State of the industry - Roy Gregory Editorial

[Kingrex]

I have landed enough King Salmon right ofg Shillshole this year I'm getting sick of eating it. I'm cooking a slab of Silver this morning to make into Salmon Salad.

For me Shillshole is a 5 mile drive and no more than 7 miles boating. Last trip we had 20 lb of fish and I use 3.5 gallons fuel. Freah King line caught is $30 a lb. So $600 of fish for $20 of gas. Not bad. And my friend gave me $30 for gas.

 

[Kingrex]

I forgot to check the fishes gut to see if there was a phono cartridge in it.

 

[microstrip]

The question I would have is if that string quartet were recorded outside in the forest, whether or not the stereo system and set up then created a sense of pinpoint imaging or image outlines. I’ve had gear that created or enhanced these audiophile effects. It is not what I hear in a room, a concert hall, or outside.

View attachment 97332

Do you also listen with closed eyes outside?

These "audiophile artifacts" just help us emulating the real experience using a conceptually limited sound reproduction system named stereo. Do you know from where the word stereo sound is known to come?

 

[Mike Lavigne]

I have landed enough King Salmon right ofg Shillshole this year I'm getting sick of eating it. I'm cooking a slab of Silver this morning to make into Salmon Salad.

For me Shillshole is a 5 mile drive and no more than 7 miles boating. Last trip we had 20 lb of fish and I use 3.5 gallons fuel. Freah King line caught is $30 a lb. So $600 of fish for $20 of gas. Not bad. And my friend gave me $30 for gas.

agree that the local Seattle fishery is healthy. and my son lives on a sailboat at Shilshoal, so right there.

people fish for all sorts of reasons, one of which is to eat. my fishing trip is a business trip in a spectacular setting, shop talk will be a big part, and i will likely give away the catch to employees. still a fun place to have a meeting.

 

[Ron Resnick]

leaving this afternoon for 2 days of salmon fishing on the Columbia River Estuary (google Bouy 10 fishing).

not exactly isolated (4 plus a guide in the 28 foot boat)......2000-3000 boats at a time....but it's a big river. and there are whales, sea lions and millions of birds too.

Have fun!!!

 

[PeterA]

Do you also listen with closed eyes outside?

These "audiophile artifacts" just help us emulating the real experience using a conceptually limited sound reproduction system named stereo. Do you know from where the word stereo sound is known to come?

Yes Francisco. I actually did close my eyes at that wedding while listening to that quartet to hear if I could observe a difference. It helps to focus ones attention and eliminate distractions. Just a short exercise to learn some thing. I was one of the few guests who actually sat in front of the quartet and listened in a focused way for a while.

I don’t know about audiofile artifacts. I wrote audiofile effect which is what I think it is when components or a system somehow seems to enhance or otherwise alter the information in the grooves which you can sense when things start to sound the same from recording to recording and don’t sound like what you hear listening live to actual musicians.

I am also starting to listen to some mono recordings. They can sound fantastic. No, I don’t know the origin of the words stereo sound. I have read a little bit about the experiments in the 1930s trying to get the sound in a theater to line up with where the actors were moving on the screen.

 

[Kingrex]

I would not say its healthy. Salmon were measured in the 10s of millions. Now they are measured in the thousands. As in, under 10,000. Out fishery is near total collapse.

By and large the greatest damage is done by hydro power. The Columbia alone has 211 dams and the whole watershed over 400. When Roosevelt came and looked at the Columbia, it is written he said, "we are going to destroy this entire river. But we will bring industry and wealth."

I use to give $5000 a year to Long Live The Kings. A salmon recovery group. Their efforts are useless so I stopped. Seattle will stop at nothing to drive growth and density. Wildlife such as Salmon can not survive human growth. Crows, rats and European Grey Squirrel seem the only species that love humans. Maybe deer too. They love a good house shrub.

 

[microstrip]

Yes Francisco. I actually did close my eyes at that wedding while listening to that quartet to hear if I could observe a difference. It helps to focus ones attention and eliminate distractions. Just a short exercise to learn some thing. I was one of the few guests who actually sat in front of the quartet and listened in a focused way for a while.

Curious that you consider the musicians playing and visual ambience a distraction - it is probably something that separates our way of listening to music. But the point is that visual memory will persist even after you close your eyes - independently of physical waves you will go on seeing the instruments in place.

I don’t know about audiofile artifacts. I wrote audiofile effect which is what I think it is when components or a system somehow seems to enhance or otherwise alter the information in the grooves which you can sense when things start to sound the same from recording to recording and don’t sound like what you hear listening live to actual musicians.

