Sublime sound , Natural sound , Horns Sets where it basically comes down to is that real Listening to music is once again reserved for the Elites .
The peasants have the short end of the stick once again.
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Natural Sound
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Sublime sound , Natural sound , Horns Sets where it basically comes down to is that real Listening to music is once again reserved for the Elites .
The peasants have the short end of the stick once again.
Not only does it influence it - it is entirely created by the microphone placement (and microphone used).
My personal preference is mono recording, with a single microphone - but I'm "old school".
In any venue, good recordings can provide a sense of the whole performance and the individual performers.
I judge a recording by the end result (see above comment), not by the hypothetical way in which the music would have been perceived had I been there during the recording.
You are over-thinking things. Clarity, articulation, presence, all make it easier to lose yourself into the performance.
Sublime sound , Natural sound , Horns Sets where it basically comes down to is that real Listening to music is once again reserved for the Elites .
The peasants have the short end of the stick once again.
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Dont forget Turbocharged imagination for suspension ..
Sublime sound , Natural sound , Horns Sets where it basically comes down to is that real Listening to music is once again reserved for the Elites .
The peasants have the short end of the stick once again.
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And you are like the knight in Monty Python who refuses to give up at every 'flesh wound'
Sublime sound , Natural sound , Horns Sets where it basically comes down to is that real Listening to music is once again reserved for the Elites .
The peasants have the short end of the stick once again.
Not at all Andro. Bonzo is simply trying to make SETs and horns great again.
Seriously, all you are doing is declaring publicly, loudly, and repeatedly, that you do not agree with the approach I have taken and described in my system threads. You follow a different approach and design your own speakers. From that approach, different results follow. By the way, you forgot to mention deplorable system videos in your complaint.
No one else is responsible for you thinking you are stuck with the short end of the stick. That is your own imagination. Instead of harping on about other people’s values and approaches as somehow “elite”, why don’t you start a new thread and argue in favor of your values and the approach you are taking.
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Can a transistor radio sound as close to the sound of a violin as your system? Or does it depend on who's listening?
No - I am suggesting people use good recordings and good music to evaluate equipment. Often, they are crappy music. I get that if someone is posting on the forum himself. Because I am so much into videos, I get PMs and whatsapps with videos of people's equpiment, apart from the ones that you see posted by others on the forum. Those too are often crappy, which means those asking me to check despite listening to my videos and reading my posts don't get the message. I am ok with those giving two hoots for what I write to ignore it.
It seems people still drink the koolaid that everything is subjective and you only need to use music you have liked before to evaluate, rather than thinking they need to progress on musical pieces, performances, and recordings, in which case their evaluation style will change. The audiophile music is so innate in the system that they cannot get themselves to change, it is too much effort.
So when you say:
'Putting it simply, each of us can target and achieve our own subjective and idiosyncratic sonic illusion -- a sound which may be wholly convincing to us individually, but unconvincing to others.'
You're saying an individual who finds a transistor radio more convincing than your system just has different tastes to you rather than being half deaf?
Agree ..!
Do you use music you dislike to evaluate .?
Audio systems are personal people should and will use the music they like , played back at the level they enjoy as their method to evaluate, same as you do. It also goes beyond just playback , Audiophiles tend to make decisions based on looks , feel , science and pride of ownership to name a few , because the right combination pleases them, its mainly the differences between an audiophile and Musicphile ..
Videophiles have a different dissonance ..
You could record on location. Good recording equipment isn't any more expensive than good home audio equipment. The knowledge of how things actually sound though is invaluable! With a good recording you made (probably also something you can play over and over again) you have a great tool for knowing a system's strengths and weaknesses.
The longer the experience of music is handled by the limbic systems the better. IMO that is the goal of any equipment designer
He's not over-thinking things. If your brain detects there's something wrong with the presentation it moves the music processing to the cerebral cortex. Clarity, articulation, presence.. plus a bunch of other things are what can keep the processing in the limbic system.
Can you reference published scientific research and associated papers to this effect ?
