Thread: A Search for Truth and Tonality, Part 2 ...

[fas42]

From http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...alia-in-August&p=110147&viewfull=1#post110147 ...

I opened with a bogey, followed with a double bogey, a par then made back to back birdies. I figured, whoah, I'm still in this thing! I tried to just play smart and ended up winning the whole thing. What I didn't know at the onset was that part of the prize was a chance to represent Mercedes Philippines in Brisbane, Australia and if I win there in the World Trophy in Stuttgart. Cool! All expenses paid. Even Cooler!!!!!!!

Congratulations, Jack! You've obviously progressed quiiite a bit down the track with this game, I just hacked around as a school sport activity, and that was that!

I hope you have a great time here, and manage to do some damage on the course. Golf course, that is! Is the competition going to held at Coolum? As far as the cars are concerned, I'm sure you'll have some fun fanging it, if you can relate to that term!

We lived for awhile in the '90s on the Sunshine Coast, a beach area north of Brisbane, then Brisbane itself, and finally in the country just north of Brisbane. If you want some ideas on things worth doing in the area give us a yell, if you have any spare time.

Safe travelling,
Frank

 

[fas42]

From http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showthread.php?6491-It%E2%80%99s-All-a-Preference&p=110908&viewfull=1#post110908 ...

My point is that distortion that effects us at the subconscious level & only becomes expressed consciously as discomfort (edginess) can be a more important factor in disturbing our enjoyment of audio than the consciously obvious noises like surface noise & snap/crackle of vinyl which we seem to be able to "hear through" to the music. Our ears/brains are expert at audio filtering - focussing on a conversation in noisy environment or a baby's cry from a long distance away.

SO your comparison of snap & crackle Vs equivalent obvious noises in digital audio, misses the point.

Exactly so ...

it reminds me of an audiophile who turned of all electric equipment in the entire house for " serious undisturbed " listening

While audiophiles live in the fantasy that the electrical circuit of an audio system comes to an abrupt halt when it meets the half inch thick aluminium casing surrounding it we'll continue having "silly" discussions about this sort of thing ...

There are many fantasies in the audio game: one is that the manufacturers of expensive, and professional gear know all that is to be known about making perfectly behaved equipment; and another is that provided that enough, preferably expensive "pixie dust" is flung other a system that it will then "know" how to avoid nasty outside interference modulating the audio signal, only well trained and obedient electrons will be allowed to circulate through our special sound producing mechanisms.

Eons ago, it seems, I used the analogy of the swimming pool: it will continue to lose water, be a pain to maintain, while there's a leak somewhere. That analogy still stands: every leak must be plugged, if you want the full value of what you've got ...

Frank

 

[fas42]

-FFro

From http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...l-a-Preference&p=110937&viewfull=1#post110937 ...

Fridges are real bad; you should always disconnect it when doing critical listening.
...Computers too. ...And halogen, and dimmer lights. ...And even the phones.

These can be tamed, Bob, without unplugging, or adding filtering devices to the power points which the interfering devices are plugged into. A lot of the progress made over the last year or two was to knock these on the head; prior to this they were a problem, and they possibly still are, at a very subtle level -- but I haven't got there, yet . As an example, the fridge is plugged into the same circuit as the HT, and is not worrying it!

The thing is, distortion doesn't have to be like a baseball bat, giving you a crack over the skull in terms of letting you know that it's there, for it to be degrading the sound. Unlike, say, how it works in Tim's world ... :b:b

Frank

 

[NorthStar]

Frank, did you ever try running an Auto Room EQ & Calibration system with a mic,
and with the fridge running not too far from? :b

Do you know how bad halogen lights are for your Audio and Picture? ...Dimmer lights?

...Phone transformers (AC power/adaptors)?

...PC fans?

 

[fas42]

Frank, did you ever try running an Auto Room EQ & Calibration system with a mic,
and with the fridge running not too far from? :b

So you're talking about the actual audible noise coming from the fridge itself upsetting the calibration process, yes?

Do you know how bad halogen lights are for your Audio and Picture? ...Dimmer lights?

...Phone transformers (AC power/adaptors)?

...PC fans?

Yes, they can be, so the trick is to isolate the audio completely, electrically. Think of a movie sound stage, what they're about is to give the movie makers a completely controlled environment, where no outside light and sound, any interference, disturbs the film making process. The last thing you want is the perfect take of a tender love scene moment wrecked by a 747 passing overhead!!

