Awwww, shucks, Bob ... just doin' my bit to make the world a tastier place .... :bFrank, you add some 'fruity' spices in our Sound world. :b
And that, is Absolutely true. ...In the most positive way of course.
Frank
Awwww, shucks, Bob ... just doin' my bit to make the world a tastier place .... :bFrank, you add some 'fruity' spices in our Sound world. :b
And that, is Absolutely true. ...In the most positive way of course.
Early in the infancy of WBF, we discussed producing a "WBF test CD" with cuts that highlighted different aspects of musical reproduction. Our own Bruce B. graciously offered to assist, but the project got almost no interest at the time. While we may not place the most "perfect" tracks on it, a test CD would allow us to discuss the sound of the system under examination from a common ground. Perhaps this CD is an idea whose time is approaching.....
Lee
I never got the scale bit. How could everything fit between your speakers or a bit beyond the edges?? How can you ever hope to get a orchestra if 15" of space?? I guess no one sits in the 10th row.
Rob
I'm still game for that Lee. I've also heard great things about Marty's evaluation CD. I'd love to have a copy of that too.
I will try to make my tone more mellifluous for those it offends.
To say that we can not find an agreed upon list of things to use as a starting point to evaluate the gear we all love and use is INHO absurd.
Yes it is Mom!
And this is how you also address your customers at the store?
Thank you AlanThere are four competing models for an audio system:
1. 'I don't care how it sounds, just so long as it's cheap enough'
2. 'I don't care what it does, just as long as it sounds good to me'
3. 'I want it to conform to an objective series of benchmarks'
4. 'I want it to conform to a subjective series of benchmarks'
HP's original 'Absolute Sound' goal (#4) came about in part as a reaction to the unemotional response of #3 and seeing that the alternative was either #1 or #2.
In most cases we got #1 or #2.
Harry's Absolute Sound approach is demanding. It demands time researching or finding the recordings suitable for equipment evaluation, and then more time evaluating that equipment. It also often runs counter to the original intentions of the person embarking on the quest for better audio - someone who is about to invest in good audio to make their dubstep or death metal collection sound better is unlikely to actively choose a system designed to better resolve an acoustic instrument in a live setting.
Audio is not medicine. If someone is faced with their chosen genre of music sounding good through a poor system, or sounding bad through a good system, they will take the first option. And, faced with music that is increasingly clipped and compressed so that the range from 0dBFS to a whole two decibels below that constitutes a good recording, with instruments time corrected to remove the human element from a track and people so unused to a voice without Auto Tune correction that they wince at Sinatra's passing tones, this is only likely to get worse.
I agree that a set of standardised recordings would seem like a good place to start, but I would find it very difficult to publish the findings of so lofty a set of standards. We are already locked away in our ivory tower according to the wider population. Citing the same recordings over and over again would only serve to reinforce that opinion of audio and its followers. I don't think all music cited in print should have been recorded within the last two years, and classical music citations are to be strictly controlled, but I know of titles that do apply such rules.
You could probably create a standard set of classical and jazz recordings very easily. You could also produce a series of contemporary recordings that deliver similar properties, but the chimeric nature of contemporary music today would mean you would have to revise this increasingly vital part of the toolkit to stay current. And the concern there is you might struggle to find recordings that consistently deliver the properties you seek to analyse in contemporary music.
Ultimately, Harry's quest for the Absolute Sound is a good one, but it's like trying to root out corruption in politics - a valid and worthwhile goal, but an impossible task.
Maybe we can go back to the year it all started (1973) (scan of first page of TAS issue 1 editorial illustrated with part of the front cover)
(...) I think that the recordings should include not only music, but sounds common to all, doors slamming, cars going by, crowd sounds, the whole gamut of shared experiece. (...)
Mike Skeet slamming his garage door again?