I wonder if Albert was looking at, and listening to, some high end speaker systems when that popped into his head ...
Interesting approach by Tim. For me, it's the other direction, assuming I'm listening to an "ambitious" setup rather than just any old sound system. If the sound quality has stabilised then there will be a distinctive distortion overtone to what's played, the "everything sounds the same" syndrome to some degree: if a pleasant one then you just go with that tone, not a problem. But frequently there is a more unpleasant, irritating edge which, once I'm aware of it starts to grate for me, so I either look for alcoholic relief or begin glancing at my watch more and more often ...
Disagree!! I'm sick of seeing this nonsense over and over again: in the part of the spectrum that counts, which is everywhere where big, beefy bass doesn't hang out, it is possible to get a consistent distortion figures in the region of 0.1%, at realistic, meaning relatively high sound levels from good quality units. Speakers are not the problem!!
Better not let Tim read this, there could be trouble ... :b
Nice to see mentioned. With a reasonably transparent system it is ridiculously easy to hear how different amplifiers distort, no matter how the brilliant the supplied conventional spec's may be. So, as long as people in general persist in the "fantasy" that everything has been sorted out in this area of electronics, from the point of view of the designers, then the industry will continue staggering around in the swamp of incomplete understanding ...
Trouble is, an audio system is more than 2 very high performance audio opamps in series. We're back to a chain made out brilliantly tempered, highest quality steel links, except that at certain points we sustitute a link or two made with elastic bands, or a bit of fencing wire found under the house, and so on. Obviously, the integrity of our chain is bound up in those superbly made links, we can safely ignore the ones we're not so sure of, or don't know enough about ... or so some "gurus" in the audio game would perhaps claim ...
Which nicely reinforces my previous post: an audio system is always, always, always a combination of elements which will yield a certain result, depending upon myriads of factors. Simply substituting one component for another will highly likely alter the perceived sound, and that change of quality is only very, very vaguely dependent upon the "intrinsic quality" of the component. Frequently, inserting a better quality component will make a system sound worse, because it is more clearly revealing that other parts of the setup still have problems: sounding harsh in the top end is the classic signature of system actually becoming more transparent, and revealing my favourite baby: low level, high frequency distortion ...
Tim's got the right idea here: you listen to sound which nominally is unpleasant to yourself, and this makes it very easy to pick problem areas. This is why I use "bad" recordings; every weakness is subjectively intensely emphasised and you don't have to play with any DBX nonsense to know that there is something wrong.
Bob, remember I'm not talking about bad music, but "bad" recordings! The latter can contain some great treasures, as for example live Art Tatum, and many other famous artists performing in front of a crowd. And truth be known, when a system is really firing then you can listen to music styles that normally leave you cold, because you can appreciate the tonal colours, and the energy of the performers.
:bWhich is why a sorted out audio system should be able to reproduce music in a convincing fashion. Studio monitors can do from well above 110dB to over 120dB peak without much trouble, so they should be able to get it right. But in raw form they fall well, well short, for the reasons mentioned in my other thread.
I don't know about others, but my "stamina" is totally dependent on how clean the sound is. So, I can listen to my HT at high sound levels all day long without problems, on all sorts of material, but the studio monitor combination is steadily bugging me more and more, because I am able to register its distortion characteristics without any trouble at all now. Which means, running it at effectively very low levels, otherwise it's just too unpleasant to tolerate for any length of time.Tricky, because everyone of us is so different in his own level of 'music stamina acceptance' .
I guess it has to do with our uniquely own level (blend) of testosterone and blood tissue cholesterol samples.
Yes, that's why musicians all wear heavy duty hearing aids after 6 months of working at it, their ears are totally shot by this stage
. The answer is, that the hearing system is extremely tolerant of clean, undistorted high level sound, this has been noted many times: once you add a heavy dose of distortion the ears go into severe overload very quickly, and the damage gets done ...
My theory on this is that many people "adjust" the sound of their systems to suit, for their ears, popular music -- jazz, blues, etc. And in my experience listening to other people's setups this frequently leaves the sound very threadbare, uninteresting, particularly when from digital sources. Good classical sound sets up a very rich texture of tones in the air, the harmonics weave in and out of each other; there is almost an other worldliness about the sound, your mind can swim through the collage of sound, and it soothes and enriches your soul.