Interesting that you refer to altering the information in grooves. Out gear intentionally alters it - it is measurable. And does it systematically - high-end stereo reproduction needs it. Why do yo think that a Lamm M2Ref sounds very different from a ML3? Because it alters information differently. we can pick which we prefer.

I am also starting to listen to some mono recordings. They can sound fantastic. No, I don’t know the origin of the words stereo sound. I have read a little bit about the experiments in the 1930s trying to get the sound in a theater to line up with where the actors were moving on the screen.

Did you try listening to just one speaker?

From wikipedia The word stereophonic derives from the Greek ??????? (stereós, "firm, solid")[1] + ???? (ph?n?, "sound, tone, voice")[2] and it was coined in 1927 by Western Electric, by analogy with the word stereoscopic.

Stereoscopic was a visual term, implying 3D images. A lot of non standard tricks are needed to create a 3D soundstage, and they are non standard. It is why the dream of an unaltered information is a myth.

 

[MarcelNL]

was it WE, I read Alan Blumlein invented stereo as we know it, but others before him experimented with it;

Stereophonic sound - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[PeterA]

Curious that you consider the musicians playing and visual ambience a distraction - it is probably something that separates our way of listening to music. But the point is that visual memory will persist even after you close your eyes - independently of physical waves you will go on seeing the instruments in place.

Curious indeed. I think I’m the only one who has listened to music sometimes with eyes closed and sometimes when I simply want to create a more similar condition between live and recorded. I’m always going about things in a strange and curious way to try to learn something. I think I’m nuts. It’s how I began to understand for myself the visual aspects of sounds.

I once saw some musicians play with their eyes closed and even a conductor. I’ve seen other audience members listen to the BSO with their eyes closed and they were not asleep. Somewhere on my listening sofa also listened to my system with his eyes closed.

What does it all say about the state of the industry?

 

[tima]

I was listening to some jazz quartet/quintet live music performed in a forest recently, and the lack of soundstage and dynamics was striking. A violin, usually an instrument capable of LOUD sounded as if it had strings made of chewing gum and pinpointing any instrument was impossible from more than plm 5 meters distance. Same happens in a music hall, but there the acoustics are more controlled and the soundstage much wider when an orchestra is playing. Still it makes me think all the focus going into pinpoint accuracy is fas less important than getting the 'colors' and tonal structures right.

I don't hear concert goers complain about poor imaging or a lack of pinpoint accuracy after a symphony in a concert hall.

I can localize to a soloist within the orchestra or to one before an orchestra as with a concerto. I know where all the sections are where on stage and where from sound originates. Yet there is a very real sense that the performance is a whole, is meant by the composer to be heard as a whole and not as a collection of parts. Pin-point accuracy and the notion of localizing to very specific sound sources and the finding of this behavior represented in a stereo system as a strong positive attribute strikes me as a misrepresentation of reality, or at the very least a line separating reality from reproduction. Yes, it may be entertaining to listeners but I find it in the long run to be a distraction.

 

[tima]

Curious indeed. I think I’m the only one who has listened to music sometimes with eyes closed and sometimes when I simply want to create a more similar condition between live and recorded. I’m always going about things in a strange and curious way to try to learn something. I think I’m nuts. It’s how I began to understand for myself the visual aspects of sounds.

I once saw some musicians play with their eyes closed and even a conductor. I’ve seen other audience members listen to the BSO with their eyes closed and they were not asleep. Somewhere on my listening sofa also listened to my system with his eyes closed.

What does it all say about the state of the industry?

Sitting before my stereo I listen far more with my eyes closed. Sometimes with eyes open I can defocus from the natural tendency to pay attention to what I see - like a cat staring into space waiting for some motion to trigger whatever passes for cat cognition. Not that what I see is unclear or out of focus, just that I'm not paying attention to it.

It is not that unusual to observe soloist musicians performing with their eyes closed. They have their music memorized. They are playing for themselves. Sometimes you will see the conductor regularly watching them whereas normally it's the other way around.

 

[DasguteOhr]

I don't hear concert goers complain about poor imaging or a lack of pinpoint accuracy after a symphony in a concert hall.

I can localize to a soloist within the orchestra or to one before an orchestra as with a concerto. I know where all the sections are where on stage and where from sound originates. Yet there is a very real sense that the performance is a whole, is meant by the composer to be heard as a whole and not as a collection of parts. Pin-point accuracy and the notion of localizing to very specific sound sources and the finding of this behavior represented in a stereo system as a strong positive attribute strikes me as a misrepresentation of reality, or at the very least a line separating reality from reproduction. Yes, it may be entertaining to listeners but I find it in the long run to be a distraction.

