Do Members use Live Music as a Reference

[PeterA]

I'm reading every post and I'm learning some. When Peter first started this thread back in February, and up till recently, I did not vote in the poll because it was just too vague. But yesterday I put aside my stance from the past and took life from a much simpler approach, and I voted. :b
I have zero regret. Life's fun and should be fun, in real life as in music reproduction.

Nice sentiment, Bob. I loved watching that movie. I'm sorry that the two poll questions and OP were too vague, but I am glad you voted.

I'm actually a bit surprised by the results. I started thinking that almost every member here would use live music as one of their references, but perhaps not their only reference. I had presumed that even some objectives and members whose primary goal is to faithfully reproduce what is on the recording, occasionally listen to live music, and do not intentionally block out their memories of those experiences when listening to their systems and thinking about how they can be improved. So I am also learning something here and realizing that there are different approaches and different goals when it comes to assessing audio systems.

I now curious to read more about how those who do not reference live music go about assessing their systems. Is it just based on measurements and listening to other people's systems?

 

[NorthStar]

Peter, here's how I reasoned yesterday: Between using live music (acoustic beautiful classical chamber music) and not as a reference I voted for the former, even living in a perfect world of this beautiful blue planet. Words are just words; the meaning we accord to them is different for each person and similar to many, in their truest sense spoken/written by the speaker/writer or/and in their real level of intensification. Our own imagination is our drive into/between the real and fictive aspired dream. Simplicity is a good guide, understanding correctly comes from reading accurately the true meaning of the narrator, listening to what people have to say when they say intelligent things is the art of evolving educated.

Appreciating our emotional satisfaction from reproduced music listening is the real thing.
The emotional impact from live music is a great reference to reproduced music @ home.
We are much closer than what we believe...

This is a good thread because we all have good ideas to share.

 

[Steve williams]

Amir, I am pleased that my simple posting of a photograph, taken at a live music event the other night, has given this thread a second life after nine months. However, I do not understand why this seems so personal to you and why you feel the need for these attacks. I would like to address the above sentences in bold. I do not remember ever claiming that people's relative ability to judge system quality should be based on how much live music they listen to. I have made the point that I asses MY SYSTEM quality based on MY memories of the music that I have heard live. I use live music as "a" reference for me, but it is not "the" (only) reference. I also listen to other people's systems and read and try to understand some measurements. The combination of these helps me to make progress with my system.

How can you claim that you "don't listen to a fraction of live music that Peter does"? Do you know how much live music I listen to? Sadly, it is not as much as I would like. I did hear a great recital the other night with two fellow members. It was in a private living room, solo instruments played by very accomplished musicians. The music was excellent and we had a great time. It helped me to better realize the limits of my speakers in terms of their ability to portray the sheer energy created by the cello, especially in the lower frequencies.

Furthermore, you have no basis for your last claim that "listening to live music did not impart the benefit Peter likes to demonstrate". What have I demonstrated, and to whom have I demonstrated it? You don't know what that benefit is. The benefit that I have gained by listening to live music is my own and used for my personal enjoyment and reference. You presume to know something about my listening skills, though we have never met and you have not seen the results of my hearing tests. Nor have I participated in measured listening tests with published results that you can reference. Are you referring to a comment fellow member Ack made in his system thread: "Thanks Peter and Ian, very thoughtful and honest! Peter has a very keen ear, and I find his comments - past and present - very much in line with what I think of the sound of this system, otherwise I wouldn't be working on it all this time. I value honest opinion and not the typical pat in the back you see on AudioShark - it's what sets sophisticated, critical listeners apart from bullshitters."

I have much reason to celebrate, but it is certainly not "that more people think like [me] than the other way around." I have discussed adjectives with fellow audiophiles, and prefer the word "believable" or "convincing". I know that my system, and most others do not sound "real". At moments, some recordings come close to sounding somewhat "realistic", though, and that is what motivates me to make improvements.

I respectfully suggest that you are jumping to conclusions about me, my claims, and my abilities. I do not appreciate your characterizations which seem more based on supposition than on evidence.

