Does Everything Make a Difference?

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.
Yes, and I'm one of them. I have to tolerate the sound quality - or lack thereof - if I am to enjoy a performance I particularly like...
Take Beeth's violin cto for example: one recording I like is a live one of Heifetz with Mitropoulos conducting the NYP (1956). the versions I have found of this recording range from mediocre to execrable, but there is nothing I can do about it -- and I'm not giving up the performance for the sake of the sound!
BTW, I first listened to this played from the original LP (Columbia?) and, if memory serves, the sound wasn't that bad...
 
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Yes, and I'm one of them. I have to tolerate the sound quality - or lack thereof - if I am to enjoy a performance I particularly like...
Take Beeth's violin cto for example: one recording I like is a live one of Heifetz with Mitropoulos conducting the NYP (1956). the versions I have found of this recording range from mediocre to execrable, but there is nothing I can do about it -- and I'm not giving up the performance for the sake of the sound!
BTW, I first listened to this played from the original LP (Columbia?) and, if memory serves, the sound wasn't that bad...
I'm the opposite, if the recording is poor, I can't get into the performance, however good.
Doesn't having a high resolution system make things worse for you, in that it could make poor recordings sound even worse?
 
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...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.
I never said anything about instrument age. How about any acoustic instrument?
 
Doesn't having a high resolution system make things worse for you, in that it could make poor recordings sound even worse?

I was just about to mention this. Poor recordings are a real test for a system. I absolutely love listening to them on my amp (powerDAC-SX) + Dan Clark Stealth headphones, for example. You feel like you have a direct connection to the recording, with a surprising amount of detail, no stridency. Fabulous!

That being said, we all have different tolerances so I would be cautious to generalize. These are things you need to experience yourself.

Here is a famous example - live club recording:


Another random example, something I was listening to yesterday, from 1935:


Here is a good one! It does not get much worse than that (in terms of recording quality) :)

 
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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!).
Sure, I never meant indistinguishable...just evoking the real.
 
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.
Sorry but you really try to sound authoritative with actually knowing what you are talking about. Notice I said from an open window, down the street , through a wall, from another room because then you don't see visually where the sound is coming from.

I was once at a seaside town in southern Spain. We were doing the usual tourist shopping and going down lots of small alleyways that had various shops. At some point off in the distance, I started to hear music. The level was very low, below the ambient noise level, but audible. I told my wife, there is a band playing off somewhere. Even at that very low level with all that street noise I could tell immediately it was live and not recorded playback. Sure enough, after about 20 minutes a brass band could be heard coming up the alleyway to the point of clogging it up. They then passed our location and at that point it was very loud (well over 100dB I would guess as you get in close proximity to brass instruments). The ratio from when I first heard the sounds to when they were within visual distance was easily 30-40dB and yet hearing it as live had nothing inherently to do with the SPL. The live characteristics were unmistakeable.

I have done demos just like you describe and the system was a VERY special line source with huge custom SET amps. The sound was also very convincing but it was still possible to tell within seconds between the live and recording made of the same quartet earlier in the day with a top of the line Nagra recorder. It was still the best demo of this type I have sat through and one could at least "suspend disbelief" relatively well because it was a good facsimile of the real thing...but a facsimile nonetheless.
 
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

And for evaluating someone's mood or other mental states? What are the measurement tools for that? Functional MRI? Sure, it tells you WHAT the brain is doing when it is processing certain thoughts but it doesn't tell you about that feeling the person is having.

This is the difference between what you are describing in mechanistic terms vs. what is more likely happening when we listen to music. You have all this data you can objectively measure but it doesn't tell you what the listener actually hears. Same as with the functional MRI looking at brain activity.

Now, what you can do with functional MRI is correlate different functions with different moods and feelings and then start to use it as a predictive tool for certain behaviors.

Same thing with audio, you can take your measurements and play things for people and gauge their response to it and start to make correlations between what they like and the measurements of the gear that they said they like. However, without this connection, your measurements are not really useful except for quality control...that you can make something that measures the same repeatably.

BTW., it is the same in the pharmaceutical industry. We develop drugs with a given purity and potency. However, what that drug does cannot be determined by measurements alone (such as dissolution testing for tablets). It has to be correlated to clinical results where it is administered to patients. However, it is not even enough to get their blood plasma concentrations. This tells you that yes, the drug dissolved as it was supposed to and yes, it is now circulating in the bloodstream the way you expected, but it STILL doesn't tell you about the efficacy for the given indication. What you then try to do is correlate with technical data so that you gain a bit of predictive power.

