Do Members use Live Music as a Reference
- Thread starter PeterA
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Roger, this morning everything is white; about two inches of snow felt (first of the season). Yesterday it was sunny with all blue sky and green everywhere on the ground.
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You didn't have to delete your music video recording; it was a good comparison indicator with other online youtube videos.
I was using it as a reference to compare. It don't matter how it sounds for an online video; it is just fun to contribute our thoughts and ideas and everything that life has to offer.
Please, reinstate it...everything is important...we are all important.
Thanks Bob....let that thing die a quick death. It did serve a good lesson though. Making improvement in resonance control leads to much higher resolution and if there are problems elsewhere they stick out like a sore thumb. No reason for my tube DAC to sound like that anyway.
Because we're a visual species. The ears serve communication and survival. God did not intend for us to be audiophiles...
I don't agree with each of your first two sentences, Roger. The last one I know you put smiley faces on it by which I presume you mean it in jest but is there actually a serious point in it?Because we're a visual species. The ears serve communication and survival. God did not intend for us to be audiophiles...
Fun is also part Amir, and fun is experimenting.
Hey, I like it. Read some more below...
Can we use measurements as a reference? Double blind tests among a group of trained listeners?
Peter, I'm on the same wavelength as you. We would be very good friends in real life, 100% no doubt.
I was happy to hear Roger's recording on his own youtube channel, it brought some rainbow coloring to our fun and educative discussion's exchanges.
Roger would also be a very good friend in real life, 100% no doubt.
In your thread of live music reference or not all our comments are important, both sides equally no matter the popular vote, 100% no doubt.
Kenn Kessler has an excellent valid point. And I would say that it is one of the top barometers in life to have a solid idea of all the world around us.
We mentioned it in some posts previously; reference being our own system @ home...preference of the sound we love and got used to love more every day with our ears and rooms and decors and furniture and friends and families and life and the beautiful blue planet and today in the now @ the edge of Christmas 2016. :b
Read more below...
Very well said Peter because it is indeed what music reference is for all of us; a multicolored set of musical events...live and reproduced.
I am proud to have some of my best friends right here on this site, in this thread...and on other threads. :b
Yes, we all have our own reference, and it's all natural because we all have our own perception of live music and of reproduced music and for what we love most in both circumstances no matter the specifications but the overall character of each musical minute by minute moment, our own emotional intensity level. Us, the music listeners, live or not we have more power than all the things contained on this planet; our ears and our feet guide us where we go. The gas pedal is operated by our own GPS brain.
"we are still at 2-channel stereo>" - >I have surround sound since a few years ago.
Lamborghini Countach haven't replaced all cars either, doesn't mean that the average car on the road is better than the Lambo.
It's easy to test high-rate DSD on a native DSD DAC nowadays - there's no reason not to.
I was at the infamous Pink Floyd concert in 1977 at the Olumpic Stadium, Montreal where they used quadraphonic sound - does this count as a live experience? I heard Roger Waters getting pissed off with the audience at the front, letting off fireworks & generally pretty noisy but I didn't see 'live' the part where he called on of them ("little piggy") up on stage & gobbed in his face - the seed from which the idea of 'The Wall' came from
I have never had this manipulated soundstage in my room
It seems most take PQ much too casually - what would explain the slew of digital filters and washed-out colours or even monochrome scenes so prevalent in movies these days, otherwise?
How many people actually spend time, the 45 minutes or more required to do at least a minimal calibration of their picture?
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Maybe & maybe I'm wrong & there is someone on a TV forum currently asking why they don't compare sound to 'live' sound, that it's only TVophiles do this?
I still maintain that there are much more important parts of the playback to get right for the illusion of reality to happen & that this only happens when our internal model of 'sonic realism' is sufficiently satisified.
Yashn, do you find the calibration changes the "realism" of the picture?
I noticed the increase in 'vibrancy' when moving from SD to HD - have seen 4K in shops & it looks even more vibrant
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I just don't know what to say or add; it's perfect. And it works for all equally and without necessarily being the same, 100% no doubt.
Yes, me me me! :b Because real life 'live' is so beautiful that when we watch a movie we can sometime be reminded of it, from its photographed representation.
