Natural Sound

[hopkins]

Funny you should post this. The last concert I attended was a big band in a small club. I was at the bar really close to the brass section and the volume was very high at times. I partially inserted some foam earplugs in my ears on some numbers. I could hear everything, slightly muted, but when I closed my eyes I had trouble locating each soloist on the (real) stage.

Long story short, there is no incompatibility between precise instrument placement and natural live sound, on the contrary...

 

[Mike Lavigne]

In my opinion, very precise, pinpoint imaging, usually with outlines, is an artifact, and to me it sounds artificial.

Peter, who describes imaging "usually with outlines"?

where does that come from?

i see this used in a negative way, but i don't recall imaging fans using that term. but maybe i'm just not paying attention. educate me. i just don't see it.

'outlines'........or.......'cookie cutter'...... to me infers a cartoon type idea. not real. agree there with you. but who is bringing these terms up? it's like a label attached to a type of gear or speakers, but not actually a real thing, just a negative caricature by those seeing things differently.

pinpoint imaging does not infer 'outlines' or 'cookie cutter'. maybe that's you putting those together.

 

[morricab]

I posted the following in a different thread, but want it here as it reflects my thinking on the topic of natural sound:



Live music is my reference, and the reference for many here, but not all.

In my opinion, very precise, pinpoint imaging, usually with outlines, is an artifact, and to me it sounds artificial. Some gear and combinations of components and acoustic treatment set up in particular ways will create this effect. Sure, some people like that. It gives the illusion that someone is there in the room with you, but it sounds fake to me. When I close my eyes when listening to someone speak or when listening to live acoustic instruments, I do not hear this effect. Therefore, I do not want to recreate it in my listening room. My goal is a more natural presentation, reminding me of what I hear live.

I am talking about the origin of the sound, the location of the musician with his instrument as it is presented before me. My focus is the sound that the musician or singer makes with his or her instrument. The musician himself is not making a sound. We should not see/hear/imagine a pinpoint image of the musician or his instrument but rather the location from which the energy originates and then expands into the space. Is that precise? To me, it is about the spatial relationships between the instruments up on stage and how the energy moves outward and around and is reflected. I can tell that the violins are to the left of the piano and cello and that the timpani is further back in center and where the brass section and wind instruments are. The triangle may pierce through the mix and be on the left side, but where exactly is hard to tell, especially if you sit further back in the hall. Of course Ella is sitting there right next to Joe Pass in front of me in my room, but even then, it is not pinpoint and certainly not outlined. I hear her voice and his guitar. I hear the moment the sound is created and roughly where, but no pinpoint and no outline. The scale is believable and their relationship within the space is convincing. I can imagine them there singing and playing, but it is only the origin of the sound in space as captured by the recording and presented by the system in the room. Pinpoint imaging also implies to me at least a very small and precise point in space. Hearing a piano or cello or voice singing is nothing like that.

Yes, we all certainly have different approaches, observations, and goals.

Boston symphony hall last week just prior to the beginning of the program. When the musicians started to play, I could see pinpoint imaging. But when I closed my eyes, I did not hear it. The right most cello is 3 feet in front of the bass player. That is pinpoint imaging. There is no way I could discern that distance with my eyes closed. But I could hear a wave of low frequency energy coming from the left middle front of the stage and the two instrument sections playing very distinctly. The timbres were unique and the spatial relationship was clear but there was nothing pinpoint about it.

During Tchaikovsky’s piano Concerto, I could clearly see the pianist’s two arms rising above the keyboard, with fingers hidden. I could clearly hear 10 fingers on two hands playing different keys. Although I am certain the two hands attached to 10 fingers we’re only playing inches apart, I could not tell that by simply listening to the sound. What I heard was the energy leaving the soundboard to fill that great hall with beautiful music and the piano in the middle of the string sections and in front of the brass with the tympani even further back. There was an occasional triangle strike. Its energy pierced through the fabric, clear and high from somewhere behind the violins and to the left of the piano.

The sound from that orchestra simply did not have any pinpoint imaging.

Try getting seats close to the stage…very different experience and closer to what is on most recordings

 

[PeterA]

Try getting seats close to the stage…very different experience and closer to what is on most recordings

My usual seats are seventh row center orchestra. The sound is much more immediate when sitting up close. And the scale is usually much bigger. But the interesting thing is, in terms of imaging, that is what I think of as being able to locate the source of the sound, the middle of the orchestra is what I get from a lot of my recordings in my room. The recording perspective for the listener seemed a bit more like what I hear in my room when I sit further back in the concert hall. And the three audio buddies who are with me seemed to agree.

