Is "Live" Sound the Gold Standard for Audio? Why? Why Not?

[watchnerd]

I often listen to the Hearts of Space radio broadcast on my local public radio station on Sunday evenings. So many sounds that sound as if they could be real in space except of course none of them are. Nor could they be in the vacuum of space.

I completely forgot that program existed.

Hasn't it been around for decades?

Thanks for reminding me.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I completely forgot that program existed.

Hasn't it been around for decades?

Thanks for reminding me.

The longest running radio program of its type according to wikipedia. Began in 1973. I've listened to it ever since I've had a car with FM radio (late 70's).

https://v4.hos.com/home

They have an app and you can stream each weekly show up to 4 times. But the Android version I'd suggest not getting. It just won't stay working. Which is a shame.

Still I associate it with driving on Sunday evenings after dark.

Where I live anyway, the local station follows Hearts of Space with Echoes which is a similar kind of mood music presented weekly. Echoes talks with a musician during each week, and the interviews for that are often interesting.

 

[Mnyb]

Wonder if not some people misses the point again , of course there are genres without any kind of acoustic counterpart at all ( unless there is singing ).

Point is to try to have a reference outside the circle of confusion, then one can try to asses if the equipment used for reproduction. . Even if you don’t actually listen to this stuff at all . You now that your system at least tries to be true to source and reasonable neutral .

The human voice is a good one we hear it everyday . So if a system renders voices bad it would not be good for anything imo .

This acoustic reference may not actually “work” properly as any attempt to record and produce may change stuff ? And how would know unless you where there and did the recordings yourself.
This whole premise may be an historical anecdote from the past . And we may need better nowadays to improve the state of the art .

For electronics no listening assessment is needed , you can measure them .

For speakers ? What to do ? I applaud the attempts Toole and others do to make speaker design a more consistent science and not a dark art , how speakers behave in room and all that jazz.

Then maybe the recording engineers can get closer to solve their “translation problem” if they use “propper speakers” in good acoustics and we have also have similar “proper speakers” at home.

Then again us laypeople can attempt to judge the playback by some well chosen acoustic reference recordings .
There are ofcourse other factors such as spl that apply to some genres .
And if your favourite music is produced for Bluetooth speakers and severely loudness war afflicted ? I suggest getting a fairly neutral system in any case as it works for more kinds of music and tv and movies . And jus accept that some music sounds horrible and you can’t fix it .

I don’t know where to start if one was trying to find “ the best “ for a specific narrow music genre ? I suppose you be running around in circles for a long time ? Or have anyone cracked that ?

And what to say about DSP algorithms that extract more ambience and uses multichannel to play back stereo sources how to judge them ? By what standard ? I’ve use them and finding that they sound more natural to me on all music genre ?

Maybe we should abandon the “ natural acoustical reference” thought altogether and replace it with what ? A standardised listening position measurement with some predictive power ?
This may already exist as i’m Just a curious hobbyists and may unaware of it .

So historically this “live music” thing comes from the times before electric music and with really bad equipment and it may have to be augmented with other approaches today ?

 

[Blumlein 88]

snippage...........
So historically this “live music” thing comes from the times before electric music and with really bad equipment and it may have to be augmented with other approaches today ?

Historically it comes from the very simple idea you could record music and play it back. Letting you hear music done at another place and time. Even the first Edison recordings. Naturally once various methods were used there was the question of which was more accurate to the original recording.

This probably wasn't even really any big debate until the explosion and misguided evolution of subjective audio evaluations being the gold standard. To the point people would decide by ear that certain things which were measurably flawed were better than measurably superior gear of higher fidelity. Fidelity to the source has been a better standard than the live sound standard.

 

[watchnerd]

The longest running radio program of its type according to wikipedia. Began in 1973. I've listened to it ever since I've had a car with FM radio (late 70's).

https://v4.hos.com/home

They have an app and you can stream each weekly show up to 4 times. But the Android version I'd suggest not getting. It just won't stay working. Which is a shame.

Still I associate it with driving on Sunday evenings after dark.

Where I live anyway, the local station follows Hearts of Space with Echoes which is a similar kind of mood music presented weekly. Echoes talks with a musician during each week, and the interviews for that are often interesting.

Back to back Hearts of Space + Echoes??

I'm gonna need a bigger bong....

 

[watchnerd]

Point is to try to have a reference outside the circle of confusion, then one can try to asses if the equipment used for reproduction.

