And of course, the air from the sound of Peter's system is so clear without being dark. Air. Air. Air. Air. Air.
Sublime Sound
- Thread starter PeterA
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Here's an honest question for you: Could you have got to where you are wrt language and vocabulary without taking the path (over years) that you did?
I congratulated Peter on what appears to be good sound in the video, but that does not make the video useful for any comparative purpose, except possibly for two identical videos with only one component changed or adjustment made with everything else held constant. And even then I don't think it is worth very much.
"You are doing more than anyone else to suggest, if not to prove, the efficacy of Magico speakers + Pass Labs amplification." (Implied with these videos)
Timpani are very very cool - they definitely are worth attention when setting up or tuning a system. Maybe, maybe even more so than lower strings. There is so much to listen for.
Percussion can be broadly divided between pitched and unpitched instruments and (while there is opportunity in being a jack of all trades), muscians coming up the ranks often gravitate toward one or the other. Bells, glocks, chines, marimbas, vibraphones, celeste, etc. are also pitched.
But the timpani is the king of pitched percussion. Whereas percussionists play across a variety of instruments: snares, bass, blocks, shakers, sticks, slapsticks, gongs/tams, cymbals, hi-hats, and hundreds of others, in upper echelon orchestras the timpanist is usually dedicated to his instrument.
There's so much more to listen to with timpani along with impact and weight. Close attention usually reveals the type of mallet with which they are struck - degrees of soft and hard. Like a cymbalist, the timpanist can let his strike resonate or damp it with his palm - again to varying degrees - the score will often tell him. Timpani have a pedal that can, over a limited range, set its key and the timpanist can use that pedal to bend a note, just like a woodwind. Listen for transients and articulation, from the gentle roll to the giant whack. Where on the timp head a strike occurs influences its sound and with a bit of sonic attention one can 'see' the timpanist's technique. Timpani are scored across the full range of dynamic gradation, from ppp to fff.
The better a system resolves the range of timpanic expression the better it will do the same with other lower frequency instruments. Next time you're in the concert hall, spend some time watching the timpanist play.
I don’t think it’s the vocabulary that changes but values and deeper understanding of a concept. My own experience with the journey is that it was unnecessarily long and intrinsically wrong because of putting blind faith in the wrong so called experts. The path that Holt and HP put many of us on is a road to nowhere that’s why so many are still wandering not arriving, heck most don’t even know where they’re going.
david
Yes - I agree. Listening and music appreciation is its own 'vocabulary'. We struggle mightly to put that into words to try communicating our experience. It's like describing a tree with a French horn, but we carry on. The influence of HP and JGH is/was their attempt at a vocabulary. None is ultimately adequate and some wrong-headed. But as humans we need to communicate.
Tim, I presume every question you ask is an honest one. There is no way of knowing the answer to your question. One can dwell on the "what ifs" in life. I don't know how helpful that is. It appears as though Tang and I are speaking similar languages, and even with Al, yet look how different our respective systems are from each other and the different paths we have taken to get to where we are.
David told me that my local audio friends would not like the changing sound of my system as I methodically removed stuff from my system and experimented with zero toe in. One actually told me that I had lost what he so liked about my system: the pin point imaging and 3D holographic images precisely defined in front of him. I continued along my new direction despite their growing dissatisfaction with the sound of my system. Al, more than the others, has closely witnessed the progress, and I think he now has an increased appreciation for what I am trying to do.
Many roads may lead one toward a more natural sound. I think Tang summarized it quite well in his wonderful post yesterday. Music is about nuance (Tang) and I would add subtlety and gestalt. It is its own language. And sound is energy. One must manage that energy in the room (ddk). Much of what is promoted in the hobby seems to be in conflict with those goals. Many products promise to enhance aspects of the sound, the terms in the audiophile glossary, by focusing on specific sonic attributes. These accessories got in the way of the music, at least in my system. It took me a long time to fully understand that.
I have no regrets because I think I better appreciate where I am knowing fully from where I came.
Dear Peter,
Our gears are very much different but there are some addictive aspects of sound that I am pretty sure we have in common and those are what Al described about noise floor or quietness and the immediacy of energy rising from quiet passages. These aspects can be illustrated from a system using music like Scheherazade with wood wind instruments, piccolo, obe, clarinet, etc. Many music conducted by Stokowski has his signature in the way he used these instruments too. Imo Stokowski likes to use the quiet gap between instrument inter play and transition to draw you into the music creating more enjoyable listening sensation.
We may think the system has so low noise floor as Al said. But I think it isn't really that. My system is not that quiet. Yours is definitely more quiet. I could hear small tube artifacts and often rfi from my right tweeter when I am two feet away from it. The vdh also exhibits the surface noise of vinyl more than other carts. My room surrounding also is a working environment with noises. Yet I still have this sensation of quietness and immediacy of sound. So here is my own conclusion. The nuance is what makes this two effects.
1) Nuance is taken away by absorption panel.
2) Many power cords take away nuance.
3) Many vibration management platform, footer, grounding boxes take away nuance.
(Sound comes from vibration. Audiophile like to kill vibration. Maybe we overkilled? Just a thought to provoke people to jump on me now.
When nuance is there it lets you hear and feel the quietness of the time they were recording at the venue. We need all the nuance to hear the quietness the ambient of the recording venue. Natural reverb is only part of the ambient and easy to hear but there is something else too (not the coughing) that make up the sense of silence. Nuance also make super contrast of sound of each instrument. So between inter-play you can hear more swing, and out of quietness when a crescendo arise you hear more immediacy.
