Sublime Sound
- Thread starter PeterA
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Sure it is.
Have you ever heard pinpoint imaging live?
I haven't. Yes, precise location, but not sharp pinpoint outlines.
Also, I have pointed out why the argument that "it is on the recording" cannot be made:
https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/sublime-sound.12853/page-76#post-665779
I mostly agree.
I think you have 2 paths (extremes .)
1 is about the music .
Which is fairly simple, so it may be not interesting to many, because its mainly about stripping things instead of adding things .
The other is mostly about gear .
With which one tries to create a fascimile of what he thinks it should sound like .
Often driven by how much more complicated a piece of gear is the better it must be (marketing )
Resulting in the most extreme case in endless gear/ power conditioner /cords / cable swapping .
Some magazines function as a jumpstart to this process , driven by advertisement / politics .
To keep everybody happy and in bussines so to speak , is there a wrong to all of this i dont know , its mostly how things work in the world .
People gotta figure out things for themselves .
Fact is that a lot of people take these things as absolutes , especiallly as you mentioned people who start in this high end audio thing
A lot of people want /need confirmation of some higher institution whether its high end audio /religion /politics , especially as beginners
And off course there is everything in between .
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By the way , i think this applies to the recording proccess much the same way .
Al, This was made very clear to me and I am surprised it took me so long to understand. WBF member VLS was visiting with Ack last winter before Covid to hear my system. As VLS was in my listening room saying his goodbyes I closed my eyes and simply listened to his words. There was absolutely no outlined image of him in front of me. Sure I could tell he was standing in the corner of the room and roughly how large the sound was coming from his mouth, but that was it. This matched the experience of listening to two or three instruments in a chamber setting as well as at symphony hall. No precise outlined images. That is when I knew that my new direction of removing the acoustic treatments and toeing out my speakers was the right move. It also led me to rethink what my audiophile cables were doing to the sound.
It required some more fine tuning of my system set up since VLS and Ack visited, but that voice made clear that I had been living with (and enjoying) a more "hifi" sound, and I was now moving away from it. Not surprisingly, from what I remember of Ack's system, there is little image specificity or even soundstage information, and he is clear that those are not system goals of his. Interestingly, Ack did comment that with the zero toe in in my set up, he could no longer hear the 3D palpable, defined images and soundstage that he so enjoyed hearing from my system before. That was lost in favor of images that were still layered, still localized, but not as precise, and more reflective, IMO, of what I hear live. Soundstage boundaries, and the hall's acoustic information, however, were now becoming more evident and continued to improve over time.
I fail to understand why this is a controversial subject. It is very easy to hear, and which type of presentation one prefers, is subjective and personal. It really does not matter. It only depends on whether or not one's system goals are to get closer to a realistic or natural sound, or more toward a "hifi" or artificial enhanced sound. Once can achieve either.
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I believe the controversy isn't whether it's a real life thing one experiences, but rather being able to handle the approach to get a more life like representation (and some possible trade-offs).
Al notes a post where he talks about why it isn't part of the recording (or so his last post said). I'll refute that as utter nonsense (again), since he can't back it up by anything in anyway what-so-ever and I can. The rule of thumb is if you can hear it, it's on the recording unless your stereo is broken (note not all recordings have it). The question is, are you hearing it pronounced totally incorrectly? And the follow up is "ok if there is an inherent amount what is or is not ok to do to work around it?"
Saying things like purposely causing some distortion or loss of information sounds wrong; but are parts of the reality practiced daily by many. They just make up gobbly-gook descriptions to try and make it sounds like they're objectively improving something.
Personally I don't care if there is some imaging (but not hardened outlines), so long as everything else is right. And never in my life have I experienced any tube system or whatever you call it that makes the origination of the sound appear to be completely authentic to a live performance. People will tell you "oh I got a tube amp without feedback and now it's real" - ya whatever. Just because something sounds better to you (and maybe me) doesn't automatically mean it sounds real.
Apparently you don't understand my argumentation, which is why you misquote me. I did not say that pinpoint imaging is not part of the recording. Here is what I said in the post that I linked to:
"It could or could not be the recording, we don't know."
The reason why we don't know, as I further explain, is that we cannot know if what we hear on the recording is an artifact introduced during playback, by the speakers. As I say:
" We cannot test the proposition that "it's in the recording" with diagnostic tools, i.e. speakers, that may introduce the very artifact that we aim to find in the recording itself. Proclaiming with confidence that "it's in the recording" is therefore nonsense."
So yes, you are right, "I can't back up by anything in anyway what-so-ever" a claim that I never made. I never claimed that it was not in the recording. But for the reason given, you can't back up your claim either, that it *is* in the recording.
