Several of us on this thread appear to agree on the topic of a black background and the live acoustic music experience, and the relative importance of ambience. An audience in a hall puts energy into it, a kind of aural excitation of anticipation before a performance starts that ebbs and flows throughout the performance then sometimes explodes at its conclusion...
Is this simply an issue of some of us using live acoustic music as our basis of preference while others of us prefer our own notion of what our system should sound like - styled to our taste? Is it that simple, or something else? Is it review hyberbole...
... The more I think about this, the more the reality of it seems a tempest in a teapot. Isn't this mostly a language usage or inadequate vocabulary issue?
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Numerique yes, but a wonderful performance.
Ahemm bit of an essay alert, sorry guys you ask such interesting but also such complex questions. My particular version of the spectrum makes it hard to correspond with a simple answer at the very best of times but this one is especially complex and layered it seems to me... and so the signal emerges from my inky inner blackness.
A great post Tim (and also album pick) in a thread with plenty of thought provoking discussion in it. I have some thoughts on the more specific point above on the blackness of which we audiophiles sometimes speak but disclaimer: absolutely just as suppositions.
Background noise - mainly there are so many possibilities for noise already discussed at points in this thread that the source of accumulated noise sits also in a vast range of potentials and different interactions of impacts of recorded sound. What is noise in a way but unwanted signal. The rightness or otherwise of noise is also coloured by our experience in replaying music and our own system benchmarks and listening as well as perceptions and also set by individual retention, experience and anticipation.... and that any of these outcomes or interpretations of outcomes can (and likely may well) come from many, many very different sources.
So to first try and pull this together in a way (a signal emerging out of all the various noises) and to get some encompassing overall scope in the concept I’d maybe just lump (and there is a clear roughness in the approach) all the possible individual bits into a simpler more recognisable basket of sorted parts.
So the overview in this discussion from my perspective is married essentially by some gathered sense of rightness (or appropriateness) in the relationship (timing, volume balance and perceptual expectation from past experiences) between essential signal and noise.
Signal clearly seems a simple enough idea and for us it may be the sum of the performance of the music and all the relationships and balances in space and time and volume in and around the playing instrument’s sound.
Unsure whether the sounds of the players themselves (Glenn Gould springs to mind along with Keith Jarrett) is then part of the noise or the signal (subjective call) as well the (expected) additions of the mechanical parts of an acoustic instrument and conscious and accidental musical accompaniment like breathing, humming, and the creaking of the physical stuff of the performance space.
Then as discussed other noises are many. Recording noise. The acoustic, reflected sounds and the noises of the environment, the audience (also as a record of participation and appreciation in live music) and then system noise both in recording and in replay and both electronic and mechanical as well as the greater environmental noise at the place of both recording and of listening.
If you are hearing live music then any environmental noise of the playing space and the listening space are clearly coherent if spatially variable. If you are hearing traffic from your neighbourhood it can seem to be a coincident part of the recording at times. I love recording venues where noises are implicit, the occasional rumbling background in a Kingsway Hall recording or the underlying flood of punctuations in the air by the seasonal crickets in Dave Brubeck’s Concord on a Summer Night. In live music the latency is real and spatially as well as temporally relative.
From the first time I walked into a sound studio when I was a kid with my uncle and then regularly in recording sound sessions when my job was in film and commercial video in my early career that awkward state of being set upon by a closing door in a recording studio and the weird out of kilter relationship between sound and attached acoustic is the least natural thing imaginable. The empty void is hopeless and alienating. Getting sound to be right and the relationship between signal and noise to seem natural is a series of trip hazards that can make or break the sense of rightness.
So to Tim’s point (hopefully)... that changing gear and perception of different levels and qualities of float in a velvety background and how sounds emerge from the void of blackness. Does the experience in the apparent shifting of the blackness itself make much difference. Is it real, overplayed or just the fluff of stuff. The experience and level that quieter gear alters the quality of sound or a sound (as an effect) and is alluded to quite often in audiophile speak as brought about by a system change is perhaps something separate again to much of the above... is it suppression at a point with unnatural focus then on the music alone. Can the level and the shape or way of specific emergence of sound out of blackness comes about in that sharpening of the sound that leads small quantitive changes experienced as qualitative night and day... for those caught in extreme sharpening of sound the shift in experience is possibly different and I suppose that it is in that comprehension of this experience in the first place which I’m really doing most of my supposing.
So past the ambling preamble and to Tim’s question hopefully (if I’ve got it right).
For those of us chasing natural sound and also using live music as a reference it can be (among many things) the expectation and balance of signal and noise and the sense of rightness of these and how they accompany each other in terms of sound and spatial volume and a coherent timing that put the experience rightly into accord with our previous life experiences.
Live recordings can step one layer closer to live music also because of the more direct relationship of noises and signal between players and what is apparent in the acoustic. Perspectives of mic technique as well as mixing are also going to factor here in a hopeful sense of rightness that comes from coherence in the relationship (is it a marriage where one is not real then without the other) of both signal and noise.
So I’m wondering if a more artificial sense of sounds emerging from blackness might be also about the shape of launch and decay of the sounds. An artificial sense of inflation or in a synthetic plasticity in the launch or attack as example of an altered or highlighted shape of the signal and or then say the trailing decay being too articulated, too long held in the mix by either the mixing or by the placement or directness of the pattern of the mic. Or say that the balance of attack is not seeming to be in a natural way directly related to the sense of decay of a note given the setup and our perceived approximation to the players. Then also at times a heightened hushness just prior or after a note perhaps. Too much void, or not enough, not at the right place in space or in the right timing with all the signal and all the other parts or players.
Sometimes for me it’s like a video signal where the blacks are crushed and the signal is then highlighted... and the rise and fall of the note is seemingly out of accord with the scaling of the volume of the note.
Or then there’s non characteristic truncation of notes evident with some digital treatment or for some types of switching amps (segue into a personal bugbear).
When something just isn’t right between signal and noise we (based on our own lore) may look to impacts of infrastructure and cables or power or room acoustics or isolation or mechanical resonance issues or more essentially components themselves and the recordings or performance and then the mediums of the recordings... but for me here it is in implementation... as any or all of these are part of the essential shaping of the sound and the seeming resultant rightness or not rightness of the sound.
An out of character blackness doesn’t fit the latitude of the human condition in hearing and perception or the expected tone, presence, balance and the shape of attack and decay of acoustic instruments. So perhaps it’s not just the fact that sounds emerge out of an artificial void but also the way the sounds do and then the way they recede back into the black.
So I do think that when the balance and shape of the sound isn’t natural it can be subtle disconnects but still noticeable in experience... and then what makes us mention that this quality is noticeable is simply that in some way it sits highlighted out of the musical whole. The blackness or the void is noticeable because it is standing out from what may be expected. So really is this noticeable blackness then a good thing? To me any part within the whole that is unnaturally more noticeable such that it draws us to the part can work against that gestalt of music. So I suppose it just comes down to whether it seems right or not. If this newer blackness is unnaturally obvious and in a way elevated or perceptually amplified beyond any expected natural latitudes then (while it may be fascinating of itself) it’s not then necessarily leading us easily to then just fold back into the whole of the music. At times it is just a nuance but I do believe that it can also then work against the essential experience of music.