And you need to do exactly the same with audio playback. If the neighbour in the house next door is spraying great swathes of electrical garabage into the environment, by what he's doing in his workshop adjacent to your listening area -- electrons and radio waves know nothing about the sanctity of high fences, etc, unfortunately!! -- then you need to do something about it, other then hopping across that fence and demonstrating the size of your fist to your good neighbour ... :b

Frank

 

[fas42]

From http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...l-a-Preference&p=110939&viewfull=1#post110939 ...

I'm sure it can. And yet the fridge is on, the air conditioner is running, the computer is right here, and the background beneath my music is quiet.

And that of course is not the point. Others experience actual noise intruding, clearly heard as gliches or buzzes, as mentioned. But my schtick is that the tonal qualities of the music change with the other devices running, if no measures are taken to alleviate this, the spectrum of harmonics forming the music alter. In other words, you've added an effects unit to the audio chain, for people who tune into the pro world; it's not a "hit you over the head obvious" thing, but the foot has kicked the fat button on the distortion pedal on the floor, with the effects level set on low ...

Frank

 

[NorthStar]

But that motor inside that refrigerator (at the bottom) is devellish to good Sound & Picture as well.

Yeah, anything that goes through our water pipes has to be filtered, but is losing pressure too.
And less pressure means less force, impact, current, flow, and all that electrical water Jazz ...

These hobbies of ours (audiophilia & videophilia) are like aqueducts for our sense's irrigation.
They need to be constantly and properly well balanced for the best fruits in our gardens.

And that was just a small sample of more things to come .... :b

 

[fas42]

Some nice metaphor mixing there, Bob ...

But your use of term of pressure is good, Bob -- equivalent to the "stiffness" of the voltage, and, guess what, it ain't! Needs its own Viagra, I reckon (will the Spam filter pick this up ...? ). Essentially, mains voltage is a mess, the fantasy of a pure 50 or 60Hz sine wave is just that, and you hope to God that the component's power supplies can compensate. Often, they can't ...

BTW, are you a fan of "Being There" ...?

Frank

 

[NorthStar]

What is "Being There" ..., Frank? ...Balanced exchanges with your surrounding neighbours*?

* Neighbor: A person living near or next door to the 'speaker' or person referred to.

 

[Soundminded]

I have to thank Amir for the link to this audio podcast of an interview with Floyd Toole. at about 7:30-11:00 into it he claims you cannot duplicate the sound of an original performance, it can't be done says he.

http://twit.tv/show/home-theater-geeks/14

John Atkinson editor of Silly-o-phile Magazine says the same. Listen to what he says from 28:00-32:00. In his live versus recorded demo the sound from the recording didn't have the "bigness" of the pianos. Of course it didn't. One look at the speaker design and judging the sound fields they propagate would have told him why. I think I'd go into cardiac arrest if an electrical engineer (Toole is, Atkinson isn't) ever demonstrated to my satisfaction that he knew what a vector is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mEsuKqj5wA&feature=relmfu

Oh what an admission to concede that no matter how much money is spent, even this relatively simple aspect of the problem of high fidelity sound recording and reproduction has beaten them. And what arrogance to think that it cannot be solved by people far more clever than the two of them combined. Hahahahahaha. That problem is the tip of the iceberg. For not only can they not recreate the tone of the piano in the same room as they are, they could hardly appreciate the much more difficult problem of recreating the tone at a large live venue where it isn't the tone of the instrument as it would be heard in your home but in a concert hall where its tone is entirely different. Why is it different? Because in the typical concert hall sounds at 8 khz will die out at about twice the rate as they will at 1 khz and since the reverberant field represents the overwhelming preponderence of the energy you hear in every seat in the audience, that change affects the perceived tone. Without recreating the reverberation you can't recreate the tone, it is a dynamic event, they are part and parcel of the same phenomenon. In short, if you need to recreate the tonalities heard at a large venue, whatever the frequency response of your sound system is.....it's wrong.

Here's another tougher problem than F&A can't solve. Where a sound system will make a grand piano sound like a large source in your listening room, will it make a recording of a human voice sound as big as a piano too? The answer is no, it's still the size of a human voice. After 4 years of experimenting with it, I haven't figured out why yet, all I've got are some hunches.

 

[NorthStar]

---------

 

[fas42]

Here's another tougher problem than F&A can't solve. Where a sound system will make a grand piano sound like a large source in your listening room, will it make a recording of a human voice sound as big as a piano too? The answer is no, it's still the size of a human voice. After 4 years of experimenting with it, I haven't figured out why yet, all I've got are some hunches.