This is where immediacy and direct sound up front is like the recording but the perspective and sense of ambience and balance is more like a few rows further the back. Up close I don’t hear much reflected sound, but I do on my recordings. Further back, I hear the reflected sound and scale and listening perspective from my recordings but not the immediacy and direct sound and detail from being up close. I don’t hear the bow on the strings or the hammer strikes of the piano as much further back, but I do get that on some recordings.

Perhaps by “imaging” people are really trying to describe listening perspective. Regardless, I never have the sensation that sound or an image is a very precise tiny spot. A friend refers to that as a pin prick.

 

[PeterA]

Peter, who describes imaging "usually with outlines"?

where does that come from?

Mike, I don’t know where it comes from. It’s a general sense I have picked up from various discussions on this topic over the years. The notion of precise imaging with dimensions and separation in space. It seems to be used in a visual sense when describing someone like Ella Fitzgerald in your living room singing for you. Scale and dimension and size. To me, that implies an outline of an image. None of that makes sense with the concept of “pinpoint“. I think it’s another example of poor audio file language being confusing. When kingsrule disagreed with one of my posts in the other thread, I asked him to define pinpoint imaging for me. Perhaps AudioGod should also define it. It would be helpful if those who use the phrase in a positive sense and try to achieve it in their listening rooms would tell us what they mean.

 

[hopkins]

Mike, I don’t know where it comes from. It’s a general sense I have picked up from various discussions on this topic over the years. The notion of precise imaging with dimensions and separation in space. It seems to be used in a visual sense when describing someone like Ella Fitzgerald in your living room singing for you. Scale and dimension and size. To me, that implies an outline of an image. None of that makes sense with the concept of “pinpoint“. I think it’s another example of poor audio file language being confusing. When kingsrule disagreed with one of my posts in the other thread, I asked him to define pinpoint imaging for me. Perhaps AudioGod should also define it. It would be helpful if those who use the phrase in a positive sense and try to achieve it in their listening rooms would tell us what they mean.

Take a (real) mono track, play it on a single speaker, then play that same track on both speakers and adjust the speaker placement/listening position until you achieve the same sound than with one speaker. The sound will be coming from the center, between the two speakers. Then play a stereo track and you will have pinpoint instrument placement in a soundstage formed by the outer edge of the speakers and extending to the front and back of the speakers.

 

[PeterA]

Take a (real) mono track, play it on a single speaker, then play that same track on both speakers and adjust the speaker placement/listening position until you achieve the same sound than with one speaker. The sound will be coming from the center, between the two speakers. Then play a stereo track and you will have pinpoint instrument placement in a soundstage formed by the outer edge of the speakers and extending to the front and back of the speakers.

I have excellent instrument placement in a sound stage in my system now but it’s not constricted to the edges of my speaker or speaker dimensions in terms of depth.

My speakers were actually developed in the mono era. David spent 20 years trying to find a matching speaker of the same version for a stereo pair. Being corner horns, the presentation is a bit different. The images are projected out in front of the speakers. The soundstage varies from recording to recording but occasionally the depth is beyond my front wall and the width is beyond the sidewalls. And sometimes it is just two performers in front of me between the speakers and slightly forward or backward depending on the context and recording.

My ability to know the location of the instrument creating the sound within the sound field is very good. For me it is about being able to locate the origin of the sound relative to the other sounds and the context in which the instruments are being played. And it’s about feeling as though I am in the presence of the musicians.

 

[RCanelas]

I'm conflicted on this topic.

On the one hand, if it is in the recording, it should be surfaceable by the system. A system can't 'force' or create out of thin air etched imaging if that information doesn't exist in the first place.

On the other hand, excessively outlined sound sources are clearly a record engineering artifact, as it doesn't represent the original sound field, or any natural sound field for that matter. It is an emulation, reconstructed, synthetic space, a bad mixing choice.

But if it is in the recording... I'm not sure how I could design a system that relieves that artifact without leaving the same fingerprint in records that are just fine or otherwise extraordinary.

 

[PeterA]

I'm conflicted on this topic.

On the one hand, if it is in the recording, it should be surfaceable by the system. A system can't 'force' or create out of thin air etched imaging if that information doesn't exist in the first place.

On the other hand, excessively outlined sound sources are clearly a record engineering artifact, as it doesn't represent the original sound field, or any natural sound field for that matter. It is an emulation, reconstructed, synthetic space, a bad mixing choice.

But if it is in the recording... I'm not sure how I could design a system that relieves that artifact without leaving the same fingerprint in records that are just fine or otherwise extraordinary.

