Milan I’ve spent the last twenty years being paid to set homework for others… not do it for them lolIt's kind of homework now Graham, get cracking !
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More Consensus That Streaming Is An Inferior Format & Not High End?
- Thread starter ddk
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I get that Peter and fully support that. But I’m not here taking about using music to learn about my system, quite the opposite, my system has flipped me over into a new priority of using my system to learn about music. This actually was functionally the original intention of having a sound system so I’m not feeling too much like I’m being a radical in this.
What I was talking about simply was the value of having affordable and immediate access to a far greater range of performances and how much I feel my learning has accelerated over the last decade since I’ve been streaming just from having that far greater access beyond a traditional music library to a vast almost boundless music library of the great storehouse of recorded performances to compare in both classical and jazz music. I also listen to a lot of contemporary music as well.
If the choice is chasing best sonics a great analogue setup and good vinyl library is the ultimate. I would completely love to have that.
But to compare and learn about classical music performances streaming is in a league of its own in terms of being able to easily compare a vast and diverse range of music performances. I have reached a point in my life where while I still love exploring gear I really want to expand my understanding of music. It is a completely absorbing pursuit and at this point is the far greater harvest for me.
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I do love a good wax on and wax off
Edit - I will (when I can get around to it) try and add some thoughts about what it is about Brahms that has kept him on the very shortest of my shortlists of great composers for over 5 decades and what makes his relatively very small cache of orchestral music so rich (for me). Could then pen a shortlist of my favourite Brahms piano concerto pairings after a few weeks of final comparing of a fairly comprehensive list of contenders as an outcome of the great concerto search as well.
I may record some videos of my setup playing excerpts from the different favourite performances and then describe what I see as coming successfully through the recordings here. It might take a while though so patience would be great as I’m historically happy to overcommit lol
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I agree with this. Best way to learn music is to compare performances. If you hear same compositions played differently, and different compositions, that way you will learn more, and if you want to do that, streaming is the best. Unless you have a massive vinyl collection where you can do the same. It just sucks for analog only people with not much vinyl and lot of gear cost to hear that they are only interested in sound.
I agree on principle, but there are a few (important) caveats:
- I find that YouTube has much more music available than any streaming services, and that includes live performances, ripped vinyl, etc... There's no need for high quality streaming to discover new music, or even to "appreciate" it. The only thing you can say for higher quality streaming is that you can better assess the quality of various releases using a streaming service than YouTube.
- But the reality is that many services will include one "high res" version, and many poor quality knock-offs from dubious labels, so where is the benefit there ? In addition, sometimes the "high res" version is clearly inferior to other CD versions. Here is an example (Oscar Peterson):
Qobuz version of Corcovado from "We Get Requests": https://storage.googleapis.com/cloudplayer/samples/Mic Comparison/01 Corcovado (Qobuz).flac
My CD version:
- The lack of adequate metadata on all streaming services is problematic for music discovery.
Very much so. It’s just like compares of gear… you have to hear a lot of what’s on offer to understand what’s possible. The performances (and gear) that are good but not great teach you a lot about what then is genuinely great.
Agree, given I spend a lot of my time streaming performances olayed back from youtube, but on YT as you know some have vinyl recorded and some have it digital. I choose the vinyl playback where available (e.g. cgoroo's channel)
Ok then, here's the encore
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The flow of Rubinstein, and the strike of the notes on the piano, was much better. With Oistrakh’s Bruch Scottish Fantasia, there is a part which has a quiet rise and fall of the orchestra, which is magical. With the Allnic amp, it was relatively flatter to the KR.
On Wagner’s Gotterdammerung (I have, btw, watched the Ring Cycle the Royal Opera House. The Gotterdammerung and the Valkyrie are worth going for. Siegfried and Rheingold are meh), the vocalist had much more drive with the KR amps, more chest. And the orchestra in the background unraveled more…while with Allnic amp, the focus was on the vocalist, while the orchestra was flat, in one layer. With Monte Verdi Vesper’s the decay and concert hall was more with the KR, while the Allnic kept the focus on the odd instrument. All differences were highlighted more with the Decca London Reference, than with the Koetsu Jade with the Diamond Cantilever.
Howard’s 1 quid Tallis Scholars Stabat Mater was bouncing off the concert walls with admirable decay. When we cleaned the LP with his Audiodesk, I could not notice much difference with the Allnic pre. Now, with Soulution pre, the difference was mahoosive. You could hear the resonance of the instruments and the walls of the hall.
The resonances of piano and violin were incredible. Normally, I just audition a part of the Bach Partitas, but now, I let it slip into Chaconne. Once it goes to Chaconne, it becomes difficult to stop. I checked for dryness, there is none. Liquidity, flow, it is all there.