There's no such thing as an artifact unless your VC is scraping and making a new noise. We can measure perfectly well whether an artifact is introduced. That's sooo decades ago. There is no mystery. Your presumption is that we can't measure speakers... We can.
What's harder to measure is the volume of everything in the music. Are the recorded sounds being represented correctly or are they totally out of whack? Does the speaker portray the sound right or does it truncate it (volume shifts)? All important questions. Zero artifacts.
Any actual artifact has to show up in phase measurements (hz; thd). It cannot exist otherwise. And yes people will swear that the lowest distortion somehow has artifacts? Absolute baloney. The gear probably sux, and there's no particular reason we should desire to better define the stuff in a recording we don't even want to hear.
What's harder to measure is the volume of everything in the music. Are the recorded sounds being represented correctly or are they totally out of whack? Does the speaker portray the sound right or does it truncate it (volume shifts)? All important questions. Zero artifacts.
Any actual artifact has to show up in phase measurements (hz; thd). It cannot exist otherwise. And yes people will swear that the lowest distortion somehow has artifacts? Absolute baloney. The gear probably sux, and there's no particular reason we should desire to better define the stuff in a recording we don't even want to hear.
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Not just the magazines - many scholars and trusted people addressed imaging properly. For example, I always admired the work of Siegfried Linkwitz on imaging. People can read about it with great detail in his site: https://www.linkwitzlab.com/ Quoting from his site: " In return I have a speaker with seamless integration over the whole frequency range, with impactfull dynamics, a speaker that sets up a wide, tall and deep sound stage, yet with pin point localization of instruments and voices, with speed and warmth. All this, of course, only for well recorded material. The speakers disappear and what remains is the panorama of sound and the experience of music. "
The subject of pinpoint imaging has been a permanent discussion since the appearance of stereo, particularly about microphone placement in the early days. Alan Blumlein, that is considered the inventor of modern stereo developed the Blumlein pair sound recording technique in the 1930's, that was able to produce very focused imaging and is still praised by many sound engineers. Others preferred spaced apart microphones for being able to deliver a better feeling of the characteristics of the environment space.
IMHO reducing the very interesting subject of imaging in stereo to an Harry Pearson and high-end magazine love/hate affair is absurd. Anyway IMHO the fundamental question is how people prefer to deal with the absence of a visual stimulus in sound reproduction - the divergence starts immediately at this point.
Peter,
Do you listen to concerts with closed eyes all the time? Do you really want just a binaural experience from your home stereo?
Natural is for me a combination of:
1) Resemblance of sound to live performances of unamplified music.
This is not necessarily a specific sound, but makes the sounds fall within the wide range of timbres heard live, resulting from instrument played, performer playing the instrument, hall acoustics, distance from listener etc. Rather than being about "accurate" reproduction (define that), it is about believability.
2) Lack of audible artifacts resulting from electronic and/or acoustic (mostly room) distortion.
Such artifacts continuously remind you of listening to a system rather than an illusion of live music, however limited that illusion may be.
Are you suggesting a home theatre? There are tons of concert video but the sonic of them are no where close to reproduced medium without visual. So in a way we are forced into getting used to listening reproduced sound without visual. Looking at positive side, without visual, it is actually pure music that drives our sensation and imagination. Sort of like reading a book not watching a movie. To think again, I probably misunderstood your point of asking the above question. Why are they related to pin point imaging. Localizing sound by visual is probably not what Peter's meant about pin point imaging. Crap. I am probably not thinking right. Too early in the morning. Sorry.
Are you suggesting a home theatre? There are tons of concert video but the sonic of them are no where close to reproduced medium without visual. So in a way we are forced into getting used to listening reproduced sound without visual. Looking at positive side, without visual, it is actually pure music that drives our sensation and imagination. Sort of like reading a book not watching a movie. To think again, I probably misunderstood your point of asking the above question. Why are they related to pin point imaging. Localizing sound by visual is probably not what Peter's meant about pin point imaging. Crap. I am probably not thinking right. Too early in the morning. Sorry.
Thanks, I think you misunderstood my point - I addressed it specifically to Peter in a followup of the part of the post he wrote and I quoted. I will wait for his answer.
However I must immediately say I can't agree with your view that the absence of the visual of the real being a positive and your book/ movie analogy. BTW, do you have experience with binaural?
Pinpoint imaging isn't the same thing as a stereo image and I used that as an example of the what I find wrong with HP's wrong advice, there were other topics we can discuss in another thread if you wish, up to you if you want to defend AS of the past or discuss the stereo image and soundstage.
david
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