Elliot G.
Industry Expert
no I would know the recording wasnt as good but it is still a violin
Does Everything Make a Difference?
- Thread starter Ron Resnick
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Elliot G.
Industry Expert
bad analogy and to be honest not worth this discussion. Listening for the differences in tunings of a piano is not why I have nor my clients have an audio system
If you sit in lousy seats then THAT is what you get however it is still a piano. If you audio system is not set up and positioned well then you don't get the proper sound either. If I drive my sports car in traffic is it no longer a sports car?
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We’re talking about references. The ability to merely identify an instrument is a very very low bar. I can identify a piano as a piano on the speaker of my IPhone. A reference is not a meaningful reference if it is not singular in nature and consistent. The sound of a piano is neither. The variations are far too broad. And ultimately it really isn’t what we are identifying when assessing the sound quality of a stereo system.
Elliot G.
Industry Expert
Its not a low bar its what is the reality of what you are hearing. Having heard music in a wide variety of environments , One can understand what the instrument should sound like. I sponsored a classical music series for 4 years here in a small venue ( about 500 seats) we had many solo instruments or small goups of instruments. We heard a lot of piano, I sat up close ( I was the sponser after all LOL) and I have then heard the same instruments in Hockey rinks , Football stadiums and concert halls around the country. This is all information fed to our brains and some of us can use such information to understand what it is we are listening too and try to do that in our homes.
When I set up speakers I use my experience and my knowledge to know when they are in the correct place such that the instruments sound correct. The right size, the right sound and that is from listening to them live.
There may not be an Absolute Sound but there sure as hell is the absolute sound I recognize as a piano. Not one piano, not the same piano, not just a grand piano, not just an upright piano, not just an electric piano but the sound a piano makes and the differences we hear when they are played by different musicicans in different locations.
I am not a paralysis by analysis person and I really do love music the rest of this is really mind numbing excercises to exert dominance. That IMO serves little pupose. But heck , Enjoy!
When I set up speakers I use my experience and my knowledge to know when they are in the correct place such that the instruments sound correct. The right size, the right sound and that is from listening to them live.
There may not be an Absolute Sound but there sure as hell is the absolute sound I recognize as a piano. Not one piano, not the same piano, not just a grand piano, not just an upright piano, not just an electric piano but the sound a piano makes and the differences we hear when they are played by different musicicans in different locations.
I am not a paralysis by analysis person and I really do love music the rest of this is really mind numbing excercises to exert dominance. That IMO serves little pupose. But heck , Enjoy!
I don't have your expertise and cannot identify different piano models based on a recording. But the better the system, the easier it gets to differentiate subtle differences. That's good enough for me.99% of the musicians I love I have never heard live, and never will because they are dead. Those that I have been able to see live never sound the same on recordings, though they are still "identifiable" (same for those who I have not heard live).
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Elliot G.
Industry Expert
BTW I can't identify different brands and models of piano's or guitars or anything else. I can however tell if it is an upright or a grand or a six string from a 12 string guitar. I can hear ( hopefully in a well set up system) what type of environment it was being played .
We can all tell a live recording from a studio recording ( most times) and I can certainly demonstrate if I had too the different sounds of music in venues of different sizes. Why , because i have been to different size places and heard different programs.
I dont claim that I have special powers but I do have a lot of experience.
One can listen to Reiner and the Chicago and enjoy it without ever having heard that live but understanding how an orchestra sounds is a lot easier if you have actually heard some.
I know ( and wont tell) some well thougth of or popular audio personalities that talk about the quality of gear that have little or no experience listening to live music or even different types of music. MY question then is besides what they persoanlly like why should I take anything they say with any degree of credibility.
I said this before and I will say again only this time with no context ( private joke)
Would you go to the drive in window of McDonalds and ask the clerk to suggest some high end dining places for you to try?
I never will understand how hobbies get so tribal and tribal with little or know respect or consideration for others who might know something you don't.
I joined this site a long time ago with the hope of sharing what I knew and learning from others who know stuff I don't.
I find there is far to little of that and way to much BS.
Understood. I have experienced first hand listening sessions with audiophiles who simply did not get some of the things I heard (good or bad), and it is frustrating.
I find that good equipment is not "genre specific". With any type of music, ask someone to comment on the recording, and you can pretty much tell whether that person has good listening skills. It is not always a function of their experience or musical tastes.
More importantly for this argument, they sound like a LIVE piano or violin. You hear it from an open window down the street or even through a wall and you know it’s a real instrument in real space and not playback. It doesn’t matter the brand or the tubing or whatever. The gestalt is live instrument.
There are also many very knowledgeable music afficionados (and "critics") who are not that interested in "sound" per se, or whose tolerance of poor recording quality is surprisingly high (meaning they will tolerate poor recording quality), much more so than the average audiophile. Some audiophiles, on the contrary, seem to have no strong musical tastes, and just like good sound. So you have all flavors of listeners.
That is why some people simply give up on the idea that a system could ever sound close to a live performance, and you will find many musicians (obviously not all) who simply think that high end audio is not worth the trouble.
Coleman Hawkins famously never listened to jazz at home (so he claimed, and his visitors confirmed), only to classical music, as he thought jazz needed to be experienced live... Perhaps if he had attended more live classical performances he would not have listened to these recordings either
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Your example is dumb and misses the points truly. Any real instrument, voice or natural acoustic sound is absolute sound. Amplified live is not absolute sound.