My take on this is that it's all about psychoacoustics: people's brains know how to interpret the musical and sound cues, clues from a lifetime of using their ears, and "adjust", totally instinctively, the perceived sound image to be appropriate to what they remember, know, how the source should sound. But that can only occur when, firstly, there is a sufficient level of information being fed to the ear/brain mechanism, and, secondly, there is a sufficient lack of disturbing artifacts, distortion, in that information. Over and over again when I read between the lines in reports of the sound of high end systems, is the fact that the high frequencies, the treble, has been shut down, curtailed, ameliorated in all sorts of ways. So straight away there is a loss of information, very deliberately intended to try and control the second "problem", the distortion evident in that part of the spectrum.

Soundminded, I'm well aware of how you've gone about resolving the issue, which is a perfectly valid one. My way is to focus on eliminating the critical distortion element, which is possible, contrary to what others normally believe. So, I have no trouble making a piano sound "big", ie, normal live tone at the equivalent volume, while still retaining the fully correct human quality in vocals. Interestingly, solo piano is recorded fairly consistently between albums, and I know the volume setting to give the "correct" rendition: 36 out of a maximum of 40.

At the moment I'm working on bringing up a new system configuration to a good performance level, and in its raw form it fails the piano test. But I know why: poor implementation of key electrical circuitry, meaning well less than optimal behaviour in the amplifiers -- there is no reason for it also not to perform down the track ...

Frank

 

[fas42]

From http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...er-quot-a-room&p=111073&viewfull=1#post111073 ...

"Can a speaker "overpower" a room?"

Experience with Teledyne Acoustic Research AR9 in rooms up to 400 square feet and 4000 cubic feet is that it can. It is a most peculiar experience. The speaker's sound seems to somehow dominate the room.

The sound dominating the room is what you're after, of course: if you had live musicians playing the piece that's exactly what would happen, so for the sound to be "real" that's the effect you should be striving for.

In fact, the sound can dominate the house! This is where the amp/speaker combination needs to be able to hit 120dB + cleanly, then the sound will spread fully throughout the structure's environment -- something that I'm aiming to get to somewhere along the track ...

Frank

 

[fas42]

What is "Being There" ..., Frank? ...Balanced exchanges with your surrounding neighbours*?

* Neighbor: A person living near or next door to the 'speaker' or person referred to.

Sorry, Bob, didn't respond to this before: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_There -- Peter Sellers as "Chauncey Gardiner".

Frank

 

[Soundminded]

Frank, as I have told you everything I design is built to the understanding I got from a mathematical model I created 38 years ago. I began applying it to improving what you'd call conventional 2 channel stereo systems for the last 23 years. I'd had pretty satisfactory results up through 2004. There are probably a dozen different pairs of speaker systems in my house and I've experimented with around half of them. Some still need restoration, some work fine but will need to be revisited for one reason or another. The main speakers in my most elaborate and complex system that can be used in a conventional 2 channel system mode were my most successful effort in this regard until about 4 years ago. Teledyne AR 9 is a 5 driver 4 way system with two AR 12" acoustic suspension woofers facing outward at the bottom. Many regard it as Acoustic Research's best product ever. I wasn't at all happy with them the way the factory designed them. They were "adjusted" with significant enhancement to the treble and revoiced in 1989 and further enhanced in 2008. They are designed specifically for the spot they are located in. If they were moved, significant changes would be required again. They can accurately reproduce the timbre of any instrument on most recordings when individual equalization is applied to that recording. They can match the timbre exactly of the Steinway grand piano at the opposite end of the room when the recording is of a Steinway piano with a similar tone. My Steinway has what I've discovered to be a characteristic tonality of their pianos in spades, there'd be no mistaking it for the sound of anyone else's piano. However, the speakers do not sound like a piano and cannot be made to sound like a piano for the very same reason Atkinson discovered and Toole understood. It doesn't sound like it's in the room, it sounds like it's coming from a box or from behind the box but it is not in the room. This is the result of severe vector distortion predicted by the model. It can't be corrected without redesigning the speaker from the ground up. The reason the timbre is right is because the system is flat back to the microphones and not just on axis but also the total energy reaching my ears. But the spatial distribution of that energy is all wrong, very different from the piano.