Your post reminds me that I am dealing with someone who doesn't really understand what the role of measurements are in many cases. For some, like an X-ray seeing a broken bone, or a distortion measurement showing an amp isn't grounded properly, it is obvious. When it is the interface of technology and human perception or physiology then the use of technical data is different and less direct. Audio is like that. A flat speaker measurement doesn't tell you how a speaker will sound...it simply tells you that it won't have any strange aberrations in frequency response...it can still sound like crap for a myriad of other reasons.
 
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I was once at a seaside town in southern Spain. We were doing the usual tourist shopping and going down lots of small alleyways that had various shops. At some point off in the distance, I started to hear music. The level was very low, below the ambient noise level, but audible. I told my wife, there is a band playing off somewhere. Even at that very low level with all that street noise I could tell immediately it was live and not recorded playback. Sure enough, after about 20 minutes a brass band could be heard coming up the alleyway to the point of clogging it up. They then passed our location and at that point it was very loud (well over 100dB I would guess as you get in close proximity to brass instruments). The ratio from when I first heard the sounds to when they were within visual distance was easily 30-40dB and yet hearing it as live had nothing inherently to do with the SPL. The live characteristics were unmistakeable.

I've had similar experiences many times. Walking in to my local supermarket I was once struck by the quality of the music I heard to the point where I told myself - this is not possible, how can this sound so good ? What am I doing wrong with my hi-fi gear at home ? But only to figure out that there was an actual piano sitting in a far corner, hidden away. What a relief!
 
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Sorry but you really try to sound authoritative with actually knowing what you are talking about.
Please don’t make assertions about my intentions. It’s obnoxious. Speak for yourself. Don’t speak for me.
Notice I said from an open window, down the street , through a wall, from another room because then you don't see visually where the sound is coming from.
Yes I noticed.
I was once at a seaside town in southern Spain. We were doing the usual tourist shopping and going down lots of small alleyways that had various shops. At some point off in the distance, I started to hear music. The level was very low, below the ambient noise level, but audible. I told my wife, there is a band playing off somewhere. Even at that very low level with all that street noise I could tell immediately it was live and not recorded playback. Sure enough, after about 20 minutes a brass band could be heard coming up the alleyway to the point of clogging it up. They then passed our location and at that point it was very loud (well over 100dB I would guess as you get in close proximity to brass instruments). The ratio from when I first heard the sounds to when they were within visual distance was easily 30-40dB and yet hearing it as live had nothing inherently to do with the SPL. The live characteristics were unmistakeable.
Like I said, cherry picked anecdotes. They were unmistakable after the fact.
I have done demos just like you describe and the system was a VERY special line source with huge custom SET amps. The sound was also very convincing but it was still possible to tell within seconds between the live and recording made of the same quartet earlier in the day with a top of the line Nagra recorder.
Of course it was. There are missing elements to the trick. You have to record the quartet in an anechoic chamber. You didn’t do that and so you had all the reverb present in the recording added to the playback.

Did the musicians mime when the recording was playing? I’m going to guess not. That’s part of the trick and takes a fair amount of rehearsal to do convincingly

What was the space like for the demo? Large room? Small room? Crowded? Not crowded? Room treatments? No room treatment?

There is a formula for the AR demo.
 
And for evaluating someone's mood or other mental states? What are the measurement tools for that? Functional MRI? Sure, it tells you WHAT the brain is doing when it is processing certain thoughts but it doesn't tell you about that feeling the person is having.
How listening to music makes someone feel falls into the field of psychology. Not really on topic


This is the difference between what you are describing in mechanistic terms vs. what is more likely happening when we listen to music. You have all this data you can objectively measure but it doesn't tell you what the listener actually hears. Same as with the functional MRI looking at brain activity.
Sound is pretty easy to measure and quantify. Even well beyond human thresholds of hearing. Sound perception is also quite measurable. But it requires careful controlled listening tests. Something that many audiophiles take as an affront to their self esteem as self appointed “skilled listeners.”

Now, what you can do with functional MRI is correlate different functions with different moods and feelings and then start to use it as a predictive tool for certain behaviors.

Same thing with audio, you can take your measurements and play things for people and gauge their response to it and start to make correlations between what they like and the measurements of the gear that they said they like. However, without this connection, your measurements are not really useful except for quality control...that you can make something that measures the same repeatably.

That’s a great way to sabotage any attempts to correlate listener preference to objective measurements. Fortunately the folks who actually research this stuff know how to do very good controlled preference tests. It’s actually a lot simpler than your convoluted ideas for testing preferences as stated above.