This is mainly due to the much longer reverberation time. for example in the opera 1.5 seconds, in the concert hall 2 seconds or in the church 2.5 seconds. In large rooms this does not bother the listener.
if you had that reverberation time at home, it would sound cruel. the rooms are much smaller, reflections overlap, it's just acoustic mud. For this reason, many music lovers damping their room to show a smaller, cleaner image of the orchestra. will never work always looks like looking through a magnifying glass. details are shown well, but the big picture is lost. But people strive for perfection i don't know if that's always a desirable quality.

 

[tima]

This is mainly due to the much longer reverberation time. for example in the opera 1.5 seconds, in the concert hall 2 seconds or in the church 2.5 seconds. In large rooms this does not bother the listener.

Okay. I don't understand to what 'This' refers. Can you say in a different way?

 

[DasguteOhr]

Okay. I don't understand to what 'This' refers. Can you say in a different way?

I wanted to say that the different room acoustics (reverberation time) between the concert hall and the listening room at home changes the focus of listening to music. in a concert hall you don't focus on details. You simply enjoy the sound that envelops you.
At home you get mostly directional sound from the front, which changes in my opion hearing enormously. As you described above, one tends to listen to details and is distracted by the beauty of the work as a whole. this has nothing to do with the loudspeaker but with the room acoustics and their perception and processing in our brain.That's my explanation for it, maybe I'm also talking nonsense.

 

[MarcelNL]

sounds like a plausible explanation to me!

 

[tima]

I wanted to say that the different room acoustics (reverberation time) between the concert hall and the listening room at home changes the focus of listening to music. in a concert hall you don't focus on details. You simply enjoy the sound that envelops you.
At home you get mostly directional sound from the front, which changes in my opion hearing enormously. As you described above, one tends to listen to details and is distracted by the beauty of the work as a whole. this has nothing to do with the loudspeaker but with the room acoustics and their perception and processing in our brain.That's my explanation for it, maybe I'm also talking nonsense.

Okay. Your idea is that pin-point imaging is caused by being in a smaller space that presents more direct information from the front. Although my post to which you responded was not about the cause of pin-point imaging, you present an interesting idea. My guess is that pin-point imaging is at least partly a function of a stereo source in the listening room where we do not listen in stereo in the concert hall -- but that does not preclude different reverberation time from being a factor. Two distinct sound sources allow our spatial locating ability to make a more distinct judgement on location than a single broad source in the concert hall.

 

[MarcelNL]

That also makes sense Tim, yet it also means that aiming for such pin point imaging is a treacherous path. The method used to record the 'omnipresent' sound in a room IMO has a major impact on the ability to recreate the recording using 2 speaker. I'm not sure that the individual components in an orchestra are a single broad source, it's more like a broad source consisting of multiple smaller sources, for electronic music or electric instruments all of this is different since the recording is mostly tinkered together to form 'stereo' anyway.
To me the recordings that sound most natural are usually older ones, and I suspect (yet only suspect) that this is an effect of inserting less gear and less microphones than nowadays is often the case. I assume that at some point consumers liked the more close up zoom-in effect of multi microphone recordings and the industry followed. I'd love a chat with some of the famous recording engineers of the 50-ies and 60-ies to hear how they percieved progress.

this article is mostly about the rise of CD, but it gives some insight; https://www.gramophone.co.uk/featur...lager-the-balance-engineer-on-life-at-philips

 

[tima]

To me the recordings that sound most natural are usually older ones, and I suspect (yet only suspect) that this is an effect of inserting less gear and less microphones than nowadays is often the case

Yes, I agree. The Cozart-Fine 3 mic technique seems quite adequate to believable sound. I don't know if multi-mic'ing was consumer driven. That up close detail is not available in the concert hall though some find it entertaining from their stereo. In the concert hall I sense the orchestra as a whole. In the listening room as you suggest multiple tracks come down to two sources.

it also means that aiming for such pin point imaging is a treacherous path

I agree. I suppose it depends on what the listener wants. Reviewers have picked up on it and characterize it as a positive and some set up their system to emulate what they read in a review. To some extent there is control with speaker toe-in.

 

[PeterA]

I had a revelation a couple years ago when I realized that pinpoint imaging is an artifact created by some gear and set up techniques. I do not hear it in the concert hall or chamber setting or spoken voice around the kitchen table.

With David Karmeli‘s help, I am parked on a series of set up experiments with my system and eventually got to a much more natural sounding presentation with no pinpoint imaging, or stark image outlines. The gear remained the same. It was mostly repositioning and orienting the speakers but it was also things like getting rid of my power cords and cables which created a very distinct sense of image universal across recordings.

this is when the system started to sound more natural meaning more like live music without the hi-fi attributes like precise imaging. Some people and reviewers focus on imaging as a way to distinguish gear and talk about it and it seems to be a type of target worth aiming for. I have tried to move in the opposite direction resulting in a more natural presentation.