And add nice reproduced music with onscreen moving pictures and it can be a very satisfying recreation in the scheme of all things entertainment @ home.
That, is comparing a beautiful real life moment (natural picture and sound), "live", and with a beautiful moment @ home, "reproduced" ... motion picture and soundtrack.
The two have their own point of references; all of us the watchers and listeners and real living people.
I'm thinking...we often subtract ourselves of the music appearing in front of us, when in actual reality it's us who make all the referenced difference; our own interaction with everything...the music playing, the artist performers, their skills, the overall atmosphere of the audience in the room @ the time (us alone or/and us accompanied).
I'm going to add this: some people definitely have better performing sound systems than others, 100% no doubt that the music experience is in a higher plane from those systems in those rooms and fine tuned by these people. ...Their loudspeakers, audio components, choice of music material/recording and their sources. ...Better reference to live music in grander style, ...virtuoso ? maestro. 100% no less.
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I guess my point was that the Social Security blue book list the number one disability as blindness. Being deaf although a serious disability is further down the list.
Ok, I'll bite on your question...maybe....you can say,that one of man's purposes is to create,and music is one of man's highest creations. Where does the hobby of audiophileism fit in? In this day and age not all can listen in a live setting or even have the ability to play a instrument. The creation of music has the ability to inspire the soul and mind...give joy,excitement and comfort as only it can. Reproduced sound no matter how much it is improved will ever embody all those qualities,it is just a facsimile,but no doubt it can accomplish a part of it,however small that it is.
Might not have gone where you intended,but just a thought off the top of my head.
Thanks Bob....let that thing die a quick death. It did serve a good lesson though. Making improvement in resonance control leads to much higher resolution and if there are problems elsewhere they stick out like a sore thumb. No reason for my tube DAC to sound like that anyway.
Here's what you truly brought Roger: the microphone capture difference in music recording. We talked about that for the last century.
When live it's our ears capture difference of where they are in that live music concert venue.
Everyone here agree that a microphone, any microphone, including best brand and most expensive, doesn't hear like any human set of ears.
It's a "capture"; a transducer, a condenser, a pick-up, a piece of electronic, a capacitor microphone or electrostatic microphone.
That's what ends up @ the end of our reproduction music recording chain...coming out from the mechanical electrical loudspeakers and amplified.
The natural amplification of live acoustic music is controlled by the musician artist performer, by the singer; and not by a gain control, or distance from a microphone. ...The natural distance between the musical instrument, the player and the listener. We have no control on the preamp; the transmission is direct with our ears and the bass, treble, balance and master volume control are all in the hands of the live artist/performer. I'm talking live acoustic music here, of course (live rock concerts with speakers and amplification and mics and mixing boards are controlled by the sound engineers).
I have a Blu-ray from a rock concert music video:
And in one short moment something happened:
...A technical glitch; the microphone stopped working. The guy is not happy, and he blamed big time the sound engineer.
What can you do when mechanical machines of the money/music business and fabricated my men fail?
And Metallica is certainly not the type of music to use as a reference, 100% NOT.
But this, is just to show as a quick example.
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P.S. If roughly 40 more people vote on that poll, we'll have a very good idea of what the audiophile community here use as reference to their passion of music listening.
Ok, thanks for your scale of reference & stated in that frame of reference I agree on the biological impact of the loss of a perception.
Well, if it stirs the emotions in the same way as a 'live' event then it is equivalent using that measure.
Here's what you truly brought Roger: the microphone capture difference in music recording. We talked about that for the last century.
When live it's our ears capture difference of where they are in that live music concert venue.
Everyone here agree that a microphone, any microphone, including best brand and most expensive, doesn't hear like any human set of ears.
It's a "capture"; a transducer, a condenser, a pick-up, a piece of electronic, a capacitor microphone or electrostatic microphone.
That's what ends up @ the end of our reproduction music recording chain...coming out from the mechanical electrical loudspeakers and amplified.