Your post reminds me that I am dealing with someone who doesn't really understand what the role of measurements are in many cases.
The ad hominem is getting old. Are you pissed off because you were grandstanding about how you can always taste artificial flavors and I showed you that your favorite chocolates had artificial flavors? Can we try to keep it about audio?
For some, like an X-ray seeing a broken bone, or a distortion measurement showing an amp isn't grounded properly, it is obvious. When it is the interface of technology and human perception or physiology then the use of technical data is different and less direct. Audio is like that. A flat speaker measurement doesn't tell you how a speaker will sound...it simply tells you that it won't have any strange aberrations in frequency response...it can still sound like crap for a myriad of other reasons.
Yeah. And an X ray won’t tell you about your cholesterol. It’s no secret that specific measurements tell you specific things not everything. That’s why there are a lot of measurements. And I would definitely say that even the most thorough battery of measurements won’t tell you “everything” but it will tell you an awful lot. And they will tell you a lot that you probably miss without them.

And more to the point, they will tell you a lot more than reviewers and fellow audiophiles trying, under sighted conditions, to compare audio to some convoluted vague long term aural memory salad.
 
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Please don’t make assertions about my intentions. It’s obnoxious. Speak for yourself. Don’t speak for me.

Yes I noticed.

Like I said, cherry picked anecdotes. They were unmistakable after the fact.

Of course it was. There are missing elements to the trick. You have to record the quartet in an anechoic chamber. You didn’t do that and so you had all the reverb present in the recording added to the playback.

Did the musicians mime when the recording was playing? I’m going to guess not. That’s part of the trick and takes a fair amount of rehearsal to do convincingly

What was the space like for the demo? Large room? Small room? Crowded? Not crowded? Room treatments? No room treatment?

There is a formula for the AR demo.
I didn't speak for you. These are my observations, obnoxious to you or otherwise, of how you come across in your text.

I could let you interview my wife where she would corroborate that I made comments contemporaneously that I heard the music as live...if this were a court case that is. There was no "after the fact" here.

I didn't set up the demo...those that did made the recording and I am not sure how they did it.

They played behind a thin acoustic (but not see through) curtain. So, whether it was live or not no musicians were visible.

Large room that was treated.

I already know the effect of recording something in the room and then playing it back in the room...you get a double dose of the same room acoustic that way. I have recorded musicians in my room between my speakers....have you done this? I had good (not SOTA) recording gear (R2R tape with tube microphone amp and good condensor mics) and made the recording at the listening position. The purpose was more for the practice of my ex ahead of a concert series she was giving but it was an interesting audio exercise nonetheless. The result is too dry acoustic but incredible presence on the violin itself.
 
How listening to music makes someone feel falls into the field of psychology. Not really on topic



Sound is pretty easy to measure and quantify. Even well beyond human thresholds of hearing. Sound perception is also quite measurable. But it requires careful controlled listening tests. Something that many audiophiles take as an affront to their self esteem as self appointed “skilled listeners.”



That’s a great way to sabotage any attempts to correlate listener preference to objective measurements. Fortunately the folks who actually research this stuff know how to do very good controlled preference tests. It’s actually a lot simpler than your convoluted ideas for testing preferences as stated above.


The ad hominem is getting old. Are you pissed off because you were grandstanding about how you can always taste artificial flavors and I showed you that your favorite chocolates had artificial flavors? Can we try to keep it about audio?

Yeah. And an X ray won’t tell you about your cholesterol. It’s no secret that specific measurements tell you specific things not everything. That’s why there are a lot of measurements. And I would definitely say that even the most thorough battery of measurements won’t tell you “everything” but it will tell you an awful lot. And they will tell you a lot that you probably miss without them.

And more to the point, they will tell you a lot more than reviewers and fellow audiophiles trying, under sighted conditions, to compare audio to some convoluted vague long term aural memory salad.
Listening and perception is psychology...isn't that obvious?

Correlating measurements to listener preference is sabotaging attempts to correlate that very same thing? Try to make some sense.

Show me the studies where they have effectively correlated sound preference with distortion measurements. I know that Harman did work with speakers but even those have questionable outcomes and clearly don't apply to a large swath of listeners. Afterall, from your perspective this stuff is so easy.
 
I didn't speak for you. These are my observations, obnoxious to you or otherwise, of how you come across in your text.

I’m not the topic.

I could let you interview my wife where she would corroborate that I made comments contemporaneously that I heard the music as live...if this were a court case that is. There was no "after the fact" here.
You are suggesting I verify an anecdote with another anecdote. It’s nothing personal. I just don’t put much stock in anecdotal evidence.
I didn't set up the demo...those that did made the recording and I am not sure how they did it.

They played behind a thin acoustic (but not see through) curtain. So, whether it was live or not no musicians were visible.

