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Can You Trust Your Ears? By Tom Nousaine

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RayDunzl

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I think we really have two catagories of recordings. Recordings of live music and studio productions.

... and live 24 track fed to the truck out back for mix-mastering...

 

RayDunzl

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And then there are "Live in the Studio" recordings...

 

fas42

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I am not sure I agree with these 2 points.
Firstly, low level distortion and noise artifacts are rife in a lot of nice sounding hifi systems IME. Everything about LP manufacture and replay adds distortion, often quite a lot, and noise, yet LPs sound very nice to me in a lot of cases. Many years ago I even tried to look into why, despite the poor performance with respect to noise, crosstalk and frequency response, they sounded as good as they did.
Yes, this can be explained in terms of the distortions of analogue systems being far easier to deal with, unconsciously, by the brain - a very, very crude analogy is poor analogue vs. digital TV reception; in the former, ghosting and severe noise still allow one to follow the plot; in the latter, once the picture starts to break up, all is lost. One thing that has been made very clear to me is that getting digital right is an extremely high Q exercise, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_factor - if the quality is off by only the slightest amount then it may be almost unlistenable to. By contrast, LP SQ is relatively low Q in behaviour.
The only clear repeatable conclusion from this was that adding noise adds to the impression of stereo depth (which may explain the popularity of devices which add noise, though most claim to be doing the opposite).
In the case of amplifiers I think most SS amps are linear until they clip, so there is no mechanism for the compression you mention. Many, but not all, valve amps certainly start to go non-linear before they clip, and since most are less powerful this probably happens a lot but people usually like the effect rather than seeing it as a weakness. I have been using a 1000 watt amp into 109dB.watt speakers recently, so certainly haven't been suffering from that :)
OTOH all loudspeakers are non linear to a greater or lesser extent due to the influence of heat and the detail design of the magnetic circuit and the suspension of the moving element. For some this means they are really poor at high levels even if excellent at low levels, the Spendor BC1 for example.
The compression occurs because the power supply voltages start to modulate, as the demands for current delivery outstrip the ability of the power supply circuitry to maintain stable reserves of energy. One can use circuit simulation software to see this happen in the time domain - and parts of the circuitry that depend on reliable voltages start to misbehave. Design people with regard to amplifiers most certainly have a blind spot here - they wave their hands, saying that PSRR will take care of it all - but I'm afraid that's a long way from the reality ...

Loudspeakers are fine ... really, they are. I have had the most "mediocre" speakers pumping out intense, ear-shattering SPLs, with ease - I go to demos of monster, expensive speakers, and hear the sound start to collapse as the volume rises - I roll my eyes, knowing that it's the amplifier at fault here. Having done the exercise so many times of getting good results from throwaway speakers - they're the last thing I worry about.
 

Jakob1863

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@Cosmik & @BE718,

sure, the perfomance and the capture of this performance are linked but the goal is in his words to preserve the ART which means imo the capture should represent the ART as close to the "real thing" as possible and every reproduction should preserve the ART by avoiding any further distortion/alteration.

Therefore i think, that in this/his framework, the best situation would be that everyone works and listens in (exactly) the same standardized environment, so no departure is possible. (Leaving aside individual differences for the moment)
Are we on the same page wrt this?

A bit more complicated it gets if deviations from the ideal occur.
Let me try a crude/exaggerated thought experiment to clarify the idea; an artist is performing playing a grand piano the ART is captured in a way that the grand piano sounds like a toy piano if reproduced by a totally linear system.
On another system, the piano sounds like a grand piano if reproduced by a not so linear system.
Which one preserves the ART?

(Of course assuming that neither the artist nor the recording engineer were deliberately trying to let a grand piano sound like a toy piano)

PS. I reread Toole´s comments on the topic of nonlinear production environment; he wrote showing the graph from Mäkivirta and Anet´s study:
"A recent survey of recording control rroms revealed a disturbing amount of variation in spectral balance among them.....shows that the differences were not subtle, especially at low frequencies.
Recording engineers who work in these circumstances, presumably approving of them, are doing the art no favor. This is an excellent example of the circle of confusion in action because members of this group of audio professionals cannont even exchange their own recordings with a reasonable certainty of how they will sound in one another´s control room."
Floyd Toole, Sound Reproduction, Focal Press first edition, p. 20/21
 
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March Audio

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@Cosmik & @BE718,

sure, the perfomance and the capture of this performance are linked but the goal is in his words to preserve the ART which means imo the capture should represent the ART as close to the "real thing" as possible and every reproduction should preserve the ART by avoiding any further distortion/alteration.

Therefore i think, that in this/his framework, the best situation would be that everyone works and listens in (exactly) the same standardized environment, so no departure is possible. (Leaving aside individual differences for the moment)
Are we on the same page wrt this?