It's pretty simple Peter. That post was from someone who had never been to a live music event in his life. And yes I agree with you that I felt Amir's post was an attack on you. This thread will be closely moderated for any further such personal attacks.

 

[amirm]

I do not remember ever claiming that people's relative ability to judge system quality should be based on how much live music they listen to.

That's strange Peter because you and I have discussed this topic at length and your position has always been very clear and as I stated. Here is one of many such statements:

It is abundantly clear that you are saying one listening to live music puts them ahead of audiophiles who do not.

I have made the point that I asses MY SYSTEM quality based on MY memories of the music that I have heard live.

Nope. Please see above and again, countless times you have made this as a general statement. Heck you even say that mere act of taking a child to music lesson puts one in a superior position to know what sounds more natural (which I assume you mean real) than an audiophile! No capitalized "MY" this and "My" that is present.

Indeed you created this thread to prove the generality of your position, did you not?

 

[microstrip]

(...) I now curious to read more about how those who do not reference live music go about assessing their systems. Is it just based on measurements and listening to other people's systems?

I know someone who just uses as a reference other people's systems, including mine! Unfortunately he does not manage to assemble a system that he can enjoy - IMHO he misses the hidden part of the magic of systems, that comes from our experience of life music. When fine tuning I am not comparing everything with life - I sometimes focus on a voice, an instrument or just the relation between performers. Most of the time when one of them is right and sounds life like many others also come correct. Surely this technique can be recording dependent - but fortunately the process in general is highly convergent if you pick recordings that can sound real.

 

[jkeny]

Amir, in 2012 Evelina Fedorenko, Josh H. McDermott, Sam Norman-Haignere and Nancy Kanwisher conducted a study to determine the brain’s sensitivity to musical structure that was a precursor to their 2016 study “Distinct Cortical Pathways for Music and Speech Revealed by Hypothesis-Free Voxel Decomposition” that verified the brain’s auditory cortex has distinct and specific pathways for the detection and processing of music that do not cross over with those that process non-musical sounds (speech, diegetic sound).

The specific neural clusters that respond to music and music only are not processing frequency and its artifacts. Why? Because that’s not what constitutes music. In order for the FMRI to reveal those clusters responding to sound that’s not speech/diegetic in nature, the sound needs another variable - rhythm/time. The takeaway? Music is not comprised solely from pitch/frequency. Sound is. Always will be. Music though, is the combination of pitch/frequency and rhythm defined by time. Always has been, always will be.

So the training that gave you ability to discern tiny distortions in frequency related sounds has no relevance to music. It’s missing the rhythmic/time-dependent variable that makes music music. Sorry.

What’s more, a 2015 study conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt and of New York University showed that musicians (with six years of musical training who currently practised an instrument) were more able than non-musicians to detect oscillations slower than one-beat a second. That is, only those who were familiar with the practical aesthetics of music identified rhythmic anomalies. Live music imparted an advantage for detection for those who practised it over those who did not. Again, for all your training in detecting frequency artifacts, you likely would have been identified with the non-musicians in this study.

I’m sure I’ll regret posting this in about 10 minutes. But for the next 10 minutes I can console myself knowing I did what I could to put forward actual emperical data to refute your immodesty. For whatever that may be worth. Which is probably nothing.

Excellent post as usual, 853guy
It's highly likely that the neural pathways that process music developed before pathways that process speech - afterall, nature is full of music & we were exposed to those sounds for a long, long time before speech emerged.

You are also correct in pointing out the patterned structure of music makes it a far different perceptual task to listening for isolated, specific aspects in the soundstream. The focus on such elemental aspects is IMO misplaced but not surprising in those whose bible is measurements. There is simply illustrated by looking at CMR (comodulation masking release) where a modulating sound which is imperceptibly buried in noise is revealed when another sound is modulated at the same frequency. Anybody can hear this here https://auditoryneuroscience.com/topics/comodulation-masking-release

The processing aspect of auditory perception is the 90% of the iceberg - it lies underneath the obvious stuff but represents the majority of what's going on in this perception and like any parallel processing that has the ability to cross-correlate aspects of the signal though time, it can extract & prceive more from the signal than a simple view of the auditory signals would suggest.

