Curious, the post to me reads like hundreds I have read. And amounts to little more than believing in the magic of hearing with full faith no regimented test signals can do justice to it. Not wise at all IMO.
I don’t believe in magic at all. I believe in the human being.
And I marvel that as early as 3100 BCE we were depicting the collective musical experience on the walls of temples and tombs. I marvel at our species ability to take copper and tin and beat bronze into flat discs to make cymbals ang gongs. I marvel that 4500 years ago we took dried animal innards, twisted them into strings, suspended them between a frame and a large cedar box in which the individual strings could be tuned to achieve differentation of pitch and the resonance would be amplified by the base. I marvel that nearly 4000 years ago we inscribed notation in Cuneiform into clay tablets in order to communicate the tuning intervals, scale and musical mode.
This was all thousands of years before Lee De Forest’s short-lived Phonofilm was succeded by Western Electric’s $3 million investment into Vitaphone to sync music to motion pictures. I marvel at that too.
And I continue to marvel at our attempts to improve both the recording and playback chain, through innovation, R&D, and the development of measurement techniques to quantify those improvements. Our oldest commercially-viable format (vinyl) continues to benefit from those developments.
But all of the above - historically and scientifically validated - is contingent on and would be impossible without the human hearing mechanism which has been in development for far, far longer, coupled with our pre-historical desire to individually and collectively experience the way in which music manipulates our physiology. I remain in awe of it.
I don't know what to tell you guys that hasn't already been said here many times before, but I hear live, unamplified music far more than most. I hear it every day, in my room, in my lap, in rehearsal spaces, in my life. I've listened to it daily for more than four decades. I know exactly what live mandolins, cellos, violins, drum kits, acoustic guitars, stand-up basses, male and female voices, etc. sound like live. And what I hear lines up pretty well with what can be measured. I've come to the conclusion that flat, smooth FR, low noise and low distortion are on first and dynamic range comes in next, particularly when that drum kit kicks in. You can disagree, of course. Enjoy. But if what you enjoy is formats and systems that do anything more to achieve "natural" than reproduce the recording as faithfully as possible within their design and financial limitations, disagree is what we'll do. I didn't come to this as a scientific objectivist hearing what he saw in a graph. I came to it as a musician looking for what he hears when instruments play live in a room. The objectivism followed that.
I hope this isn’t a competition, Tim, because I’ve played music for almost as long, on several different instruments, became a session drummer, before a lateral move into engineering and producing. It was short-lived but the experience of being on both sides of the glass was incredibly instructive. Just yesterday I sat and played a beaten up acoustic with nylon strings before my 8 year-old and I composed a 59 second song in Garage Band where he sung and he called What You Do, through those lyrics were absent from the actual song. I’d like to say I know what unamplified instruments sound like too.
But I still have a problem with you saying that you hear live lines up pretty well with what can be measured. The sound of musical instruments played with variations in time, amplitude and pitch is not what’s being measured, as I said in my previous post.
Also problematic for me is your continued use of the word “faithful”. “Faithful” can’t be quantified, because it’s a relational descriptor. So all you’re doing is matching a sound in your head (live unamplified music) with another sound in your head (what you get from your reproduction chain), in essence, using the human hearing mechanism and process to internally compare two different realities of which you remain the sole arbiter.
Same here! We all are. Measurements are measurements, stats are stats and the experience of listening to music is neither of those things.
The difference between you and me is that my preferences have evolved from “flat, smooth FR, low noise and low distortion are on first and dynamic range comes in next” to time, dynamics and frequency (a distant third) in that order. A component that makes Elvin Jones sound like Dave Weckl can’t be claimed to be “accurate” no matter how smooth the FR plot may be.