A bit more complicated it gets if deviations from the ideal occur.
Let me try a crude/exaggerated thought experiment to clarify the idea; an artist is performing playing a grand piano the ART is captured in a way that the grand piano sounds like a toy piano if reproduced by a totally linear system.
On another system, the piano sounds like a grand piano if reproduced by a not so linear system.
Which one preserves the ART?

(Of course assuming that neither the artist nor the recording engineer were deliberately trying to let a grand piano sound like a toy piano)

Whilst I appreciate your analogy is deliberately exaggerated for the purpose of discussion, I simply dont think it a realistic proposition that you can recover a "poor/distorted" recording by distorting the replay. The fundamental problem is that in the real world you simply dont know in what way the recording is distorted. Then of course you have no idea what is wrong with the next recording, therefore what you did with the first is meaningless. You are chasing your tail seeking a system "sound", probably why audiophiles seem to devote their life doing just that, continually changing kit seeking something they will never find.

Sure, add tone controls if you like, tweak things as you go along, but doing this via equipment choice is futile, and of course dont confuse it with improving fidelity - your are just tuning to your current momentary preference.

The failings of the recording are what they are. Until studios get their act together and start conforming to standards we are essentially screwed. Totally at the mercy of the engineer on the day.

However what we know we can do is make the system have as much fidelity to the recorded signal as possible. Why wouldnt you?
 
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Cosmik

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@Cosmik & @BE718,

sure, the perfomance and the capture of this performance are linked but the goal is in his words to preserve the ART which means imo the capture should represent the ART as close to the "real thing" as possible and every reproduction should preserve the ART by avoiding any further distortion/alteration.

Therefore i think, that in this/his framework, the best situation would be that everyone works and listens in (exactly) the same standardized environment, so no departure is possible. (Leaving aside individual differences for the moment)
Are we on the same page wrt this?

A bit more complicated it gets if deviations from the ideal occur.
Let me try a crude/exaggerated thought experiment to clarify the idea; an artist is performing playing a grand piano the ART is captured in a way that the grand piano sounds like a toy piano if reproduced by a totally linear system.
On another system, the piano sounds like a grand piano if reproduced by a not so linear system.
Which one preserves the ART?

(Of course assuming that neither the artist nor the recording engineer were deliberately trying to let a grand piano sound like a toy piano)

PS. I reread Toole´s comments on the topic of nonlinear production environment; he wrote showing the graph from Mäkivirta and Anet´s study:
"A recent survey of recording control rroms revealed a disturbing amount of variation in spectral balance among them.....shows that the differences were not subtle, especially at low frequencies.
Recording engineers who work in these circumstances, presumably approving of them, are doing the art no favor. This is an excellent example of the circle of confusion in action because members of this group of audio professionals cannont even exchange their own recordings with a reasonable certainty of how they will sound in one another´s control room."
Floyd Toole, Sound Reproduction, Focal Press first edition, p. 20/21
Who says they didn't want it to sound like a toy piano? If you don't like that version, you are free to choose to another. If a person wants to be a part time musician or producer, there must be much better ways of doing it than buying, installing and selling coloured gear! I would recommend starting with some of the free software that's available e.g. Audacity. Also, I believe some musical artists release their output in the form of multitrack recordings that their fans are encouraged to remix.
 

Analog Scott

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One can make any argument they want based on hypotheticals just by changing the hypothetical circumstances. I'd find real world examples to be far more convincing as arguments. But teh question I have is whose perogative is it to set "the" goal of audio. I think the idea of "the" goal of audio is a complete human abstract construct and as such we can make "the" goal anything we personally want it to be. There is no "the" goal. People have goals, they have values and priorities. No one gets to declare any one set of goals, values and priorities as the objectively superior set. That's just ego driven B.S. If you buy into that you have fallen on your first step without even knowing it and built completely contrived limitations that may or may not really serve you much less other people.

How many actual recording artists have you guys ever talked to about their art whenit comes to music? What do those artists tell you?
 

Cosmik

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...How many actual recording artists have you guys ever talked to about their art when it comes to music? What do those artists tell you?
Here's one. David Thomas of Pere Ubu:
David Thomas said:
Now, be clear on this point, "vinyl quality" is, in Ubu-speak, a derisive expression. "Gee, that sounds as good as vinyl" is another way of saying, "Gee, that sounds like a dog's dinner." The putative "warmth" of vinyl is another one of those mass-hysteria hoaxes that the human race is prone to. "Vinyl warmth" is not some semi-mystical, undefinable phenomenon. There is actually a technical term that audio engineers have for what you are hearing - it is called distortion. The bottom end is distorting. Now, distortion is a valuable audio tool, and an Ubu favorite, but only when the distortion is distortion we choose. You may like the phenomenon but it is NOT what we wanted and it is NOT what we heard in the studio.