The natural amplification of live acoustic music is controlled by the musician artist performer, by the singer; and not by a gain control, or distance from a microphone. ...The natural distance between the musical instrument, the player and the listener. We have no control on the preamp; the transmission is direct with our ears and the bass, treble, balance and master volume control are all in the hands of the live artist/performer. I'm talking live acoustic music here, of course (live rock concerts with speakers and amplification and mics and mixing boards are controlled by the sound engineers).
I have a Blu-ray from a rock concert music video:
And in one short moment something happened:
...A technical glitch; the microphone stopped working. The guy is not happy, and he blamed big time the sound engineer.
What can you do when mechanical machines of the money/music business and fabricated my men fail?
And Metallica is certainly not the type of music to use as a reference, 100% NOT.
But this, is just to show as a quick example.
I'll make another youtube video for you and send it via PM...I think I just discovered a private way to evaluate my audio system.
For some material, that's what to aim for: for instance, we're rather sensitive to skin tone - people can look really odd or sickly if the skin tone isn't realistic.
Another instance where calibration helped add realism: calibrating the colours toned down the yellows making grass actually a realistic green instead of overly highlighted with yellow.
A good aim is for as neutral a picture processing chain as possible: one way I see it is during the calibration of the 'sharpness' setting. With the calibration of the patterns, you can see a 'white' line all around the black surfaces, which means you need to tone down the setting.
Hi Micro,
I’ve not voted in the poll because it’s either/or premise made it difficult for me to answer.
My “reference” is ultimately historically and continually experiential and therefore still in development. Fundamentally, I’m repeating myself here, having already discussed these issues with members who have since departed for forums more likely to reinforce their preconceived notions of music being sound as determined by low-distortion and “linear” components and a pair of mics and some software at the listening position in which the results are evaluated by forced-choice listening tests, whom I sincerely wish all the best in their pursuit for whatever those systems end up sounding like.
But if f I had to break it down into three things I consider a “reference”, it’d be these:
1) Exposure and participation in the aesthetical practice of music during the period of most intensive brain development:
I began singing in the cathedral choir at age eight. For the next twenty years I practiced and played in bands not limited to musical theatre, pop/rock, metal/post-rock, electronica, classical orchestra, brass band and jazz band. I began doing session work and eventually produced and engineering indie pop/rock bands. In a 2003 study, Harvard neurologist Gottfried Schlaug found that the brains of adult professional musicians had a larger volume of gray matter than the brains of non-musicians. Schlaug and colleagues also found that after 15 months of musical training in early childhood, structural brain changes associated with motor and auditory improvements begin to appear. In a more recent 2015 Northwestern study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Adam T. Tierney, Jennifer Krizman and Nina Kraus, the researchers took electrode recordings at the start of the study and three years later. The results show that participants in the music group (versus participants in the physical activity group) had more rapid maturation in the brain's response to sound. They also demonstrated prolonged heightened brain sensitivity to sound details, noting during adolescence, N1 (a negative deflection at around 100 ms generated within primary and secondary auditory cortices) amplitude increases whereas P1 (a positive deflection at around 50 ms generated within lateral Heschl’s gyrus) amplitude declines. This process is not complete until young adulthood, by which time N1 has become the largest component in the cortical response to sound. In adults, music training amplifies the N1 response. Here, we find an increase in N1 amplitude relative to P1 amplitude only in the music group. Thus, music training may have accelerated cortical development. The change in response consistency from year 1 to year 4 did not correlate with cortical maturation across all participants, suggesting that different mechanisms underlie the development of subcortical response consistency and the maturation of the cortical onset response across adolescence. Although synaptic pruning is a likely candidate for driving response consistency, recruitment of a larger pool of neurons involved in the generation of the cortical onset response may underlie the emergence of N1 in adolescence.(http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/12456/6/Adolescence_training_revised.pdf)
Does that make me a “Golden Ear”-type listener? No. It’s simply likely that by immersing myself in music at a crucial time in my brain’s development, altering its plasticity and hardwired it toward certain certain neurobiological responses when perceiving music. And it’s looking to repeat those now as an adult.