Thank you for this post. I was struggling to answer Mike‘s question with some specificity about outlines and images, but you mentioned that very thing including the adjective “etched“. This all goes to a general sense I have of what some people mean when they describe precise imaging from a system. I also read, perhaps from Microstrip, that the visual cues from listening to live music imprint onto our imagination imaging that we like to hear from a stereo system. “It helps with the illusion“ and makes it seem more real.

I understand all of that and except it as a goal worth pursuing for some audiophiles. I simply started discussing this topic because I went to a concert the other night with some friends and we had a discussion about imaging as part of our listening experience. The qualifier “pinpoint“ inevitably arose.

 

[R Johnson]

This is my normal view of the Chicago Symphony from the Gallery in Orchestra Hall. I like to be able to SEE all of the musicians. (I use a 10x monocular from time to time.) I really don't like main floor seats, but they are excellent for concerts with a vocal or string soloist.

 

[RCanelas]

Thank you for this post. I was struggling to answer Mike‘s question with some specificity about outlines and images, but you mentioned that very thing including the adjective “etched“. This all goes to a general sense I have of what some people mean when they describe precise imaging from a system. I also read, perhaps from Microstrip, that the visual cues from listening to live music imprint onto our imagination imaging that we like to hear from a stereo system. “It helps with the illusion“ and makes it seem more real.

I understand all of that and except it as a goal worth pursuing for some audiophiles. I simply started discussing this topic because I went to a concert the other night with some friends and we had a discussion about imaging as part of our listening experience. The qualifier “pinpoint“ inevitably arose.

This is a topic that also pops up in various of my circles, but the truth is that I always end stumped with this apparent dichotomy. It's not a true issue, the answer is almost a simple matter of formal logic, but that doesn't leave me any more satisfied. I don't like what the answer implies so I keep resisting it.

 

[PeterA]

This is my normal view of the Chicago Symphony from the Gallery in Orchestra Hall. I like to be able to SEE all of the musicians. (I use a 10x monocular from time to time.) I really don't like main floor seats, but they are excellent for concerts with a vocal or string soloist.

Those are very similar to the seats I went to as a kid when my parents took me into the Chicago Symphony to hear Giulini and Solti. It was a long 2 hour drive from Rockford Illinois for a young kid and I tried not to doze off.

 

[Mike Lavigne]

Mike, I don’t know where it comes from. It’s a general sense I have picked up from various discussions on this topic over the years. The notion of precise imaging with dimensions and separation in space. It seems to be used in a visual sense when describing someone like Ella Fitzgerald in your living room singing for you. Scale and dimension and size. To me, that implies an outline of an image. None of that makes sense with the concept of “pinpoint“. I think it’s another example of poor audio file language being confusing. When kingsrule disagreed with one of my posts in the other thread, I asked him to define pinpoint imaging for me. Perhaps AudioGod should also define it. It would be helpful if those who use the phrase in a positive sense and try to achieve it in their listening rooms would tell us what they mean.

i think you should ditch the use of 'outlines' or 'cookie cutter' relative to your position that it's artificial. what's the difference between that and how you describe the same phenomena?

My ability to know the location of the instrument creating the sound within the sound field is very good. For me it is about being able to locate the origin of the sound relative to the other sounds and the context in which the instruments are being played. And it’s about feeling as though I am in the presence of the musicians.

.
i realize you rationalize that it's different, but it's a flavor of the same thing really. just that one gets 'natural sound' approval, the other is second rate. poppycock.

certainly every recording and system is going to vary a bit. and it's personal how much we value this sound field recording information.

 

[morricab]

My usual seats are seventh row center orchestra. The sound is much more immediate when sitting up close. And the scale is usually much bigger. But the interesting thing is, in terms of imaging, that is what I think of as being able to locate the source of the sound, the middle of the orchestra is what I get from a lot of my recordings in my room. The recording perspective for the listener seemed a bit more like what I hear in my room when I sit further back in the concert hall. And the three audio buddies who are with me seemed to agree.

This is where immediacy and direct sound up front is like the recording but the perspective and sense of ambience and balance is more like a few rows further the back. Up close I don’t hear much reflected sound, but I do on my recordings. Further back, I hear the reflected sound and scale and listening perspective from my recordings but not the immediacy and direct sound and detail from being up close. I don’t hear the bow on the strings or the hammer strikes of the piano as much further back, but I do get that on some recordings.

Perhaps by “imaging” people are really trying to describe listening perspective. Regardless, I never have the sensation that sound or an image is a very precise tiny spot. A friend refers to that as a pin prick.