It is possible to cut 12-inch vinyl with music that's been produced by post-1970 recording techniques as long as each side isn't much more than ten minutes in length and as long as you play by the rules. It is, however, easier to produce far superior compact disks using up-to-date techniques of analog tracking and high quality digital sampling - without the gratuitous distortion, overwhelming surface noise, and oppressive mix restrictions that vinyl imposes. Follow this link for more on this issue.

Note that we have had long experience of the Vinyl Regime. When we were producing vinyl our records were mastered and cut by the best engineers in the business. Every single one came back a bitter and humiliating disappointment.
 

fas42

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A bit more complicated it gets if deviations from the ideal occur.
Let me try a crude/exaggerated thought experiment to clarify the idea; an artist is performing playing a grand piano the ART is captured in a way that the grand piano sounds like a toy piano if reproduced by a totally linear system.
On another system, the piano sounds like a grand piano if reproduced by a not so linear system.
Which one preserves the ART?
This reminds me of a Chandos recording I have of a quintet playing - this mob encodes the sound to suit a type of "ambi" playback setup - can't remember the name of it - and the CD has the piano sounding like it's a mile away, in the far background - in a completely different acoustic space from the string instruments. Now, this sounds very peculiar compared to live, and on conventional playback it's a "terrible" recording - but it has a particular attractiveness to it - an unintended ART, which "works".
 

j_j

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The compression occurs because the power supply voltages start to modulate, as the demands for current delivery outstrip the ability of the power supply circuitry to maintain stable reserves of energy. One can use circuit simulation software to see this happen in the time domain - and parts of the circuitry that depend on reliable voltages start to misbehave. Design people with regard to amplifiers most certainly have a blind spot here - they wave their hands, saying that PSRR will take care of it all - but I'm afraid that's a long way from the reality ...
And feedback configuration, and device saturation points, and driver limitations, and if we're talking about tubes the tube operating curves and transformer curves, and g1 drive saturation, and and and
Loudspeakers are fine ... really, they are. I have had the most "mediocre" speakers pumping out intense, ear-shattering SPLs, with ease - I go to demos of monster, expensive speakers, and hear the sound start to collapse as the volume rises - I roll my eyes, knowing that it's the amplifier at fault here. Having done the exercise so many times of getting good results from throwaway speakers - they're the last thing I worry about.

Driver compression is a well-established, testable, verifiable, measured thing.
 

tomelex

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Yep, and there is no movement of charges, in the audio spectrum, that we can not measure. None.
 

fas42

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Driver compression is a well-established, testable, verifiable, measured thing.
As a physical limitation for the device, of course - but how often is that limit reached in drivers, when part of a decent quality audio system, even at elevated SPLs of playback? I have yet to hear this notorious speaker compression, my ears give out way before the drivers do - and I reduce the volume accordingly. But amplifier 'compression' is easily heard - I did a casual experiment decades ago, by using a particular test CD on every amplifier I came across, in retail shops, etc - and they all failed, the biggest, meanest looking amplifiers just as much as the "lesser" units - they were all incapable of going beyond a certain output before clearly losing their ability to reproduce peak, transient sounds.
 

Analog Scott

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Here's one. David Thomas of Pere Ubu:


“We have been working and waiting 20 years to bring you our music on phonograph record. It took a while, because we wanted to do it the right way, the absolute best way humanly possible, and I believe that’s what we’ve done. No sonic stone was left unturned, no nuance let fall by the wayside. There is honestly nothing else I can imagine hoping to hear out of the original tapes. It is all there in the groove. As people whose lives were changed by the sound of music coming off turntables, we humbly invite you to include us in your record collection.” – Gillian Welch

"In this morass of equipment and processes, my own choices of analog recording, tube electronics, ribbon mikes and the rest are dictated not by ideology nor a desire to be different, but by my perception, as a musician, of what best serves the music I make. To me digital sound is anti-musical." - James Boyk artist and recording engineer for Performance Recordings


Ya see? You can't make assumptions about artists' intent or what they consider to be their own art. And who is a greater authority when it comes to artists' intent or the evaluation of their achievement of that intent than the artists themselves? I don't think Toole is the arbitrator of what art is. Certainly not more so than the actual artists. With any given LP, CD SACD DVD-A Digital download et al you don't really know what the artists' intention was nor what they consider to be the best representation of their art.

And why should we care anyway? If someone likes the sound of a Pere Ubu LP over the CD or someone prefers one of James Boyk's CDs over the LP version how are they wrong? Do any of you now feel compelled to buy the LP version of Gillian Welch's new album over any digital version because she feels it is the best representation of her art? And let's not even get started on how we would have to listen to Neil Young's music if we are going to consider his views of his art.
 

