Very nice Peter. Those pics represent nature being both, natural and sublime. Gallery worthy !
Natural Sound
- Thread starter PeterA
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I would never argue against the merits of a low noise floor in the listening room. I've got problems with a refrigerator that is quite audible, and car traffic as my room is right next to and has windows facing a fairly busy road. Like you say, this has made it hard to hear subtle ambient information in the recordings, which is disappointing. I can turn it up enough to make the fridge and the cars outside relatively inaudible but then it's often louder than I want to listen.
Lately I've made a series of changes to my speakers that have improved their frequency response and dispersion. They sound much more natural than I've ever heard them before, which is very satisfying. A wonderful side effect is that I can seemingly separate the music from the background noise even at surprisingly low volume, allowing me to hear ambient information well enough that I no longer feel like I'm missing out on so much. I'm not hearing it all, but I'm hearing enough to let some magic happen. At this point, I think I actually prefer a little background noise most of the time.
20 years ago I used to install car stereos as well as do fabrication and mechanical work on 4x4s and sports cars. In those days car stereos were painful to listen to and you may remember they all had the same form factor and speakers sizes, so it was easier to R&R stereos in cars, and the improvement was very good. These days I feel it's just not worth the effort.
Sound deadening is a big part of high end car stereo and it's possible to remove a vehicle's interior and apply sound deadening material to the point a Honda Civic would be as quiet as a Mercedes. It makes a MASSIVE difference.
I wish we had more folks who professionally engineer recordings comment because background noise is an important consideration in recordings. Those who make studio recordings and electronic music ALWAYS add background noise. Recordings sound odd without any.
Also, there's massive differences between noise that is correlated to the signal or not. Correlated noise is far worse, random noise can be an issue, but it's one that can be solved by turning up the volume. With correlated noise this generally doesn't work.
So once again I think this topic is inseparable from the recording. I think some recordings do produce unnaturally black backgrounds, but in many cases this is an issue with the recording rather than the system. I think you should expect to hear a variety of background noise depending on the recording. I think a low ambient in the room is ALWAYS good, and the recording should provide a natural amount of background noise if it's not a live recording. Live recordings I want to hear exactly as the mics captured the event.
Sound deadening is a big part of high end car stereo and it's possible to remove a vehicle's interior and apply sound deadening material to the point a Honda Civic would be as quiet as a Mercedes. It makes a MASSIVE difference.
I wish we had more folks who professionally engineer recordings comment because background noise is an important consideration in recordings. Those who make studio recordings and electronic music ALWAYS add background noise. Recordings sound odd without any.
Also, there's massive differences between noise that is correlated to the signal or not. Correlated noise is far worse, random noise can be an issue, but it's one that can be solved by turning up the volume. With correlated noise this generally doesn't work.
So once again I think this topic is inseparable from the recording. I think some recordings do produce unnaturally black backgrounds, but in many cases this is an issue with the recording rather than the system. I think you should expect to hear a variety of background noise depending on the recording. I think a low ambient in the room is ALWAYS good, and the recording should provide a natural amount of background noise if it's not a live recording. Live recordings I want to hear exactly as the mics captured the event.
Dave, you make some good points here. It makes me scratch my head about this audiophile language of black backgrounds attributed to components in reviews. We assume they are talking about noise floor, but there seems to be some disagreement. What are reviewers and folks talking about when they describe ever blacker and blacker backgrounds, and Roy Gregory's " the blackness of the soundstage background"? I think this kind of language is misleading at best and corrupting at worst. And yet people chase it because the reviews describe it.
I mentioned that my new system, specifically the Lamm electronics, seems to have lower noise, yet I hear less black backgrounds, precisely because I hear more ambient information from the recording. More information gets through to and out of the speakers. I hear more low level information, not less. This is more like the concert hall experience, not less like it.
I think if I read one more reviewer mention blacker backgrounds, I will avoid reading him and be biased against the gear.
The descriptions people give of sound in correlation to noise in electronics are almost exclusively completely different things. I see almost no actual verifiable correlation. The only clear thing to name is some 2nd harmonic distortion but FEW can identify it easily by ear.
What I'm saying is when people say a "lower noise floor" it's utter bullshit. If anything they often find higher noise floors to sound like less noise to them. Consider that it's nearly exclusive that anything that isn't the signal abberates the music, it cannot be played through speakers that cannot product the frequency so if you're hearing something... you're hearing the abberation.
A low noise floor would sound like the stereo was off, if you want a point of reference. But I think it's a worthless goal.
Can we conclude you still read reviews?
As far as I see it, your veto list will be very large - including our dear Tim.
BTW, I think that I (and perhaps some others) do not see the term "black background" to mean absence of everything, but in opposition to a "dirty background" .
It looks like you got the definition of black backgrounds backwards: "backgrounds" in this context refers to information that inherent noise can mask, and you hear less of the background information as a result. The blacker the backgrounds, the more information one hears as a result; black backgrounds are a good thing. "Black backgrounds" means there is less or no background noise to mask minute information.
The reviewers have it right
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It's certainly complicated as I do think a playback system can do some odd things. It's possible one recording can have a black background on one system but not on another...
I have been thinking about this... I think it's possible that the phenomenon of black background and pinpoint imaging are related. Are you familiar with a noise gate? When you amplify an instrument you generally use a noise gate so low-level unintentional noise from a hand brushing the string, the musician adjusting his clothing or instrument, getting a drink of water, etc. are not amplified. Your instrument or mic needs to create a voltage above what the noise gate is set at to make a sound.