I'm off to read the references you hinted at

 

[amirm]

It's pretty simple Peter. That post was from someone who had never been to a live music event in his life.

I don't understand this tone and response Steve. Here is a recent live music event I attended with a number of members of this forum actually (Square Nut Zippers):

This was during my trip to RMAF 2016. Prior to getting on the plane, I ran into this at the airport no less:

I can tell you that there is not one system I have heard that sounds like that guitar did in the crowded airport terminal. And hearing it in no way or shape allowed me to determine fidelity of any system better.

 

[Steve williams]

Sorry Amir but you might listen to music but you don't hear it, certainly not in the way that I and so many others here do. So in all honesty what you think and what you want to prove is all irrelevant here at WBF. There is another forum on the internet that likes to dispute, dispel and disprove. Happily this ain't the place

 

[DaveC]

I'd still say knowing what real instruments sound like in real life is important. Electric instruments are great but they can sound like anything. For example a tune I heard at demos a few times recently... "My Bass" by Brian Bromberg. It sounds great but it's an electric bass solo and there's no definitive reference on what an electric bass is supposed to sound like. When you're trying to evaluate a change in your system that kind of music is halfway useless. It sounds great on a good system, no doubt... but besides, attack, dynamics, etc.. it's hard to judge. Is timbre realistic sounding? In the context of that tune the question doesn't even make sense. Human voice and string instruments are probably the most nuanced, they have the most complicated waveforms and IF you're familiar with what they are supposed to sound like in real life it tells you a lot more. You don't need to be at the recording, our brain is capable of separating the sound from the effect room acoustics have on the sound. Harman/Toole showed that female voice is what we're most critical of and Toole made the point about our brains differentiating sound from acoustic spaces in his last presentation on video.

Now Amir, I know you're super familiar with Harman testing and worship Toole like a god, so I have a hard time believing you believe what you just wrote in response to my post and aren't just trolling.

 

[Lee]

I record local jazz and classical musicians in 24/176 live to two track so that is pretty helpful in getting an understanding on how the system at home is reproducing what I heard in the hall. Solo violin and guitar are really good at troubleshooting any issues in the system. Getting the "sweetness" of a good quality violin right can be tricky in digital. Guitar is a bit easier but the decay of the notes is very useful.

 

[NorthStar]

I record local jazz and classical musicians in 24/176 live to two track so that is pretty helpful in getting an understanding on how the system at home is reproducing what I heard in the hall. Solo violin and guitar are really good at troubleshooting any issues in the system. Getting the "sweetness" of a good quality violin right can be tricky in digital. Guitar is a bit easier but the decay of the notes is very useful.

Lee, what brings you closer (emotionally and physically) to your live jazz and classical music recordings; your CD/SACD player with your digital discs or your turntable with your analog records?

 

[Al M.]

Sorry Amir but you might listen to music but you don't hear it, certainly not in the way that I and so many others here do. So in all honesty what you think and what you want to prove is all irrelevant here at WBF. There is another forum on the internet that likes to dispute, dispel and disprove. Happily this ain't the place

What did Amir do to deserve that answer, espeically the first sentence?

I understand the irritation, Steve, but...

And yes, Amir does have a point about the guitar in the airport terminal.

 

[PeterA]

What did Amir do to deserve that answer, espeically the first sentence?

I understand the irritation, Steve, but...

And yes, Amir does have a point about the guitar in the airport terminal.

Al, people at that airport were hearing the sound of that guitar plus the sound of the guitar as it was altered by the mic, the cables, the amplifier, and the speaker. They were hearing a blend of the amplified and unamplified guitar. The location of the sound was mixed between that coming from the guitar itself and that coming from the speaker location. The singer's voice was also altered by the mic, cable, amp and speaker. Measuring equipment would likely show that the sound from the speaker is different from the sound of the unamplified guitar.