The Kreutzer was used to check for liquidity and tone of piano and violin combined. The Lalo is just fantastically exciting with the blatt of the brass and the bass of the orchestra combining with one of my favorite violin pieces. The Ricci Decca ED2 is more of a collectible, but the Szeryng is better from both a sonics point – the Ricci has more intricate violin play. The Classic records sounds better than my US ED1, but the UK ED1 in the General’s system (report to come up) sounds better than my classic records. I prefer the Classic records Szeryng to my Ricci.
The Allnic shows you more the sway of the violinist and how the pianist moves from the right to the left buttock, while the Soulution allows you to feel the intensity of the strike of the note.
I picked up Led Zep towards the end of my teens in the 90s. I picked them up because of the music, not because of the change they brought in. I have read, and watched videos many a time of how they shook up the scene with their style of music. That did not matter much to me, my teens and early 20s were in the 90s, and I had already embraced that music. However, when we played Good Times Bad Times, You Shook Me, and Dazed and Confused on the tape, I could easily see how those primeval screams, the way Zep played for themselves, and not for the gallery, would have shaken up the world. There was no politeness in Mike’s system anymore. Just sheer rawness, Plant’s mating calls and Page’s weird leads the way they should be heard, raw emotion at its best. Read somewhere that when Page first visited a club to check out Plant, Plant’s eerie screams while covering Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick “made Page feel creepy all over”. I felt that on You shook me, the wild boy from Birmingham at his best.
Doing such observations for a particular is of very limited value as we do not know how the sound engineer made it sound. And then we have the same issue with shows - should a reviewer look in his collection for a recording that sounds particularly good with this equipment or just toss a coin? The audio glossary was created to help carrying a message that could be understood for all audiophiles, independently of the recording.
No, people write much more complete descriptions of these aspects of sound quality. Please read M. Colloms, M.Fremer, J. Atkinson or J. Heilbrunn very useful reviews. The question is that professional reviewers have written regularly hundreds of reviews and following them we can easily know what they mean by their descriptions if we have a reasonable knowledge about their style and preferences. People should not expect to find nirvana in the highend reading a couple of free reviews on their computer. The same about the Jim Smith or the Floyd Toole books - read it all, not a few pages.
I think everyone is always happy to read how the sound attributes affect some particular recordings to complement the sound analysis of the equipment.
The kinds of descriptions Tim and Peter are talking about have whatever value we attribute to them. But I do not think they are of "very limited value." (Post their David enlightenments I understand their predicate philosophy and underlying sonic preferences about natural sound, so their descriptions have a lot of value to me.)
The criticism that these observations are of very limited value because "we do not know how the sound engineer made it sound" is spurious to me. The sound engineer's intention, and whether or not the sound engineer achieved his sonic objective, seem irrelevant to me now. The sound engineer's work is encoded on the LP. By playing the same LP on different systems we can triangulate on what the recording, as captured by the sound engineer and encoded on the vinyl, sounds like. Whatever the sound engineering path to get it there, the engineering rubber meets the sonic road in the physical vinyl.
Other than as a separate matter of interesting sound engineering speculation, I just don't think it matters at this point how the physical vinyl got to where it is. The sound encoded in the physical vinyl is what we are dealing with today. That is what we are trying to understand and to describe today.
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Best way to learn music is not to be an audiophile. Isn't this forum proof enough?
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Nice to know your opinion and have great expertise about music instruments and how they sound.
Again congratulations. It is the first time I listen about such triangulations and I have serious doubts about such de-correlation technique, but I am at WBF to learn. According to you we have a new technique to create an absolute reference for each recording.
No, IMO are dealing with the sound coming from the reproduction of the media amd how to describe it. Anyway, it seems you did not understand my main point, my apologies. Can I suggest that you look at this article on the "Circle of confusion"? Surely the original text is more interesting, but it is rather long.
http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2009/10/audios-circle-of-confusion.html
Not too often. I generally know what I want to listen to. I am album oriented rather than track or playlist oriented.
I am listening to a 24/88 Qobuz version of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. I have this on CD, SACD, original vinyl, and re-released vinyl. I have heard the performance 500 or more times over the last 50 or more years. It always delights me. It was my introduction to Gil Evans. This streamed version is exceptionally good. It is an audiophile presentation of an historic musical masterpiece.
Known since long - "In the end I confused hardware aficionados and real music lovers. Most audiophiles, I was to learn, don’t “do” concerts. It’s part of the religion, but not part of the life." from "Are Audiophiles Music Lovers?" By Keith Yates
Sorry to ask, but where is this all going ?