In the cases I've heard this phenomenon of pinpoint/black, the system is weak in soundstaging, which depends on low-level information. If the low-level information is gone you'll still get solid images, and with a lot of low-level info stripped from the playback it's less distracting and hence you get pinpoint imaging and a black background. So I've considered the possibility some electronics may act as a noise gate. It's already been mentioned that a stripping away of harmonic information in associated, but this would include spatial information as well. Theoretically, I think this makes sense but would be hard to confirm. It would be hard because you'd have to find systems to measure that have these somewhat subjective qualities.
It may be possible to test components individually to see if signal in = signal out at very low voltages. It's also not improbably that certain solid state devices may have some amount of a diode effect, which is the basis of a noise gate. It doesn't allow current to flow until a certain voltage has been reached. I wonder if some transistor devices have some qualities of a diode...
Steve williams
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Not so sure I agree with this as I understand where Peter is coming from as I too made the trek to Cedar City 5-6 years ago where I spent a week . What I personally discovered in my system where I used cables from a manufacturer as well as isolation boxes from the same manufacturer and everyone who used the same remarked how sound emerged from blackness and disappeared into blackness. It was mesmerizing to me until David convinced me to remove these cables and boxes and listen again. What was immediately obvious was that there was suddenly a much greater feeling of presence, a "you are there moment" and it was IMO all due to the return of ambient sound. Without ambient sound there is no feeling of presence.The "natural sound" that David always commented on is sound where nothing is added and nothing taken away.....ie no coloration and no distortion. .....everything is there and nothing is exaggerated. I totally understand Peter's postulates
Isolation devices can have some very odd effects! I consider interconnect cables in particular a make or break part of the system as they can smooth out a ton of ambient information, so your results are not surprising.
I use soundstage quality as a main indicator in judging if something is a real improvement and not just a lateral move. Very much like the way you described improvements from the center stage footers when they 1st came out. I think ambient information must exceed a threshold to be able to trick your brain into suspending disbelief and providing the "you are there" experience, so there's kind of a tipping point, but then there's also a wide spectrum of how much ambient info is presented within that area. I go so far as to say this aspect of system performance is the largest driver of listener preference, moreso than even frequency response, but it does overlap with a lot of other things like smooth off-axis response to some degree. IMO that 's the thing that SETs and efficient drivers get right, while they sacrifice technical perfection to achieve it, the result is simply more satisfying and fun to listen to.
This is what a "black" or "dark" background is supposed to be (mean), as has been posted numerous times here; nothing added, nothing taken away. The less a system adds to the sound, the "blacker" the background. If the term is used to mean something else, it is not correct (based on the original meaning from the early days of audiophilia - J. Gordon Holt, Harry Pearson, etc). Let the information in the recording come through.
Right, but what if there are 2 different things going on here... One a system that simply has a low noise floor and another that wipes away low level information to achieve a seemingly low noise floor, but it kills the music in the process?
Steve, you describe very well what I had difficulty explaining. The Lamm gear I now have, has an extremely low noise floor plus an extremely high level of resolution. The result is anything but a blackness to backgrounds. There is no absence of anything except artifacts. One hears more ambient and low level information from the recording, and it give you presence, and a sense of the space in which the musicians are performing. This contributes in large part to the realism. It is a key element of natural sound.
But why would anyone want the latter? If it bothers you that much, there are digital audio editors offering a variety of (free or inexpensive) plug-ins to accomplish that, and after a lot of enthusiasm (remember NoNoise?) in the early days of digital they are now used mostly by hobbyists to work on poor recordings.
Sure, you like some noise as well; it has an effect, one manifestation of which is greater presence and forwardness. It also sounds like you lost that mesmerizing background blackness. If you don't like black backgrounds, I guess you don't. "Natural" sound is another overloaded term used in here and elsewhere; Peter keeps referring to it in terms of diffuse sound - well, diffuse sound is diffuse sound, and "natural" sound has quite a number of attributes associated with it. The presence or lack of diffusion does not make the sound more natural or less natural either; it just makes it more or less diffuse. And what the microphones pick up - typically situated close to instruments - relate very little to what one hears in one's own living room with his guests just speaking and talking to each other.
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Tasos, I respectfully disagree. People seem to be focusing on "blackness" as an attribute. I presume you refer to a lowering of noise. If that is indeed the case, and it is actually what the reviewers mean, why do they not simply write that a component has lower noise? Describing it as a "black background", or worse as Roy Gregory describes it in the quote Fransisco chose to share with us as "the blackness of the soundstage background", is nonsensical to me. How can a soundstage be black, unless it is a black box theater? No concert hall I have ever been in exhibits this characteristic.
People have quote the low ambient noise levels of certain halls, but have restrained from calling that a black background. No one has yet admitted to hearing black backgrounds when listening to live music in a concert hall. Why would we want to emulate that? Why do reviewers describe it like that?
I focus on the word "background". What is it? For me, it is the environment in which the musicians are performing. Unless it is way overdamped and very absorptive, we never hear an absence of sound, which is what "blackness" implies to me. We hear the waining energy from the musicians, the instruments, the air of the space, the atmosphere. If this is captured on the recording, I want to hear it through my system. It adds to the realism. I also want to hear very low level musical information. The decay, the subtle stuff. It is almost always there, unless the recording engineer eliminated it.
The background sets the stage. It is part of the experience. We hear it live, and should have some semblance of it in our listening rooms. Some components rob the signal of this low level information. For lack of better understanding, they are low resolution. When this information, high resolution is lacking or absent, other attributes get enhanced. This is appealing to some. Contrasts increase, "details" are pronounced, effects are enhanced. One is tricked into thinking he hears "more". It can be exciting, something new. This effect gets described in reviews. It is now something to strive for and chase.
Black backgrounds allow details and low level information to emerge and be heard. I reject this sentiment outright. It is low noise and high resolution that allow low level information, maximum information, presented naturally, to emerge. I don't want to hear "black". I want to hear what the musicians and instruments and the environment in which they are playing are presenting us.
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