 

[NorthStar]

Just a simple remark; on the voting poll there are two colored lines...Red (on top) with 75% of the votes, and Blue (below) with 25%.
It don't mean a thing, color wise. :b

 

[PeterA]

That's strange Peter because you and I have discussed this topic at length and your position has always been very clear and as I stated. Here is one of many such statements:

It is abundantly clear that you are saying one listening to live music puts them ahead of audiophiles who do not.

Nope. Please see above and again, countless times you have made this as a general statement. Heck you even say that mere act of taking a child to music lesson puts one in a superior position to know what sounds more natural (which I assume you mean real) than an audiophile! No capitalized "MY" this and "My" that is present.

Indeed you created this thread to prove the generality of your position, did you not?

What I am saying, Amir, is that a person who has heard live piano performances knows better what a piano sounds like than does a person who has not heard a live piano. And with that memory of what a piano sounds like, he is better equipped than someone who has not heard a piano, to answer the question of whether or not the sound of a piano being reproduced through an audio system sounds "natural" or "realistic".

Can you find any quotes out of my 2919 posts on WBF where I write that a person who listens to a live instrument is in a "superior position to know what sounds more natural...than an audiophile"? Those are your words, not mine. Nowhere have I suggested that an audiophile does not listen to live music, or does not know what the term "natural" means, or does not know how a piano sounds. To copy my own quote that you reference above, I wrote this: "The non audiophile who attends acoustic concerts or has a child taking piano lessons, knows what a piano sounds like and he will know how to answer the question of whether or not a stereo sounds natural." Nothing there, or anywhere, about audiophiles.

Why do you quote member Al M. when trying to make your point about my position? And why not also argue with DaveC, microstrip, Al M., MadFloyd, Ack or the many other members who also use live music as a reference?

 

[853guy]

853guy, Thanks for posting this. Have no regrets, I enjoy your writing and always learn something.

Hi Peter,

Thanks, I’m learning too, so it’s a pleasure. Hope life is treating you well.

The purpose of this post, written quite a time after you had written yours, the 20 minutes long past, should, so I am hoping, help you not to regret it!
If I am not mistaken, it was the great conductor Sergiu Celidibache who in his writings about music stressed those very points you mention as essential, where of course the whole of a performance was more important than those very parts which constitute it. I must read it up again. I think he used the term tempo for the time factor. Once I have refreshed my memory I will get back on this.
In the meantime: Thanks!

Hi Detlof,

Great conductor indeed. He and Günter Wand are my favourite Bruckner conductors. Celibidache did say this: ”Most of these ignorant people think I take a gradual pace or a fast tempo because I just happen to want it that way. The tempo is the condition that reduces and unifies the physical vastness that is otherwise present. That is the tempo!” I need way more coffee before I even attempt to think about that.

Excellent post as usual, 853guy
It's highly likely that the neural pathways that process music developed before pathways that process speech - afterall, nature is full of music & we were exposed to those sounds for a long, long time before speech emerged.

You are also correct in pointing out the patterned structure of music makes it a far different perceptual task to listening for isolated, specific aspects in the soundstream. The focus on such elemental aspects is IMO misplaced but not surprising in those whose bible is measurements. There is simply illustrated by looking at CMR (comodulation masking release) where a modulating sound which is imperceptibly buried in noise is revealed when another sound is modulated at the same frequency. Anybody can hear this here https://auditoryneuroscience.com/top...asking-release

The processing aspect of auditory perception is the 90% of the iceberg - it lies underneath the obvious stuff but represents the majority of what's going on in this perception and like any parallel processing that has the ability to cross-correlate aspects of the signal though time, it can extract & prceive more from the signal than a simple view of the auditory signals would suggest.

I'm off to read the references you hinted at

?

Hi jkeny,

Nice to hear from you! Hope you’re warm and dry. Measurements tell us more about the measurer than anything else, right? If we’re going to move forward to a greater understanding of music reproduction, like you, I agree we need to look at the only thing in the universe that knows what’s music and what’s not. We need more FMRI. More, much more.