Tell me how this would work if the speakers I have at home are not the same as the monitors the recording / mastering engineers used?

Or if I make my own field recording, how do I bypass the flaws in human auditory memory?

 

[Mnyb]

Tell me how this would work if the speakers I have at home are not the same as the monitors the recording / mastering engineers used?

Or if I make my own field recording, how do I bypass the flaws in human auditory memory?

Not at all i do not dissagree with you , the emphasis was on "try" so what do we do instead ? i just was not sure that everyone was online with the original old idea of "compare to reality" and that reality should not include any of the equipment we try to asses. , this ofcourse has it own problems .

It has merit imho .

For electronic music , say most "produced" music the reality is whatever the producer decides it to bee ,by free will or otherwise (due to cirle of confusion in the production environment it may not even bee to the producers liking listened to somewhere else)

A real unamplified acoustical event is what it is .

Then it may not work at all or be very unpractical to even try to use that real acoustical event as reference .
maybe a music producer can walk in and out the studio and controll room and compare ? but for us at home we are at the mercy of the recordings we choose as reference and truly inside the circle of confusion .

I'm curius to if there is another way altogether that do not include the frailty of human listeners ?

I dont think we know where the baseline is ? I heard many argument online similar to "that i dont like neutral or uncolored sound" but do most of us have any chance of knowing what uncolored or neutral sound is to begin with ? I'm starting to think after many years as a card carying audiophile that i actually don't know ( I do assume electronics as solved, trying to mellow up things with tubes etc is just deep missunderstanding of what going on )

 

[Vuki]

Live sound is the reference. Live is not amplified. So unfortunately - no rock, pop, metal, edm etc., but mostly classical&jazz. Sounds elitist, conservative and snobbish but that's how it is. If one often listens to live music, with time ideal reference "image" of each instrument sound will be built and than through many recordings it will be used to evaluate sound of audio system.
If one mostly listens to amplified music no real life reference can be had.
But as dr. Toole explained it- on the user/listener side it's "my-fi" anyway.

 

[Cbdb2]

I don't think so, as I know several.

I don't know any who claim to make recordings indistinguishable from live sound.

Their goal is to make a marketable product that meets the clients needs to sell well and sounds good in the average home system and car.

Because you know some engineers your an expert on recording? I wasnt talking about indistinguishable I was talking abut recording electric guitars. If my 30 years as a recording engineer isnt good enough for you google recording electric guitar and look at the first 3 pictures, you dont even have to read anything.

 

[MattHooper]

Live sound is the reference. Live is not amplified. So unfortunately - no rock, pop, metal, edm etc., but mostly classical&jazz. Sounds elitist, conservative and snobbish but that's how it is. If one often listens to live music, with time ideal reference "image" of each instrument sound will be built and than through many recordings it will be used to evaluate sound of audio system.
If one mostly listens to amplified music no real life reference can be had.
But as dr. Toole explained it- on the user/listener side it's "my-fi" anyway.

There are some obvious reasons why live, unamplified acoustic sounds - voices etc - would be chosen as a reference point. Though I think those who completely dismiss the relevance of any amplified instruments as a reference point are going a bit too far.

If you are familiar with amplified instruments, you'll know there are also some characteristics that you hear from "the real thing" vs how they sound through most consumer sound systems. You could get as detailed as knowing your bass amplifiers, noting in production notes the bass amp used by the musician, and see how much you recognize that sound. But there is also an overall gestahlt to the sound of amplified bass (or guitar) that, especially if you've played in bands, you recognize. The sheer solidity and punch of a bass played through most bass cabinets puts the average audiophile speaker system to shame, like Kate Moss on the heavy bag compared to Mike Tyson.

As a keyboard player used to often hearing my keyboards on headphones, studio monitors and live monitors, I always found that, just like real instruments have a greater timbral richness, so did keyboards. But on recordings and consumer playback, they sounded more two dimensional, less interesting, more "low-res."

So when I'm auditioning systems or speakers and an acoustic instrument sounds more like the real thing or even I notice some of the actual richness of a "real keyboard" being played through a monitor, that in itself can be quite compelling.

 

[Mnyb]

There is actually “acoustic performance” of single electrical instrumental like electrical guitar half of the instrument is the amplifier and speaker cab especially electrical guitar I bet a lot of the harmonics and special sauce is created in the amp/speaker box , similar goes for electrical bass .

