recordings themselves. (And it was found recordings themselves influenced the speaker ratings).
If you have a speaker measuring like a Revel Salon 2, but play a recording that has all sorts of frequency peaks and valleys, similar to those that get a speaker design rated as 'poor quality,' then even through the "well measuring speaker" you will get "poor quality sound." So speaker measurements don't tell us what "Good Sound Quality" is per se. The recordings themselves used in speaker tests have to be selected on
some criteria of "good sound quality" to begin with. But...then...what is that?
As I understand it, at least some of the recordings used for the blind tests were selected for having some level of "good" sound quality to begin with - e.g. ones that contained more naturally recorded vocals etc.
So if we are asking about some general criteria for "Good Sound Quality," it seems to me that at least ONE aspect is likely to be "sonic realism." If you had one speaker that could reproduce voices and instruments indistinguishable from the real thing, and another that reproduced those sounds with obvious colorations/distortions, it would seem likely that the first speaker would be rated higher for sound quality in blind tests. This would be especially true of the human voice, given our familiarity with the real sound of voices. Even with perfection being impossible, the speaker producing voices "more naturally," without obvious resonances or colorations, will be rated better.
Is this train of thought is correct?
That, even though a sound system can not be expected to reproduce sound indistinguishable from live, nonetheless we still tend to have, and use, our experience of "real sound" like voices as one touchstone to rate sound quality?
And also, if there is
some other general traits in reproduced sound for what people will rate as "Good Sound," aside from "more natural/more realistic" what might those general traits be, based on your research or personal hunches?
Cheers!