Cosmik

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Ya see? You can't make assumptions about artists' intent or what they consider to be their own art.

Who said I was making any assumptions about artists' intent? You asked for examples, and I gave one artist's stated view on the subject of 'anachronistic' audio equipment. Art can be anything anyone wants to create, or it may be spontaneous and accidental, and the listener can do whatever he likes while listening to it. He can even use one of these:
20171015131713_PhotoLead-WinerMojoMaestro.jpg


The question is not who gets to decide what to listen to and how; it is who gets to define the terms "high quality", "high fidelity", "audio science", etc. I think it is important that these terms are not corrupted, so that people have a reference point when discussing, and hopefully advancing, the state of the art - so to speak.
 

watchnerd

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“We have been working and waiting 20 years to bring you our music on phonograph record. It took a while, because we wanted to do it the right way, the absolute best way humanly possible, and I believe that’s what we’ve done. No sonic stone was left unturned, no nuance let fall by the wayside. There is honestly nothing else I can imagine hoping to hear out of the original tapes. It is all there in the groove. As people whose lives were changed by the sound of music coming off turntables, we humbly invite you to include us in your record collection.” – Gillian Welch

"In this morass of equipment and processes, my own choices of analog recording, tube electronics, ribbon mikes and the rest are dictated not by ideology nor a desire to be different, but by my perception, as a musician, of what best serves the music I make. To me digital sound is anti-musical." - James Boyk artist and recording engineer for Performance Recordings


Ya see? You can't make assumptions about artists' intent or what they consider to be their own art. And who is a greater authority when it comes to artists' intent or the evaluation of their achievement of that intent than the artists themselves? I don't think Toole is the arbitrator of what art is. Certainly not more so than the actual artists. With any given LP, CD SACD DVD-A Digital download et al you don't really know what the artists' intention was nor what they consider to be the best representation of their art.

And why should we care anyway? If someone likes the sound of a Pere Ubu LP over the CD or someone prefers one of James Boyk's CDs over the LP version how are they wrong? Do any of you now feel compelled to buy the LP version of Gillian Welch's new album over any digital version because she feels it is the best representation of her art? And let's not even get started on how we would have to listen to Neil Young's music if we are going to consider his views of his art.

While true, I don't understand the point you're trying to make with regard to either our ears (the original thread title), or the new topic related to reproduction?

Yes, people can buy whatever suits their subjective tastes, either in music, mediums, versions, or playback systems. This seems fairly self-evident, though.
 

Analog Scott

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Who said I was making any assumptions about artists' intent?


That was meant as the proverbial you. Not you personally. Sorry for the misunderstanding there


You asked for examples, and I gave one artist's stated view on the subject of 'anachronistic' audio equipment. Art can be anything anyone wants to create, or it may be spontaneous and accidental, and the listener can do whatever he likes while listening to it.

The question is not who gets to decide what to listen to and how; it is who gets to define the terms "high quality", "high fidelity", "audio science", etc. I think it is important that these terms are not corrupted, so that people have a reference point when discussing, and hopefully advancing, the state of the art - so to speak.

"Quality" "high quality" " audio" and "science" and any of these words together are already well defined. So I am going with the body of scholars and academics of the English language as the rightful purveyors of the definitions of these well known words.
 

Analog Scott

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While true, I don't understand the point you're trying to make with regard to either our ears (the original thread title), or the new topic related to reproduction?

Yes, people can buy whatever suits their subjective tastes, either in music, mediums, versions, or playback systems. This seems fairly self-evident, though.
It relates to Toole's assertions about what constitutes "the art"
 

watchnerd

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It relates to Toole's assertions about what constitutes "the art"

Sorry, still don't get it.

In my mind, all Toole is saying is that the best chance to hear what is on the recording is to have a reproduction system that is neutral, that adds / subtracts as little as possible. He then conducted many tests to see how that aligned with listener preferences and what that meant for specific speaker design attributes.

Now, if one doesn't want a neutral reproduction system -- okay, no problem. It's your money, spend it how you want.
 

Analog Scott

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Sorry, still don't get it.

In my mind, all Toole is saying is that the best chance to hear what is on the recording is to have a reproduction system that is neutral, that adds / subtracts as little as possible. He then conducted many tests to see how that aligned with listener preferences and what that meant for specific speaker design attributes.

Now, if one doesn't want a neutral reproduction system -- okay, no problem. It's your money, spend it how you want.
I don't think that is quite all that Toole is saying. And you can't hear what's on the recording in any "pure" form because the recording has no sound of it's own without a playback ssyetm on which to hear it. But we have alrady been over all of this and I would prefer not to do so many laps on the same points.
 
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