But you can’t put together a whole song with singers and the other instruments without microphones and mixer etc simply because of levels a human singer can rarely compete with the drum kit so the complete song can not exist outside of production equipment.

And yes most productions reduce the pure impact of bass drums quite a lot to much imho .

Heck a friend mine blow the midbass drivers in his hifi speaker with his electrical guitar when we where younger . He conected his guitar some effect pedals and all this directly trough a mixer not using the amplifier case ,and electrical guitar abused this way I quite dynamic there was no compression used he did not even play very loud subjectively

 

[Robin L]

I often listen to the Hearts of Space radio broadcast on my local public radio station on Sunday evenings. So many sounds that sound as if they could be real in space except of course none of them are. Nor could they be in the vacuum of space.

Yeah, but Steve Hill thinks they're spacey.

 

[Robin L]

I completely forgot that program existed.

Hasn't it been around for decades?

Thanks for reminding me.

I was doing some technical work for HOS over 30 years ago. LP to reel to reel to a Sony digital recorder that used Betamax tapes. Sometimes CD to that nasty sounding Tascam 32. Not technically anywhere near ideal, but the step of uploading the finished program to a satellite for distribution did the most sonic damage anyway.

 

[Kvalsvoll]

The sheer solidity and punch of a bass played through most bass cabinets puts the average audiophile speaker system to shame

And that is why I did not use the average audiophile speaker in this evenings listening session, playing Jøkleba - Mayshia, and some Flashbulb.

As someone described it; "the ability to literally scare you."

And this important ability to reproduce transients is not limited to just bass, it applies to the whole frequency range.

 

[q3cpma]

Not for everything. Production can be an instrument in some genres.

 

[FeddyLost]

Part 1: Is that "Live" sound a key reference against which an ambitious system should be judged?
Part 2: How is an actual "Live" performance different, in a technical sense, from what most home systems can reproduce?
Part 3: Is "Live" sound even worth chasing? What happens when the dog catches the car?

First of all, we have to define what is "live" sound.
Even in big concert hall different seats will have different sound. And conductor's place will have one another different sound.
So, I'd prefer to tell about reproducing dynamic sound field of a (sometimes live) event. This in principle possible in stereo only if that event was recorded by dual-mic or any other puristic technology when sound was directly converted into record without intermediate dynamic sound field.
Otherwise we shall reproduce last dynamic sound field that was approved by producer or band or someone else.
I've been once in special diffusing room, which was built around system for correct creating an illusion of being somewhere near orchestra. Worked well on some dual-mic Decca and DG CDs with good scenery and imaging, but most modern multitrack records are very ... artificial and fuzzy. So, transfer function of this room+system was optimized for some specific tracks.
For correct reproducing sound field we have to optimize transfer function somehow. This can be done right only for some records, because mics are different, control rooms are different, mastering engineers are different, etc.
So, my opinions about your questions are
1) at some degree, not completely, because we have some constraints like SPL in room due to laws, for example.
Also, if we are really ambitious, we cannot optimize transfer function 100% correctly unless we have recorded exact this CD and know original event. So, there must be some averaging and error and we have to accept this, otherwise it's a chase for ever changing goal.
2) dynamic range, size of room and size of sources, RT and a lot of smaller differences
This can be partially imitated (big speakers with high DR and SPL, for example) , but not completely. Room size and RT is main trouble.
3) if you need good fidelity, your transfer function optimization will be seriously limited to some tracks. A lot of other records might suffer.
So, i'd not go extremely deep unless your tastes are also limited.

Personally my preference is "good enough" emotional message translation. I accept the fact of illusion itself and don't care much about live sound.

 

[A Surfer]

Live music often has objectively poor sound quality for many of those in the audience, so in my experience absolutely live music is anything but a standard I use to judge what constitutes a good recording. Give me a well done studio album any day. That isn't to say that I haven't heard excellent live recordings or been lucky enough to be sitting in one of the few acoustic sweet spots at a live show.

 

[Doodski]

Live music often has objectively poor sound quality for many of those in the audience, so in my experience absolutely live music is anything but a standard I use to judge what constitutes a good recording. Give me a well done studio album any day. That isn't to say that I haven't heard excellent live recordings or been lucky enough to be sitting in one of the few acoustic sweet spots at a live show.

Hmmz. Rush sounds the same live and in the studio, so does Queensryche. Corrosion of Conformity not so much and I heard a live Prokofiev recital that blew all recordings I've ever heard.