Sorry, Jack, it doesn't count. Terry's talking about "good" sound; I'm talking about "real" sound. As in, play a "quality" recording of that clip on your system, and listen from the doorway: do you hear a "real" snare drum in a bare room, followed by the ever more muffled versions thereof. The peak transients should be sufficiently convincing that you do the Maxell question ...
Gary, does that mean all drummers are deaf, or a deranged sub-species? As in also, members of an orchestra who are sitting a couple of feet in front of a full brass section?
Well, it always helps to do a little research as to why albums have a certain sound, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Led_Zeppelin_%28album%29:
If the system is not in good form these acoustic clues come across quite confused, your head can't make sense of them, and the album becomes quite messy, the acoustic signatures can't be unraveled. However, once the setup is sufficiently transparent then it all makes sense, and translates into massive depth, width and height, far more than DSOTM.
This again is where Tim just doesn't get it: I've just experienced how awful his beloved active monitors sound when no attention is paid to cleaning up the electrical environment, irrespective of how "perfect" their frequency responses, etc, are. Those types of interference are exactly what causes that dreary, uninvolving "pro" sound; that fairly rapidly gets you in the "I just want turn this stuff off, and sink a beer or two" mood ...
In simple terms, there is really such thing as digital, at the level of electronic parts behaviour: as I have noted before, the notation of 0's and 1's is ultimately a convenience for describing the "bigger picture " functionality of the process of turning what exists on the CD into an analogue waveform. Which means that all the little subtle nasties of analogue misbehaviour can intrude into the pure world of "digital" processing, if they're given sufficient opportunity, at the crucial phase of the D to A conversion. And that doesn't even consider that if the CD transport is working harder to read the CD signal then its power supply will draw more erratic or spikey current waveforms from the mains, which can then intrude into the workings elsewhere in the audio system.
Unusual for you to say that, Mike. I have just spent two consecutive days listening to studio monitors, using a well recorded live performance CD with plenty of depth. Dud listening environments in every sense of the word on all occasions, and all of Tim's medioc ... err, magnificent active marvels completely eliminated any sense of space, totally. Except for one, which was quite a pleasure to listen to. The subtleties you speak of were a million miles away from the picture, but the quality of the setup and the environment were quite contrasted.
It's a good thing that expensive amp's know how to do this -- it must be a good portion of audidophile magic, or pixie dust that makes it happen. I don't quite understand how cheap equipment knows how to block off the extra information, there must a special filter in there somewhere, as a standard part of the designer's toolkit.
But, and the really big but is, that the acoustics of the event are not missing. They are there, very much intact, buried within the distortion, noise if you will, of a high percentage of audio systems. Only when you experience a system capable of revealing those acoustics clues clearly enough do you realise that the information was there all along, but it was effectively hidden by your ear/brain rejecting that level of detail, because it was too confusing for your mind to take in, while mixed in with too high a level of reproduction distortion.
Very impressive set of measurements, in terms of the level of information there. And two speakers particularly stand out with regard to the most important performance parameter of all: distortion. The Wilson and the Vivid cover the crucial range clean as a whistle, and strangely enough, these brands are very highly thought of in some quarters :b. What the hangup with 20kHz behaviour is all about I'm not quite sure, what counts is that the speakers perform extremely well in the region where the music is.
Well, it's a section which quotes other sources for those points: if you are aware of an alternate explanation, or one that disputes this story I would be pleased to be made aware of it. Listening to the album, the explanations make excellent sense -- it's full of experimentation with echo to create large, even huge, apparent acoustic spaces.
Thanks for pointing me to this material: this is other people's take on my notorious low level, high frequency distortion. A few academics have, or are thinking in the correct directions, another recent variant is A New Method for Measuring Distortion Using a Multitone Stimulus and Noncoherence, see https://secure.aes.org/forum/pubs/journal/?ID=4 , interesting comments ...
Ah, sounds like another happy customer getting on board the "you can get good sound from bad CDs" train. There will come a day when even poor Tim no longer has the energy to swat all these annoying insects suffering audio delusions out of their misery, the swarm may have just got a little too big to handle even for him ...
Couldn't have said it better myself. Trouble is, Tim and many others are locked into the belief that frequency response (linear distortion) defines fidelity; I and some others believe that non-linear distortion are what it's about -- that's where the "magic" is, by reducing the latter by any means. Over and over again, the pattern repeats, a speaker/system that measures terribly in areas of FR, but just "works" for the listener. One thing that is almost never done in these situations is to do truly meaningful measurements on the non-linear side because it's "too hard, too expensive, ..."