This makes hifi different from, say wine tasting, because with wine tasting you are selecting preference among many absolute tastes. There is no reference.
Look back through my posts you will see I posted seven videos of seven violins all playing the same piece by the same guy with the same bow. My system was able to easily resolve the distinctness of each one and to sound pretty realistic at the same time., Did it sound indistinguishable from live? No, but it had the feel of live.
I suspect most people with reasonable listening skills would agree with the first term (distinctiveness) but opinions would vary more concerning the second (realistic). No judgement on your system (which I like based on the videos I have heard!).
...if you remove "real instrument" from your list I can *mostly* agree with you. Otherwise, I would consider a "real instrument" as a very personal judgement call, anchored to a level of technology from a long-past era. Why would newer instruments not make the grade? Or electronic, for that matter. It's all just sounds/frequencies generated by various devices, technologies, etc. How does one pick a "winner" ?
It seems arbitrary to me. Perhaps not to others? I'm trying to follow the logic for many posts, across multiple threads and years.
Merely recognizing an instrument is a very low bar. Yours or mine or anyone else’s amalgamation of experiences simply don’t serve as a true reference. Our long term aural memories are reduced to a small fraction of what was originally heard. Human memory is inherently unreliable and extremely limited.
Harry Pearson, the guy who coined the phrase “The Absolute Sound” is a classic example of the unreliability and extreme limitations of long term aural memory as a supposed reference. He would all to often make claims that particular pieces of gear brought new levels of accuracy because they made him feel like the playback was “closer to the absolute sound.” But there was no correlations between the actual accuracy of the gear and his subjective evaluations. And the response to that reality was irresponsible and arrogant. Not only that objective measurements don’t matter but that they were in many cases simply wrong. In any other walk of life this belief would be laughed out the door. The most experienced carpenter in the world can’t visually out perform a basic $10.00 tape measure in evaluating the dimensions of their wood work. The most experienced doctors in the world can’t evaluate a patient’s state of being as well as blood tests, X rays and other objective tests. No painter, no matter how brilliant can match a color from memory even close to as accurately as the Home Depot spectrometer they have in every paint department. I can go on and on. In just about every other facet of the modern world the idea of long term memory as an objective reference is not even a matter of reasonable consideration.
And since the beginings of TAS and the wide spread adoption of HP’s belief system has allowed a major faction of audiophilia to spiral out of control and dive into a world filled with mythologies and just plain bad ideas. A world in which a $100K speaker cable is seen as cutting edge and cutting edge DSP is seen as an impurity that degrades sound quality.
J Gordon Holt summed it up best in his last interview with Stereophile. It was an epic call out of high end audio.
He was spot on
A claim that I think is often way over stated. And rarely tested. Look no further than the AR speakers demo back in the 60s where listeners failed to identify the difference between their speakers and a live string quartet.
This claim that we be can always discern live instruments is a cheat. Almost all the time when we are evaluating stereo playback we know that it is playback. Knowing is hearing. You can’t fool someone into thinking something sounds real when they know for a fact it is not. On the other side all accounts of correctly identifying live instruments from down the hall, or across the street and around the corner are anecdotal. And often cherry picked.
Put live musicians in the room, something small in scale like a string quartet, play back a recording of them made in an anechoic chamber, level match and compare them in a large reverberant space while they mime playing when switching to playback from live sound and guess what happens? We don’t have to guess. We can thank AR for that demo.
Of course what AR did was as much parlor trick as meaningful demo. But so is recognizing a live piano from down the hall and around the corner. Neither really proved the points for very specific reasons.
Just a follow up. This is what JGH had to say about these things in his last interview
“As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.
Remember those loudspeaker shoot-outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasions when various reviewers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least-favorite) model? That was all the proof needed that [blind] testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio.”
#1 makes me think about where does one want to sit in the musical event. For the recording of a small jazz ensemble, do you want to hear the drums the way the saxophonist does (loud but very real)? Or do you want to be in the audience (most likely)? Near the front or toward the back of the room? All these places sound different.
I believe that good equipment can give a very good simulation of a live event, but perhaps people choose equipment based (in part) on where in the hall they want to sit. After all, don't we choose our tickets that way (well, and based upon price and availability too)? I think this preference not only influences choice of equipment, it affects our judgement of what sounds natural to us.
Do we really want to hear all the instruments as they sound live? A saxophone or trumpet can rip your ears off. But perhaps that isn't a concern since the recording engineer most likely toned it down. Reading the autobiography of an engineer who recorded for the Beatles, it was amusing to learn that they used tea towels to tone down Ringo's drums. So, is the recording the same as the live event (in this case in the studio)?
I think we have to concede that despite what we may want these choices are largely determined by the recordings themselves. As an audiophile what I want from my system is the ability to accurately play any commercial recording back without compromise and the additional ability to tweak it to suit my tastes.
I don’t want to be stuck in any row by my system’s limitations
I don't think Brad was limiting 'real instrument' by age.
I suspect what is meant by 'real instrument' is an acoustic instrument, one whose sound is not influenced by an electronic system for its delivery. And played by a 'real human'. Is that 'old-school' or reflect some sort of prejudice? Well maybe depending on one's perspective. I haven't looked but we're probably already at the point of YouTube videos of electric music performed and written by AI bots.
For some there may be greater emotional involvement listening to a person playing an
acoustic instrument.
These are not the logics you are looking for. ;->
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