I can tell you that there is not one system I have heard that sounds like that guitar did in the crowded airport terminal. And hearing it in no way or shape allowed me to determine fidelity of any system better.

Hi Amir,

Why would anyone expect a pair of microphones with a predetermined polar pattern and response to ever be able to “hear” the same things as a human being with a highly complex auditory mechanism and neuro-physiological processor walking through an airport? Why would anyone expect a complex inter-dependent electro-acoustical system with a unique phase/frequency and direct/reverberant relationship ever be able to recreate what a single human being heard?

I don’t think anyone’s arguing a human being’s electro-acoustic and neuro-physiological hearing mechanism listening to an instrument played live can either A) be captured in the same way by a single pair of microphones, or B) recreated in the same way by an audio system. Human beings “listen” - we are always processing the data and are never simply “hearing”. “Listening” is a sentient property of being human. No audio device on Earth will ever possess that ability.

So although hearing is not listening they are dependent on one another. Hearing is the first part of the process determined electro-acoustically by the ear. Listening is the second part of the process determined by the brain. The ear doesn’t know whether it’s listening to music or a train crash. Only the brain does. And as the research continues to make clear, it’s the brain that looks for and responds uniquely to sounds that contain the signature elements of pitch/dynamics/rhythm constantly modulating over time. Listening to music and understanding its aesthetics does impact brain response, and what’s more, continued practice of it does allow discrimination of certain musically-significant elements on a higher level than non-musicians. The research is all there and doesn’t require membership to a self-congratulatory “professional association” to view it.

Our brains have incredible capacity for learning. A conductor is fundamentally a practical aesthetics disciplinarian. His or her practice is to constantly distinguish musically-meaningful events from one another and actively shape them toward a coherent whole through judgement. We, whether active practicing musicians or active music listening attendees, share the exact same ability to learn to distinguish musically-significant and musically-meaningful variables from one another and apply judgement to them whether they be a guy and guitar in an airport miked and amplified, or a minimalist two-channel DSD track played back over the least distortion-compromised system ever assembled.

Why? Because I say so? Because that’s the way I want it to be? Because my self-esteem is dependent on it? No, because that’s what the research says.

Because my brain, and your brain, and everyone’s brain is hardwired to process music in a way that is completely independent from processing ALL other sounds, whether they be speech, pink noise, brown noise or your child’s breathing in the middle of the night when they’re asleep (man that’s a great sound). That’s what the research says and it’s been put forward by myself and others on this forum (too*) many times. What’s more, it demonstrably possible for all of us, musicians or not, to learn the practical aesthetics of music and become better judges of musically-meaningful variables.

But it doesn’t come from training to discern distortions in codecs for lossy compression. All that will ever do is allow you to better discern distortions in codecs for lossy compression, leading to domain-specific myopia, leading you to believe the same findings must therefore apply to music, which is processed by an entirely different part of the brain, specifically and intentionally looking for pitch, dynamics and rhythm constantly modulating over time. If you want to understand music better, and I believe many of us do, then it's crucial that any individual element always be understood and evaluated in the context of its inter-dependent relationship to the other two, for as soon as we begin to remove and isolate any one of the elements, we destroy that which makes music "music".

My hope is that you'll take the time to look at the research - there's lots of it out there, and it's robustly reviewed. You may choose not to, of course. In any case, there's just as much joy to be found in opening one's mind to a new way of approaching the data, as there is defensiveness to be found in remaining ignorant. At least, that's what my wife's teaching me.


*This is why I try not to post very often. Inevitably, I run out of things to say, so I say the same thing in a different way, which is like banging you head against a brick wall and then deciding to bang your torso against it, but ending up with a lesser result.