No, when I sit close to the performers then I get a clear spatial image of where everyone sits or stands in 3D. It is not vague or fuzzy. It is much more like I hear on recordings. Mid or back hall it is quite imprecise and there is a lot of the hall in the sound…you shoukd be able to hear this.

 

[PeterA]

i think you should ditch the use of 'outlines' or 'cookie cutter' relative to your position that it's artificial. what's the difference between that and how you describe the same phenomena?

You actually introduced “cookie cutter“ into the conversation for some unknown reason. For me this is not a visual thing because I don’t see sound. Describing something you hear in visual terms I find confusing.

It is not clear to me that we are discussing the same phenomenon. I am describing the ability to locate where the sound originates by listening.

.

i realize you rationalize that it's different, but it's a flavor of the same thing really. just that one gets 'natural sound' approval, the other is second rate. poppycock.

certainly every recording and system is going to vary a bit.

I agree that every recording and system is going to vary a bit. I’m not talking about any kind of natural sound approval. What a strange comment. Nothing is second rate or poppycock, just the result of different values and goals. I am describing my listening experience when attending a live concert.

 

[morricab]

This is a topic that also pops up in various of my circles, but the truth is that I always end stumped with this apparent dichotomy. It's not a true issue, the answer is almost a simple matter of formal logic, but that doesn't leave me any more satisfied. I don't like what the answer implies so I keep resisting it.

If you sit about where the microphones would be then it makes more sense.

 

[PeterA]

No, when I sit close to the performers then I get a clear spatial image of where everyone sits or stands in 3D. It is not vague or fuzzy. It is much more like I hear on recordings. Mid or back hall it is quite imprecise and there is a lot of the hall in the sound…you shoukd be able to hear this.

I agree that sitting further back when he hears more whole sounds and less precision. Less immediacy and detail also.

When sitting close I also get a clearer sense of where The sound is originating and where the instruments are located, but not so much in depth. The scale is also much larger and the sound more vibrant and immediate.

I actually discussed with my friends who attended the concert that’s somewhere around the 12th row might sound most like what we get from our systems kind of combining the immediacy and detail with a slightly more distant listening perspective hi with some hall information as I hear on many of my classical recordings.

Then there is the whole experience with chamber recordings of string quartets or piano and singer. And the whole subject of energy in the space. I find this is a little bit easier to reproduce realistically in my listening room.

 

[morricab]

You actually introduced “cookie cutter“ into the conversation for some unknown reason. For me this is not a visual thing because I don’t see sound. Describing something you hear in visual terms I find confusing.

It is not clear to me that we are discussing the same phenomenon. I am describing the ability to locate where the sound originates by listening.



I agree that every recording and system is going to vary a bit. I’m not talking about any kind of natural sound approval. What a strange comment. Nothing is second rate or poppycock, just the result of different values and goals. I am describing my listening experience when attending a live concert.

Sorry but imaging and soundstage as well as ambient space are all visual aspects of sound reproduction. Your mind is reconstructing the space and instruments/singers from the spatial information on the recordings. Visual references are also easier to understand for humans because we are so visual by evolution.

 

[PeterA]

Sorry but imaging and soundstage as well as ambient space are all visual aspects of sound reproduction. Your mind is reconstructing the space and instruments/singers from the spatial information on the recordings. Visual references are also easier to understand for humans because we are so visual by evolution.

And yet when I listen in my room I don’t see pin points of sound nor an image of a singer. I hear sounds which remind me of listening to live instruments. It’s fine if our language describes that invisible thing as an image. It’s really the other words that I have trouble with: pinpoint, etch, outlines. These are overly visual to me. I understand scale dimension and presence which I can more easily relate to when listening to live music and recorded music. I think it’s very difficult to describe what we hear. Perhaps that’s why not very many people attempt it.

 

[Mike Lavigne]

You actually introduced “cookie cutter“ into the conversation for some unknown reason. For me this is not a visual thing because I don’t see sound. Describing something you hear in visual terms I find confusing.

you introduced 'outlines'. i added 'cookie cutter' since that term is used to indicate the same negative idea. outlines = cookie cutter. both demeaning terms.

It is not clear to me that we are discussing the same phenomenon. I am describing the ability to locate where the sound originates by listening.

so is everyone else speaking about locating sounds in the reproduced soundstage.

I agree that every recording and system is going to vary a bit. I’m not talking about any kind of natural sound approval. What a strange comment. Nothing is second rate or poppycock, just the result of different values and goals. I am describing my listening experience when attending a live concert.

what i copied was you responding to Hopkins describing your system experience, not you describing your live concert experience.