Peter, you got rid of 1-3. So to get these two aspect of sounds, given anyone has decent pieces of equipments, we do not even have to pay for it.
Tang, thank you for posting this on my system thread. You have a way of getting to the heart of the matter. No BS, just your way of describing things as you see them. Simply wonderful.
It's not just about specific equipment and poor recommendations made over the years or the politics of it all but fundamentally they change the goals and values of the engineers who created high end sound. I can't tell you if it was out of malice, ignorance or both but for years HP/Holt dominated the industry with their magazines and idiot reviewers or understood even less. Rather than looking at the music and ethos of high end holistically they broke it down to nonsense and bits. Music reproduction wasn't imagined that way by it's creators. For example reading those magazines you'd find article after article on pin point imaging as if it has a basis in reality but what happened many including myself spent a lot of time and money to create that absurdity. I remember audiophile meets that all we talked about imaging while ignoring the fact that system was sounding synthetic and no one was listening to music anymore. Of course to fix that stupidity they pushed horribly manipulated so called audiophile recordings and blamed everything on recordings that were right and natural sounding. This type of thing came out of their moronic shootouts that we all consumed and accepted so readily. That influence is still with us and why so many are disillusioned and dissatisfied after spending many hours and tons of money on systems that will never bring them long term satisfaction and certain things have become the gospel when they have basis in reality.
To clarify, I'm not anti-reviewers and magazines I believe that some serve a purpose and help people my comments are about HP and his ilk.
david
And, more than anything, the recording needs to be same-- the same lp pressing.
Okay ... but there was also a time when they didn't dominate the industry. They were among those who pushed back on the reigning notion that the quality of the gear depended solely on the quality of its measurements. Early on, when THD and signal to noise ratio ruled the day, P&H were considered controversial. I don't disagree with your take, nor is this absolution, but Pearson and Holt were early advocates for a subjectivist, listening based approach, which today many take for granted.
Thanks David, I get it. There was an article about this written many years ago by the late German reviewer/writer Markus Sauer called "God is in the nuances" where he talked about the obsession on detail and sound staging. There was a quote in that article that stayed with me - it was something like "I don't want to know WHERE He is on the stage, I want to know WHY He is on the stage".
I went down the detail path myself, but was very fortunate to have come under the influence of someone who were showed me the benefits of timing and dynamics.
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Well, I can't be happy when people choose the insult to refer to people and reviewers that have followed different ways of listening and assembling systems and wrote great articles that most of us still enjoy reading and consider mark stones in the high-end way.
Anyone being in the business of high-end edition for several decades should have had positives and negatives - it is part of life. We had several threads referring to Harry Pearson in WBF along the years on these aspects, that were well participated and many members in general expressed positive feelings about him and his importance in the hobby.
IMHO it is not possible to summarize the importance of the work and influence of HP in short forum posts. We have to dig in his reviews and articles to understand it. And yes, he extensively addressed pinpoint (that he separated from focusing power) , nuance, dynamics, layering, soundstage, common recordings, audiophile recordings, all these subjects were spread along many issues along decades.
Anyway TAS was not only Harry Pearson - I would risk that in average his writings were less than 15% of the issue. He was joined by several top quality writers that helped to convey the message of the high-end to consumers.
As always, IMHO, YMMV.
Apologies, Peter. Your thread is surely not the best place for this discussion.
Anyone being in the business of high-end edition for several decades should have had positives and negatives - it is part of life. We had several threads referring to Harry Pearson in WBF along the years on these aspects, that were well participated and many members in general expressed positive feelings about him and his importance in the hobby.
IMHO it is not possible to summarize the importance of the work and influence of HP in short forum posts. We have to dig in his reviews and articles to understand it. And yes, he extensively addressed pinpoint (that he separated from focusing power) , nuance, dynamics, layering, soundstage, common recordings, audiophile recordings, all these subjects were spread along many issues along decades.
Anyway TAS was not only Harry Pearson - I would risk that in average his writings were less than 15% of the issue. He was joined by several top quality writers that helped to convey the message of the high-end to consumers.
As always, IMHO, YMMV.
Apologies, Peter. Your thread is surely not the best place for this discussion.
The measurement is everything era was short lived and those reviewers & editors didn't declare themselves the masters of universe. Holt & HP definitely weren't the first to mention subjective values look at audio magazines and news articles from 50's & 60's, there was a beautiful mix of engineers and lay people discussing sound quality subjectively and without the politics and pomposity of HP. Do you remember the Paul Klipsch interview I linked several weeks ago, that was the spirit! Do you know how companies HP put out of business with his bullshit? I know he's gone and can't reply but I said the same when he was still around.
david
"I don't want to know WHERE He is on the stage, I want to know WHY He is on the stage" This is a great quote!
Imaging is just one of the things these magazines made up, there's a couple of decades of this type of nonsense that they peppered trusting audiophiles with.
david
He's not a fellow audiophile and my comments have nothing to do with the difference of path Francisco, he was a so called professional and I'm questioning his ethics. No disrespect but you weren't involved in the industry and didn't see the politics and don't really know who HP was. You're right that there were other reviewers working for the magazine, you should have met some of them then you'll understand why I attack. To be clear I have no desire to sway you or anyone else about this, just stating my views, and if you're not happy with me dear friend, tough!
david
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