 

[Detlof]

Peter, here's how I reasoned yesterday: Between using live music (acoustic beautiful classical chamber music) and not as a reference I voted for the former, even living in a perfect world of this beautiful blue planet. Words are just words; the meaning we accord to them is different for each person and similar to many, in their truest sense spoken/written by the speaker/writer or/and in their real level of intensification. Our own imagination is our drive into/between the real and fictive aspired dream. Simplicity is a good guide, understanding correctly comes from reading accurately the true meaning of the narrator, listening to what people have to say when they say intelligent things is the art of evolving educated.

Appreciating our emotional satisfaction from reproduced music listening is the real thing.
The emotional impact from live music is a great reference to reproduced music @ home.
We are much closer than what we believe...

This is a good thread because we all have good ideas to share.[/QUOTE

I do see your point and I do love your thoughts, especially those expressed in your last paragraph, simply because music has again and again deeply moved me, both in concerts as well as at home. But then music can also get at me coming from a car radio, sometimes perhaps even more so compared to sitting in front of my rig, simply because I listen more " innocently ". My point being, that listening to ones stereo, its sound can interfere with the music per se in my efforts to listen and to be immersed in the music. I absolutely hate that. Except when I want to listen critically to my rig, I want to listen to music and not to my rig. I am interested in the message, not the messenger. I can do this best, once I have resigned myself to the fact, that my sytem will never sound like the real thing in ALL its aspects, no matter what I do. Once that is achieved, I can relax and open myself up to the music, regain my "innocence" so to speak. In other words, yes, getting emotional satisfaction from the music from my rig is the real thing as you say. But if I would say that my rig sounds real, like live music, I am comparing sound, not music. But if I find, my rig sounds realistic enough compared to the live event, I then can relax and open up to the music. But then, that is just me.

 

[Al M.]

Al, people at that airport were hearing the sound of that guitar plus the sound of the guitar as it was altered by the mic, the cables, the amplifier, and the speaker. They were hearing a blend of the amplified and unamplified guitar. The location of the sound was mixed between that coming from the guitar itself and that coming from the speaker location. The singer's voice was also altered by the mic, cable, amp and speaker. Measuring equipment would likely show that the sound from the speaker is different from the sound of the unamplified guitar.

O.k. got it. Didn't look closely at the picture.

 

[microstrip]

Al, people at that airport were hearing the sound of that guitar plus the sound of the guitar as it was altered by the mic, the cables, the amplifier, and the speaker. They were hearing a blend of the amplified and unamplified guitar. The location of the sound was mixed between that coming from the guitar itself and that coming from the speaker location. The singer's voice was also altered by the mic, cable, amp and speaker. Measuring equipment would likely show that the sound from the speaker is different from the sound of the unamplified guitar.

Unfortunately the thread is suffering from what Al M. immediately referred in post #2 - IMHO we must separate non amplified music from amplified music when debating the influence of life music in evaluating sound reproduction.

Most of the time amplified music does not aim at sounding like non amplified music. It aims at sounding like the creator and technical people wanted it to sound - and very few people have knowledge enough to guess what were their intentions.

I am sure that if my preferred music was amplified music my system would have a different composition from what it is now. But sometimes I use recordings of amplified music just to check for the "imperfections" induced by the recording system - e.g. the small variations of intensity due to a moving singer that approaches the microphone suggest live and improve the feeling of being there and are an excellent check for system resolution.

 

[caesar]

Unfortunately the thread is suffering from what Al M. immediately referred in post #2 - IMHO we must separate non amplified music from amplified music when debating the influence of life music in evaluating sound reproduction.

Most of the time amplified music does not aim at sounding like non amplified music. It aims at sounding like the creator and technical people wanted it to sound - and very few people have knowledge enough to guess what were their intentions.

I am sure that if my preferred music was amplified music my system would have a different composition from what it is now. But sometimes I use recordings of amplified music just to check for the "imperfections" induced by the recording system - e.g. the small variations of intensity due to a moving singer that approaches the microphone suggest live and improve the feeling of being there and are an excellent check for system resolution.

Microstrip, what is the value of distinguishing between amplified music and non-amplified music - other applying our imagination to make us feel good, or more likely FRUSTRATED, because we come up SO SHORT? Isn't this comparing business all intellectual masturbation?