Yes for sure, people talk about hearing and certainly the initial functional hearing ability is fairly easy to establish but then ultimate listening abilities and the accuracy and or quality of people’s perception and the range of perceptual states used in listening and perceiving (rather than just hearing) is a whole lot less easy to establish let alone qualify or validate.
Many like to insist that perception is well established and I can only suggest someone heads on over to Stockholm and collect your Nobel prize… from my informal understanding there is no agreed final model of perception and consciousness and this is currently quite beyond the remit of science. It’s still a frontier we’ve yet to breach if anyone wants to claim it from a proper science/neuroscience perspective. Theories abound but no-one has got the one model rules all guensey yet.
Very much agree that there are great differences in priorities and some of us share some of those priorities… a better understanding of these can be drawn in part from looking at the various positions people take on gear types. Shared preferences point to shared perceptions and values.
I can only suggest that people coming at this from a range of perceptual perspectives and individual experiences with different built hierarchies and their individual balance of whole synthesis in listening as opposed to areas of analysis is the core that I believe leads to building very different preferences for gear.
The differing experiences creating different values and the pattern of reaffirming of experiences and different routines and the embedding of defaults in perceiving (and ways of perceiving) is likely a chicken and egg proposition… expectation and retention of experience building the current state and type of pattern of phenomena at that time for individual perception. We are always a work in progress.
We focus from previous experiences to lean into listening and appreciating certain aspects and qualities over other aspects in our listening… this is often considered as likely establishing patterns in the varying modes of usage of the brain as well as a varying mixed region activation and the following dispersal of the much loved chemical rewards.
The pattern has a tendency to be re-affirming and values and preferences for specific perceptions builds on each other (until they don’t… and perhaps that’s when you stop linear upgrading and undergo more revolution rather than gentle evolution). This is a sign of transformational learning rather than small change learning.
I’d just suggest that perceiving something and drawing evaluations and then being able to turn that around and communicate that assessment are two different phases in operation… someone can be good at perception but struggle to write about it and these are grounded in different perceptual modalities.
The first in some form of aural evaluation (perception of sounds including music and words) and then the second phase in the ability in read/write function to communicate that via written posting.
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You do have a way with words Tim ! You are a great example of why written words reviews still have their merits, you make those you tubers look like clumsy clutses trying to sell us vacuum cleaners.
Thank you Milan -- much appreciated.
Ron Resnick said:
Can I have some of what you are on?
I am obviously kidding but.....am I? Sounds should not change or vary to be convincing.
They either are or they are not. Palpable....it is or it isn't.
Tom
I"m not sure there is much of a distinction between what you refer to as phases. Isn't "perceiving something and drawing evaluations", for the most part, using the same abilities to formulate concepts (notions) as is used to communicate them? To do one well is to do the other -- if only for yourself.
You can wax poetic about these things, but at the end of the day, either you have heard something, or you have not. Very few systems can convey "presence" to the degree that some can, and when you experience it, you know it. You don't need to be an audiophile to recognize it (my girlfriend, and a few friends, who are not audiophiles, came to the same conclusion as me listening to the Altec 755A), and you certainly don't need to have a vast experience of live music either.
When you do hear it, it feels like the stars have aligned. Salvatore talks about it in a way which I feel is honest and I don't doubt he has experienced it with the Sadurni speakers (in his room, with his system).
The Altec 755A is quite unique, but it is an old, very fragile, speaker. There is a reason why those who have heard one (in good condition, with a good system) are so enamored with it. The degree of realism (though that term may be misleading) is uncanny, unlike anything I had heard before, irrespective of cost. The other Altec models (ex: 755C) do not have that same magic either. Unfortunately, it is very limited in other ways. The sound is addictive, and I ended up selling mine to free myself from its spell
I will also add that hearing what this speaker can do has led me to realize that many costly speakers are simply not worth it to me - but that's a personal point of view.
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Most curious , might you advise us as to the mechanism with which your amplification designs have been developed and manufactured so that they seemingly induce this intrinsically corporeal effect upon the listener ? ( Whether they like it or not ) beyond the palpable norms of keeping THD around 1% or lower and tailoring the harmonic structure of an amplifiers more toward the Even rather than The Odd ?
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