How The Ear Works

[JackD201]

For someone that doesn't speak english natively, you sure have a knack for being profound in your conciseness Tony. Bravo!

There is something most people notice when listening to well calibrated systems regardless of cost. That is that even at low levels the sound is "complete". You don't have to goose it up in SPL to get the details. The really good systems just make the experience more intense by growing the images and visceral components. A very common comment of non-audiophile visitors is that we can still talk to each other even when the system is rocking out.

 

[MylesBAstor]

After improved my system I can detect the gap is bigger between good and bad records
tony ma

Yes and sometimes what one thought was a problem in a "bad" recording was actually an issue in the playback system.

 

[JackD201]

Hahahahaha! Oh yeah.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

"Improving" your system to the point of rendering your software unlistenable, really is the most illogical thing I've ever heard from a hobbyists perspective.

But it is the basic premise of Pyrrhic Audio Systems. Your system is incrementally converted to be more and more revealing until you achieve complete clarity coupled with complete dissatisfaction with music. At that point, you are directed to a nice mid-market system but, since you have gone through the indoctrination process, it is now completely satisfying and you are permanently cured of the upgrade bug. (A backup option is a frontal lobe ablation.)

 

[MylesBAstor]

But it is the basic premise of Pyrrhic Audio Systems. Your system is incrementally converted to be more and more revealing until you achieve complete clarity coupled with complete dissatisfaction with music. At that point, you are directed to a nice mid-market system but, since you have gone through the indoctrination process, it is now completely satisfying and you are permanently cured of the upgrade bug. (A backup option is a frontal lobe ablation.)

Now damn why didn't I think of that? I'd actually have a living room!

 

[caesar]

I've experienced the same thing as Microstrip more notably on the front end. Most recordings just turned out to be real dogs but some, like Masquerade, the opening of Phantom of the Opera and one of my wife's favorites sounded brittle and compressed because my old CD player was having problems resolving the information. Switching to a single bit Delta Sigma player at 384 Fs and 5Hz to 25kHz power bandwidth (analog output stage built to be fast like say, a spectral) and instead of sounding mushed together the chorus spread out dynamically. I'm not saying you could now pick out every individual singer, what I'm saying is that the orchestra and vocalists were no longer crammed into the same space. This points, in my mind at least, improvements in time domain performance over my old player.

I am with Microstrip also. There are some designers who want to tell you exactly what and how something has been recorded. Other designers want for the equipment to get out of the way so you can emotionally connect with the music. To me, the hobby is about joy, not suffering. So I go with the latter. But this is just a hobby!

 

[garylkoh]

I am with Microstrip also. There are some designers who want to tell you exactly what and how something has been recorded. Other designers want for the equipment to get out of the way so you can emotionally connect with the music. To me, the hobby is about joy, not suffering. So I go with the latter. But this is just a hobby!

I'm with you Caesar, the equipment should get out of the way of the music. It should be a conduit for the enjoyment of music. But I also find that when the system gets beyond a certain point, even bad recordings can be extremely musically enjoyable. Particularly some ancient mono recordings.

But there are also the equipment lover (and there are many of them), and to them, listening to different equipment is the hobby.

The sad thing is that this thread is about how the ear works, moved here by one of the mods, and in the past 6 pages, I haven't learnt anything new about how the ear works.....

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

There seems to be a common thread here on this thread. If you have "improved" your stereo to the point that all recordings sound bad on it, guess what, there is somethling seriously wrong with your stereo.

Agreed. there are too many great-sounding recordings out there. If your objective is to reproduce the recording, on the better system the bad will sound worse and the good will sound better. It is really that simple.

"Improving" your system to the point of rendering your software unlistenable, really is the most illogical thing I've ever heard from a hobbyists perspective. A revealing system has got to reveal the good as well as the bad.

Exactly. But what may be even more important is that if truly improving your system renders much (there are exceptions) of your software "unlistenable," you're completely lost. Sell the gear. Give away (to someone who will listen to it) everything in your music library you've owned for more than a month but haven't yet heard. Swap all the audiophile forums in your bookmarks for music forums. Go buy an iPod. Listen to great music through earbuds for a year and re-boot your soul. It's not too late.

Tim

 

[RBFC]

So, how does the ear work?

Lee

 

[Kal Rubinson]

So, how does the ear work?

Lee

Surprisingly well.

 

[MylesBAstor]

I'm with you Caesar, the equipment should get out of the way of the music. It should be a conduit for the enjoyment of music. But I also find that when the system gets beyond a certain point, even bad recordings can be extremely musically enjoyable. Particularly some ancient mono recordings.

But there are also the equipment lover (and there are many of them), and to them, listening to different equipment is the hobby.

The sad thing is that this thread is about how the ear works, moved here by one of the mods, and in the past 6 pages, I haven't learnt anything new about how the ear works.....

+1

 

[MylesBAstor]

So, how does the ear work?

Lee

What?

 

[Ethan Winer]

And you're asking us to believe that out of the millions of recordings done, there's not ONE that sounds good (performance aside).

I never said that. I said of the (mostly old, ratty sounding) CDs that I have, few sound great or do my system justice. But I have lots of concert DVDs that sound great. One is ELO's Zoom, another is Diana Krall live in Paris, another is Alison Krauss live with Union Station. Two others are the live Eagles concerts Hell Freezes Over and Farewell Tour. My current fave is Jeff Beck Live at Ronnie Scott's. When played at concert level, all of those sound amazing and better IMO than being there.