The study and understanding of audio and of music are two different things. You don't need audiophile equipment to appreciate music, and most audio critics are not audiophiles. You barely need music to make audio equipment and evaluate it (all you need is "sound").
Perhaps there is an "audiophile complex" ? The simplest is to accept whatever flavor and combination of audiophile/musicophile we are, and stop pretending that audio (high fidelity) is somehow important for music understanding and appreciation, because it really isn't, but that does not make audio less interesting and rewarding in and of itself.
The study and understanding of audio and of music are two different things. You don't need audiophile equipment to appreciate music, and most audio critics are not audiophiles. You barely need music to make audio equipment and evaluate it (all you need is "sound").
Perhaps there is an "audiophile complex" ? The simplest is to accept whatever flavor and combination of audiophile/musicophile we are, and stop pretending that audio (high fidelity) is somehow important for music understanding and appreciation, because it really isn't, but that does not make audio less interesting and rewarding in and of itself.
No need to be sorry. We're talking to each other. That can be an end in itself.
I hear no one pretending that audiophilia is a precondition to anything, much less music appreciation. If you dislike or prefer not to describe what you hear from your system, well that's you. Okay?
With apologies for not having read this entire thread-- it is now fairly long- I'll add a couple of things (I don't think I posted to this subject here yet). I haven't invested anywhere near the money, or made the kind of effort in streaming that I did in vinyl playback. That said, I was surprised by the quality of sound I was getting from Qobuz over a very modest digital front end.
My complaints are two: first, no depth of catalog. For example, I'm a fan of Cecil McBee, an unusually melodic bassist who has appeared on a vast number of jazz albums- not as many as Ron Carter, but on more eclectic stuff. If you look for him on Qobuz, you find only a smattering of material- and not even the most famous albums. Now, people may be using streaming as a way to hear new to them music, but I found it shallow in this respect.
Second, unless it is a release that has been clearly identified as "special" you don't know who mastered the thing. There are such big differences in how a recording sounds based on who cut it.
Take Jeff Beck's Truth- I went through a dozen copies, mostly Epics, until I landed a very early Columbia/EMI blue/black label UK. The sound of this record is so vastly different than all the Epics, US, UK or otherwise, that it is like a different record. I expect the same to be true among digital issues.
I have this redbook copy of Black Ice by Wolfert Brederode that is simply stunning- you don't have to think about format, or whether it is hi-rez or whatever. The thing just sounds great and it is a standard ECM CD.
So, I have some files on a drive, a decent CD transport and a couple of DACs. Nothing to brag about, sufficient for my need to listen to a CD or file, and then start mainlining records because that's me. Will I change? I doubt it- not because I'm anti-digital or anti-streaming- I just don't think the incentive is there to do more with it than what it is- a convenience to simply turn on and get music that sounds good. But the shortcomings I found are significant enough for me not to pursue it more deeply at this point. For what little that may be worth to others. Of course, I live in my own bubble, as we all do. Peace upon you.
My complaints are two: first, no depth of catalog. For example, I'm a fan of Cecil McBee, an unusually melodic bassist who has appeared on a vast number of jazz albums- not as many as Ron Carter, but on more eclectic stuff. If you look for him on Qobuz, you find only a smattering of material- and not even the most famous albums. Now, people may be using streaming as a way to hear new to them music, but I found it shallow in this respect.
Second, unless it is a release that has been clearly identified as "special" you don't know who mastered the thing. There are such big differences in how a recording sounds based on who cut it.
Take Jeff Beck's Truth- I went through a dozen copies, mostly Epics, until I landed a very early Columbia/EMI blue/black label UK. The sound of this record is so vastly different than all the Epics, US, UK or otherwise, that it is like a different record. I expect the same to be true among digital issues.
I have this redbook copy of Black Ice by Wolfert Brederode that is simply stunning- you don't have to think about format, or whether it is hi-rez or whatever. The thing just sounds great and it is a standard ECM CD.
So, I have some files on a drive, a decent CD transport and a couple of DACs. Nothing to brag about, sufficient for my need to listen to a CD or file, and then start mainlining records because that's me. Will I change? I doubt it- not because I'm anti-digital or anti-streaming- I just don't think the incentive is there to do more with it than what it is- a convenience to simply turn on and get music that sounds good. But the shortcomings I found are significant enough for me not to pursue it more deeply at this point. For what little that may be worth to others. Of course, I live in my own bubble, as we all do. Peace upon you.
I am v much album, or at least album side oriented, as well. I was curious because the majority of claims I read from others about streaming is access to new music or discovering new music. I guessed that led to a fair amount of channel surfing. Sounds like maybe not in your case.
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