The direct/reflecting model Bose 901 creates spatial distribution much more like most musical instruments either because of the way instruments are constructed or because of the way they are played. This is why so many people liked them. Its problems are related exclusively to its miserable frequency response. I corrected this flattening out its rolled off deep bass, eliminating its mid to upper bass peak, and correcting its non existant high frequencies with special arrays tailored specifically to the room and the very spot it's in and that matches it perfectly. This took two efforts, the second one taking 4 years from 2004 to 2008 to be successful. This time, when further corrected for each recording it produces the sound of a piano as it would be heard in the room unless there is audible reverberation which pushes it back a few feet but it is not in the box. With either system there are no sweet spots. The question was, would such a system make a human voice or a solo violin sound like a large source too. The answer to my delight and puzzlement is that it doesn't. They're pretty much point sources. I don't know why. Give me at least another 10 to 15 years to think about it and experiment with it and maybe I'll have a better answer.

I expect in the next week or two to hear the JBL/Revel Ultima Salon 2. I'm curious to see how their best effort that costs so much money stacks up to my best effort that costs so little.

 

[fas42]

My Steinway has what I've discovered to be a characteristic tonality of their pianos in spades, there'd be no mistaking it for the sound of anyone else's piano. However, the speakers do not sound like a piano and cannot be made to sound like a piano for the very same reason Atkinson discovered and Toole understood. It doesn't sound like it's in the room, it sounds like it's coming from a box or from behind the box but it is not in the room.

I'm a little perplexed that it sounds like the Steinway, yet it doesn't. Can you run the system cleanly at the same volume level that your own instrument would produce? If someone played a piece on the Steinway with the intensity of a recording you have, could you match the sound levels, using a SPL meter, on playback? If yes, then in what way does the sound then fall short?

My experience is, for my system, that when I put on a solo piano piece that it nominally sounds very ordinary at low volumes: it doesn't hit me in the face and say, wow, a hifi system doing a piano recording! But when I increase the volume that's all that happens: the volume increases, the intensity of the sound level builds, the tonality doesn't change in any way. Right up to near maximum volume for the system, which equates to realistic sound levels for that instrument, live. Then the echo, the naturally reflected sound in the room conjures up fully the experience of having a piano in the room, and that's sufficiently realistic for me ...

When you say there are no sweet spots, how well does that that hold up as you physically approach one or another of the speakers? At what point, how close before your ear starts telling you that the sound is not just "in the room", but is actually emerging from the speaker drivers?

Frank

 

[Soundminded]

I'm a little perplexed that it sounds like the Steinway, yet it doesn't. Can you run the system cleanly at the same volume level that your own instrument would produce? If someone played a piece on the Steinway with the intensity of a recording you have, could you match the sound levels, using a SPL meter, on playback? If yes, then in what way does the sound then fall short?

My experience is, for my system, that when I put on a solo piano piece that it nominally sounds very ordinary at low volumes: it doesn't hit me in the face and say, wow, a hifi system doing a piano recording! But when I increase the volume that's all that happens: the volume increases, the intensity of the sound level builds, the tonality doesn't change in any way. Right up to near maximum volume for the system, which equates to realistic sound levels for that instrument, live. Then the echo, the naturally reflected sound in the room conjures up fully the experience of having a piano in the room, and that's sufficiently realistic for me ...

When you say there are no sweet spots, how well does that that hold up as you physically approach one or another of the speakers? At what point, how close before your ear starts telling you that the sound is not just "in the room", but is actually emerging from the speaker drivers?

Frank

Both systems can play to ear shattering levels without distortion as I discovered to my regret by accident. Fortunately the damage to my hearing was not permanent. The sole exception is that there is not enough power to push the (original version) Bose 901's deep bass to more than a loud level without clipping the 135 watt per channel receiver (Marantz model SR 930 with a built in 10 band equalizer made in the 1980s I think.) More power would only add 3 db more range, multiple systems would be required to play louder or in a larger room and correspondingly more amplifier power. I estimate it would take at least 3 pairs and 600 wpc to equal one pair of AR9 at 60 wpc for comparable bass. The tone doesn't change as the sound gets louder but for the AR9s it doesn't have the presence of a real musical instruments the direct/reflecting model creates. The greater uniformity of sound energy distribution the piano creates is demonstrated by playing the piano and the speakers at the same level when you are midway between them. There's a door to an adjacent room also in the middle of the long wall halfway between. From outside the room the piano sounds appreciably louder. That's because it's producing much more sound energy to achieve the same loudness but it is distributed in space much more uniformly.