Large room that was treated.
AR used crowded, noisy untreated rooms. It helps the trick. So does the miming. Seeing is hearing.
I already know the effect of recording something in the room and then playing it back in the room...you get a double dose of the same room acoustic that way. I have recorded musicians in my room between my speakers....have you done this?
Between the speakers, outside the speakers, to my extremes left and right and even behind the listening position using state of the art in ear microphones. The results were 100% spatial accuracy and near perfect reproduction. Human voice.


I had good (not SOTA) recording gear (R2R tape with tube microphone amp and good condensor mics) and made the recording at the listening position. The purpose was more for the practice of my ex ahead of a concert series she was giving but it was an interesting audio exercise nonetheless. The result is too dry acoustic but incredible presence on the violin itself.
No doubt, in the listening room recordings have limitations
 
A perfect description of the goal of this hobby.
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.
While I listen to 90% acoustic music, I’m not sure I agree with the common chestnut here that acoustic instruments are the inviolate standard.
I particularly love electric guitar in it’s infinite variations played by “real people” with all the human nuance of any acoustic guitar.
Electric piano though? That just sounds like a mistake.
 
Listening and perception is psychology...isn't that obvious?

Correlating measurements to listener preference is sabotaging attempts to correlate that very same thing? Try to make some sense.

Show me the studies where they have effectively correlated sound preference with distortion measurements. I know that Harman did work with speakers but even those have questionable outcomes and clearly don't apply to a large swath of listeners. Afterall, from your perspective this stuff is so easy.

I would like to know more about the measurements Vladimir Lamm made on listening subjects to inform and guide him on his circuit designs. He attempted to correlate listening preferences through measurements to the design of his amplifiers, as I understand it.
 
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Listening and perception is psychology...isn't that obvious?
No that’s psychoacoustics. Different field of study.

Correlating measurements to listener preference is sabotaging attempts to correlate that very same thing? Try to make some sense.
You were suggesting it be done using MRIs! Yes that would be as bad as straight up sabotage. A test designed to fail. There are easier ways to find out what people prefer than MRIs. You ask them and they tell you.

Show me the studies where they have effectively correlated sound preference with distortion measurements. I know that Harman did work with speakers but even those have questionable outcomes and clearly don't apply to a large swath of listeners. Afterall, from your perspective this stuff is so easy.
The Harmon studies are a great example. What was questionable about the correlation they found between speaker preferences and speaker distortion?
 
I’m not the topic.


You are suggesting I verify an anecdote with another anecdote. It’s nothing personal. I just don’t put much stock in anecdotal evidence.

AR used crowded, noisy untreated rooms. It helps the trick. So does the miming. Seeing is hearing.

Between the speakers, outside the speakers, to my extremes left and right and even behind the listening position using state of the art in ear microphones. The results were 100% spatial accuracy and near perfect reproduction. Human voice.



No doubt, in the listening room recordings have limitations
No, just confirmation of what I said at the time I heard it. Not how she heard or didn't hear the music.
 
While I listen to 90% acoustic music, I’m not sure I agree with the common chestnut here that acoustic instruments are the inviolate standard.
I particularly love electric guitar in it’s infinite variations played by “real people” with all the human nuance of any acoustic guitar.
Electric piano though? That just sounds like a mistake.

Didn't Jimi Hendrix tell someone he played the (electric) amplifier, not the (electric) guitar?

I like electric guitar also, especially Grant Green, Kenny Burrell, Eric Clapton and Tony Iommi. I find it more difficult to tune my system (set up the cartridge and speaker position) to that instrument knowing the sound can vary by quite a bit. I still know it is an electric guitar though. Great stuff. It is easier to do so with Laurindo Almeida's acoustic guitar. Joe Pass with hollow body electric guitar is interesting.
 
No that’s psychoacoustics. Different field of study.


You were suggesting it be done using MRIs! Yes that would be as bad as straight up sabotage. A test designed to fail. There are easier ways to find out what people prefer than MRIs. You ask them and they tell you.


The Harmon studies are a great example. What was questionable about the correlation they found between speaker preferences and speaker distortion?
I was not proposing using MRIs for audio correlation...you misread what I wrote. I was using that as an analog because they use them to look at brain activity in some psychology studies and try to correlate that with different mental states and diseases.

With the Harman studies they overlooked a lot of what makes people gravitate to a speaker design....a wide even dispersion is not the only or perhaps even the main criteria for preference.

What you seem to ignore is the relatively large community that is now using tubes, and particularly SETs, despite their objectively much worse measurements and horns, which would horrify the Harman researchers. Why if the science suggests soemthing very different according to you? Clearly people, and I might add it is usually the most experienced people, are migrating this direction because they have tried the path you advocate and found it lacking in what they get from live music. You can call that anecdotal and it often doesn't compute for short term studies but when you see a large migration it is not due to imagination.
 

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