But I also hear flaws. The Alison Krauss DVD has a slight but irritating EQ boost on her vocal around 8 KHz. I'm sure the voice was EQ'd that way to increase clarity and presence on more modest systems. And on one of the Eagles concerts (I think Hell Freezes Over) the kick drum has quite a bit too much subsonic oomph that gets tiring after a while. I imagine the system used by the mixing / mastering engineers was deficient in that very low range, and had they heard their work on my system they'd have EQ'd differently.

So having a great system is both a blessing and a curse.

--Ethan

 

[MylesBAstor]

I never said that. I said of the (mostly old, ratty sounding) CDs that I have, few sound great or do my system justice. But I have lots of concert DVDs that sound great. One is ELO's Zoom, another is Diana Krall live in Paris, another is Alison Krauss live with Union Station. Two others are the live Eagles concerts Hell Freezes Over and Farewell Tour. My current fave is Jeff Beck Live at Ronnie Scott's. When played at concert level, all of those sound amazing and better IMO than being there.

But I also hear flaws. The Alison Krauss DVD has a slight but irritating EQ boost on her vocal around 8 KHz. I'm sure the voice was EQ'd that way to increase clarity and presence on more modest systems. And on one of the Eagles concerts (I think Hell Freezes Over) the kick drum has quite a bit too much subsonic oomph that gets tiring after a while. I imagine the system used by the mixing / mastering engineers was deficient in that very low range, and had they heard their work on my system they'd have EQ'd differently.

So having a great system is both a blessing and a curse.

--Ethan

Did you or didn't you say this:

Originally Posted by Gedlee
As I continued to improve my system I kept hearing more and more flaws in the recordings ... I don't have many classical recordings (maybe 1% of my collection), but I would have to say almost all of them are "bad".

That is exactly my experience too. A while back someone asked what my favorite recordings are, and it was difficult for me to name one. --Ethan

 

[tony ky ma]

I all of those sound amazing and better IMO than being there.

I real wonder how it can be ? I believe that the best repro sound will be just sound closer to a real sound, never can be the same as the original, because different place will have different effect with same sound, even better ?, I would like to have that chance to compare those difference !
tony ma

 

[mep]

IMO, concert DVDs don't count for much when it comes to judging your equipment. This is where you need your double blind test. Listen to a concert DVD blindfolded and tell me it sounds as good as your best recorded music. I think it just sounds better when you have your eyes open and can see the band playing. I never knew that watching/listening to a concert DVD could possibly be better than hearing the band live. That $150 Pioneer receiver must be sweet.

 

[Ron Party]

The sad thing is that this thread is about how the ear works, moved here by one of the mods, and in the past 6 pages, I haven't learnt anything new about how the ear works.....

Nor have I, Gary. Maybe it's just me, but I thought your post and the two following it, which initially were posted in another thread, were very interesting and deserving of its own thread, so I moved the posts. A member reading the thread title, interested in the subject matter, is (mis)treated to posts about any number of other subjects, despite repeated moderator intervention.

So for the last time, please limit your posts to the technical matter at hand.

 

[amirm]

An implicit conclusion might be that we don't really know how the ear works . I was just researching dither types for a question someone asked me offline. I was surprised to hear that noise-shaped dither which complies with Fletcher-Munson audibility curves is actually not preferred by many who mix music! They actually prefer flat dither which raises the noise floor across the board. The dither that pushes the noise down in the highest sensitivity for the ear and boosts it at higher frequency was said to make the high-frequencies not sound so nature. Whether this anecdotal answer is right or not is hard to say. But it is informal survey data contradicting what we take as bible on the science of hearing.

 

[Ron Party]

Very interesting, Amir. As always, your investigative skills shine! And thanks for trying to keep this thread on topic.

 

[garylkoh]

One reason that we are always struggling with this topic - How the Ear Works - is that the ear is intimately intertwined with the brain. We already know that the ear is an active instrument - and hence it does not work without the input and feedback (and also feed-forward) from the brain.

Here is one example - the discovery of privileged binding between visual and auditory perception. There is only empirical data (the latest of the papers below were written in 2007) but it begins to explore how do the vision subsystem bind with the auditory subsystem to produce a single audio-visual object. This is why when watching a concert video, the quality of the recording AND the performance goes up. The audio is inextricably intertwined with the video and elevates the performance. Hence, in a blind test, even musicians cannot tell the performance of one musician apart from another, even when one musician is highly celebrated and the other musician is not (but both are reasonably competent).

I believe that there was an experiment done by Floyd Toole where he had blind and sighted tests on loudspeakers, and in the sighted tests, the larger speakers all rated better, while in the blind tests the smaller speakers rated better. (I'm sure Amir will find this paper - it wasn't in my bookmarks) If we believe that the performance can be influenced by what we see, then we have to intimately couple how the ear works, how the eye works, and the binding between the ear and the eye by the brain.

Hearing Gestures, Seeing music:
http://www.michaelschutz.net/documents/Schutz Lipscomb 07 - Hearing gestures, seeing music.pdf

Performance Gestures of Musicians: What Structural and Emotional Information do they Convey?
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.94.1304&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Audio-Visual Objects
http://people.virginia.edu/~mk9y/mySite/papers/KubovySchutz2010.pdf