2) Producing, recording and mixing music:
I spent much of my twenties and early-thirties in recording studios, firstly as a session musician, and then as a producer and engineer. This process lead me to a gradual hierarchy of importance in which room selection, placement within the room, instrument selection, instrument tuning, mic placement, mic selection, mic-pre selection and converter selection were organised from most-to-least important. While it’s always been true, and likely will remain so, that all mics capture sound in a pre-prescribed manner relative to the type of diagphram (large condenser, small condenser, ribbon, dynamic), polar pattern (omni, cardioid, figure eight, etc), frequency response, sensitivity and equivalent self-noise specifications, and many are exceptional relative to other mics of the same type, no mic hears in the same way a human listens. And having been very fortunate to work with a few of the better examples, I can say that while no mic/pre/converter has ever captured the totality of the sound that I, the subject, capture via the electro-mechanical mechanism of my ears and the neurobiological device that is my brain, the recording chain is certainly capable of capturing the artist’s intent. The former - the sound - is and will always be a preference the producer/engineer shapes via the hierarchy mentioned above, while the latter - the artist’s intentions - are and will always be directly related to the artist’s ability to convey those wholly separate from the mechanism the producer/engineer employs to capture them. That is, what I capture with the mic (and how it’s processed from there) will ultimately define the sound - what that the artists does will ultimately define the performative aesthetics of the music. No mic, pre, converter, compressor, EQ, reverb, software package, or mixing console can “fix” the performative aesthetics the artist is only ever solely responsible for. The sound of it can certainly be manipulated to sound however you want it to (and to a certain extent, the pitch and timing - but not without sacrifice), and what’s more can be eternally remixed and remastered and upconverted and released on ever-higher resolution media, but the performance is bound by time to that moment the tape or hard-drive began to roll, and finished the moment someone pushed “Pause”.
Does this make me a “Golden Ear”-type listener? Nope. It’s simply lead me to be able to separate out the sound of the recording from the music contained within it. That’s continued to be true irrespective of whether it’s a live performance or a recorded one, whether it’s an analogue or digital release, stereo or mono, historic or contemporary. Sound is not music. Music is not sound. Music begins in the brain of the artist, and is perceived in the brain of the listener. The medium will be an audible mechanical wave of pressure and displacement, and if recorded, varying degrees of voltage and current reproduced as another audible mechanical wave of pressure and displacement. But its beginning and ending is always going to be a perceptual phenomenon neurobiologically processed in the brain.
3) Rejection of systems/topologies that heighten the sound of the music at the expense of the gestalt of the music:
Kinda obvious, isn’t it?
Does that make me a “Golden Ear”-type. Nope. Just a guy with a lot of preferences and biases that have been forged through the above two processes. I’ve heard a lot of systems - too many, actually - that heighten the sonics of a recording and yet diminish or destroy the pitch/dynamics/rhythmic time-based contingently dependent relationship inherent in the aesthetics of music. Now that fMRI testing has begun to map the area of the brain that processes music as distinct from non-musical sounds and speech, I hope that continued research will be able to ascertain as to whether the neurobiological processes required for passing A/B/X listening tests is the same area/process used for distinguishing music from non-musical sounds or a different area, and/or whether such testing produces conflict in the brain as it attempts to process tasks that are dissimilar. JackD201 referenced this in his “uncanny valley” reference (Post #178), the research of which is here: https://www.jove.com/video/4375/perceptual-category-processing-uncanny-valley-hypothesis-dimension
Blah blah blah blah.
This thread is moving too fast for me to keep pace with it, so apologies in advance if I’ve missed the point. Which, goodness knows, is more than likely.
Steve williams
Site Founder, Site Co-Owner, Administrator
853guy, no apologies are necessary
Your posts for me always stimulate me intellectually and make me think. I appreciate that
Your posts for me always stimulate me intellectually and make me think. I appreciate that
I don't know which is better. I think which is "preferred" as a reference is more accurate. I certainly use my system, and those of others, quite often as references. They are all data points, as Mike has written.
Thanks Steve, I appreciate you appreciating it!
853guy
P.S. Isn't it cool we've had over 240 posts and no-ones been sanctioned, threatened or banned? Let Jesus be praised, I say.
P.P.S. Did I just jinx this whole thread?
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