What is a reviewer?

[Rt66indierock]

It was mainly this little beauty i was referring to. Maybe your equipment is just really bad at reproducing depth and will pass the test with flying colors ! By the way "a sixties mono copy" refers to a digitally converted file, you don't list a record player among your equipment ?

And you would be wrong. Both my systems produce the wall of sound when intended and have the soundstage depth I want when that is intended.

 

[Tim Link]

You are hearing exactly what you should hear. And as we age you need to turn it up a bit to hear the tape noise.

Thanks, that's reassuring. I listened to someone's vinyl playback on Youtube and that was pretty messy, with too much surface noise for me to identify tape hiss, and the stereo cartidge they were using was putting out a noticeably different signal on the left side than the right.

 

[Lagonda]

We have the blind leading the deaf

 

[PYP]

I am not putting down someones methodology but listening for noise wouldnt be my method. The sound of real instruments in an acoustic space has and will continue to be what I am looking for. Electric studio recordings can sound like anything they want to sound like.This is not good nor bad just reality. So if judging your system by the glassbreaking in a Dire Straits Record , or a dog barking in a Roger Waters disc is your test great to me I want to hear real instruments played in a real space and Ill live with the rest.

I agree, but back in the day my father used a mono recording of a steam locomotive to test realism (his DIY system was mono). A neighbor apparently found it quite convincing when he ran out of his bathroom to avoid the collision. True story.

 

[Rt66indierock]

I guess you didnt read what I said but so be it. This is the way things are done take something out of context and get indignant. If you had said what you said now then maybe the reply would be different. I don't know what you use as you never said it. My mind reading skills have diminished sadly. I made a statement of what I do and thats that period .

No, I understood your post. I have a few issues with it. Even someone as out of touch as the late Art Dudley (Stereophile. TAS, Listener) and that is saying something knew this. Most high-end audio equipment won’t reproduce the sound of a banjo properly. One set of my refence recordings is therefore various banjos and has been for decades. Herb Reichert (currently Stereophile) who may be even more out of touch has written most high-end audio can’t reproduce Cajun saw fiddling properly. Something I’ve known for decades since I love Cajun music. My personal recordings of harmonicas are similarly hard on high-end audio. Aren’t you just regurgitating the same old stuff?

 

[the sound of Tao]

I agree, but back in the day my father used a mono recording of a steam locomotive to test realism (his DIY system was mono). A neighbor apparently found it quite convincing when he ran out of his bathroom to avoid the collision. True story.

Was this before the advent of LSD?

 

[Elliot G.]

No, I understood your post. I have a few issues with it. Even someone as out of touch as the late Art Dudley (Stereophile. TAS, Listener) and that is saying something knew this. Most high-end audio equipment won’t reproduce the sound of a banjo properly. One set of my refence recordings is therefore various banjos and has been for decades. Herb Reichert (currently Stereophile) who may be even more out of touch has written most high-end audio can’t reproduce Cajun saw fiddling properly. Something I’ve known for decades since I love Cajun music. My personal recordings of harmonicas are similarly hard on high-end audio. Aren’t you just regurgitating the same old stuff?

I’m sorry I have no idea what you are trying to say. your reply makes no sense. I have no idea what banjo’s, harmonicas, Cajun music and old out of touch people have to do with me or my comments.

 

[Lagonda]

One of the problems of WBF lately, is the sudden influx of people and their opinions that are far from what i would call audiophile. It has become a place where some people come to socialize, talk about dance and art, rarely in the even most far fetched relation to audio. Do it in the the dedicated sub categories not in every thread, please !

 

[tima]

One of the problems of WBF lately, is the sudden influx of people and their opinions that are far from what i would call audiophile. It has become a place where some people come to socialize, talk about dance and art, rarely in the even most far fetched relation to audio. Do it in the the dedicated sub categories not in every thread, please !

You noticed it as well. Are they being flown in?

 

[tima]

I agree, but back in the day my father used a mono recording of a steam locomotive to test realism (his DIY system was mono). A neighbor apparently found it quite convincing when he ran out of his bathroom to avoid the collision. True story.

Then stereo arrived and you could hear the locomotive go into the tunnel and come out the other side. it was mind blowing. Timothy Leary had nothing on that!

 

[PYP]

Then stereo arrived and you could hear the locomotive go into the tunnel and come out the other side. it was mind blowing. Timothy Leary had nothing on that!

Hey, this was a quiet, respectable suburb! OK? Another neighbor hung a gutted bear from a chain wrapped around a big tree in his front yard. So, a train running through a house was probably seen as the second strangest thing.

I was attempting to show that the neighbor made an objective observation that a train was passing through his bathroom although there was no train anywhere near the neighborhood. Thus, he showed an unconscious bias which, by extension, shows that the TAS reviewers are in fact positing subjective impressions. Agreed?

 

[bonzo75]

One of the problems of WBF lately, is the sudden influx of people and their opinions that are far from what i would call audiophile. It has become a place where some people come to socialize, talk about dance and art, rarely in the even most far fetched relation to audio. Do it in the the dedicated sub categories not in every thread, please !

The problem is people who reply to them

 

[Holmz]

…. As a kid I always easily heard hiss on anything that wasn't pure digital on any system I listened to. Now I rarely notice it unless I go out of my way to hear it.

Most stuff, back in the day, was recorded on tape… and less was recorded direct to digital
So hearing more hiss as a kid, seems a bit unremarkable, and there was more reason for tape hiss to be present with tape.

We have the blind leading the deaf

I think that the poorly recorded Violent Femmes album was “The blind leading the naked”…

 

[Tim Link]

Most stuff, back in the day, was recorded on tape… and less was recorded direct to digital
So hearing more hiss as a kid, seems a bit unremarkable, and there was more reason for tape hiss to be present with tape.

I was still a kid when CDs came out. I recall some CDs, like Mercury Living Presence reissues having very noticeable tape hiss from the original master tapes that I could hear a lot easier than I can hear today on those same recordings. That might be a false memory. Or perhaps, I was going out of my way to listen for it because digital's big selling point was no tape hiss. Come to think of it, I know for sure that I had a Phillips classics CD (still have it) that I didn't realize for quite some time was actually from analog master tapes from the 1970s, so obviously I wasn't picking up on all the tape hiss. I only bought DDD back then, at the very start of the CD era, but somehow goofed up and bought that one, never noticing the difference. By the time I was buying Mercury reissues I wasn't the least concerned about it.

 

[Holmz]

I was still a kid when CDs came out. I recall some CDs, like Mercury Living Presence reissues having very noticeable tape hiss from the original master tapes that I could hear a lot easier than I can hear today on those same recordings. That might be a false memory. Or perhaps, I was going out of my way to listen for it because digital's big selling point was no tape hiss. Come to think of it, I know for sure that I had a Phillips classics CD (still have it) that I didn't realize for quite some time was actually from analog master tapes from the 1970s, so obviously I wasn't picking up on all the tape hiss. I only bought DDD back then, at the very start of the CD era, but somehow goofed up and bought that one, never noticing the difference. By the time I was buying Mercury reissues I wasn't the least concerned about it.

I always associate tube traps with my friend Mike, and maybe he got them later… but it seemed like the 80s or 90s.
(Maybe it was post 2000)

 

[Kal Rubinson]

I was still a kid when CDs came out. I recall some CDs, like Mercury Living Presence reissues having very noticeable tape hiss from the original master tapes that I could hear a lot easier than I can hear today on those same recordings.

We are all a lot older now than we were then.