There are no sweet spots in the sense that you hear the stereophonic effect anywhere in either room even directly in front of either speaker. The center image is more stable as you move off center with the 901 even when you are to the right of the right speaker. Bass is more prominent in either room near the perimeter due to cancellations in the middle of the room. Even so AR9can produce gut wrenching bass. If you sit midway between the AR9s about a foot or two in front of the line that joins them you'll hear about what you'd hear from the 901s from across the room. The timbre of the two systems BTW can be made to be an exact match to each other, only the spatial energy distribution is different.

You can hear the AR9 as the source of sound up to about 5 or 6 feet way and then you are in the room's own predominantly reverberant field. For 901 the sound could be almost anywhere depending on the recording including well beyond the side walls. Front to rear perceived distance in not much for either system. The AR9s are the main speakers for a proprietary system that can produce perceived distance to be up to 100 feet or more beyond the front wall. That distance is usually only useful for simulations of choral and organ music as it would be heard in a cathedral. For most simulations the goal is more like about 40 to 50 feet away.

 

[fas42]

From http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showthread.php?6491-It%E2%80%99s-All-a-Preference&p=111148&viewfull=1#post111148 ...

My point is any distortion becomes part of the signal as it is now part of the voltage swings. It therefor becomes part of the whole and affects the whole. You guys rarely see me post an absolute but in this case I'm doing just that. The question is how much they affect the whole not if they do or don't. They do.

Again, exactly.

Let's take an extreme example, just for the sake of an exercise. Something malfunctions somewhere in the audio, and injects a very high level, pure 22kHz sine wave into the audio circuitry. Hmmm, is something wrong? Naaah, can't hear anything from the speakers when no music playing, must be my imagination! But how come the audio sounds like sh!t ...? Well, that nasty, inaudible signal is heavily stressing the circuitry, intermodulation distortion of that sine wave and the good audio is badly contaminating what you hear ...

Yes, extreme, but that's how electronics can behave. In the real world, answers may not always be simple. And that's just the way it is ...

Frank

 

[fas42]

Both systems can play to ear shattering levels without distortion as I discovered to my regret by accident. Fortunately the damage to my hearing was not permanent. The sole exception is that there is not enough power to push the (original version) Bose 901's deep bass to more than a loud level without clipping the 135 watt per channel receiver (Marantz model SR 930 with a built in 10 band equalizer made in the 1980s I think.) More power would only add 3 db more range, multiple systems would be required to play louder or in a larger room and correspondingly more amplifier power. I estimate it would take at least 3 pairs and 600 wpc to equal one pair of AR9 at 60 wpc for comparable bass.

My first good speakers, years ago, were Goodmans Axiom 301s, did my own box for them: here you have 98dB sensitivity, 20W power handling. This translates to peak SPL of 116dB for a pair at a metre, and these units were manufactured in the '60s -- how much progress has been made to date? They were magnificent beasts, with a huge magnet structure: makes a Peerless driver look wimpy!!

The tone doesn't change as the sound gets louder but for the AR9s it doesn't have the presence of a real musical instruments the direct/reflecting model creates. The greater uniformity of sound energy distribution the piano creates is demonstrated by playing the piano and the speakers at the same level when you are midway between them. There's a door to an adjacent room also in the middle of the long wall halfway between. From outside the room the piano sounds appreciably louder. That's because it's producing much more sound energy to achieve the same loudness but it is distributed in space much more uniformly.

That's interesting ... Have you ever tried recording and analysing the frequency spectrums to compare why there may be such a difference between those two positons?

Frank

 

[fas42]

From http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...-the-bandwagon&p=111164&viewfull=1#post111164 ...

amen to the continual discovery of more data from analog as the tools improve. the media seems almost unlimited in rewarding effort. 10-12 years ago i was just as interested in better digital as i was better analog. and hirez (both PCM and dsd) delivered. however; things have not changed since then with digital (in any meaningful way other than delivery systems)........but analog has taken many performance steps forward and continues to. to bring this back to the OT; as one's system matures it's the analog software/source gear advances where the system advances then come from and that keeps the passion burning.

not to say that better and better digital players/dac's are not being built; but if you compare the best from 10 years ago to the best today not much has changed.

Digital has not progressed because most people seem to be missing the point. My Yamaha CD player, over 25 years old, admittedly very well built, got me the good stuff just as many years ago: the problem is not fighting for 130dB or so dynamic range, or using 32 bits rather than 24, or 16, but understanding that digital sound is very sensitive to interference effects. And until that lesson is learnt people will keep repeating those exact same remarks as above, for years to come. Ultimately, the great revelation shall fall, seemingly miraculously, from the sky, and digital will take front place as the medium for sound: until then use whatever works best with your current setup ...

Frank