What is the correlation b/w measurements and good sound?
- Thread starter caesar
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My Audio Buddy has a pair of CLS, driven by Parasound, with Rythmik F12G subwoofers.
He has an SPL meter and a 30 band digital EQ. I need to get over there and see what a sweep looks like. Sounds good, though!
Oooooh! Happy days with my old departed pair of CLS iiZ, I would be most interested in your results Ray, most probably sound great yet measure like Pooh!
It's just marketing. Rarely does anything measure truly bad. It depends on definition of good. Frankly 1% distortion isn't worth raising an eyebrow, but we nit-pick at thousands of a percent all day. How you achieve distortion figures means more than the figures themselves.
Nah, it landed in my backyard. I'm currently salvaging pieces of it that I'm planning to use for the audiophile tweaks I'm going to market. "NASA technology" and all that...
There are such things as "octave smoothing" "A-weighted, etc." To go even further most measurements are subject to varying interpretations.
Yes, and some people know how to interpret meausurements (and knows when to ask for more), and some people don't.
Those who don't are usually from the "measurements are meaningless" camp.
If only a few yards to the left sigh!
Anyhoo, I am on the cusp of launching my new business venture, Area51 Audio Tm, so no corporate trespassing please.
That is the sort of Catch 22 argument that I have no hope of settling here. There are those who have mastered measurements and readily admit to there shortcomings. I fall in the group of not really knowing how to interpret measurements. I have picked up a few things here and there. It just brings us to that fire flame argument of ,can you trust your ears. So I don't think measurements are meaningless. Trying to find someone who really understands measurements and,is willing to be candid about them is difficult and rare.
What I "measure", that I find important, is distortion. Of the system in total. But I do it subjectively, using my ears only. In the same way one can "measure" how quiet the interior of a car is, not by an soundmeter reading, but by listening for extraneous noises, the rattles and buzzes so to speak. They may not have a high acoustic level, but they are extremely irritating, in a car!
In an audio system this is something one can learn to do, by using the 'right' recordings to provoke the system to misbehave - the process of eliminating "rattles and buzzes" in an audio setup ends up giving one good sound ...
In an audio system this is something one can learn to do, by using the 'right' recordings to provoke the system to misbehave - the process of eliminating "rattles and buzzes" in an audio setup ends up giving one good sound ...
Thats only an issue to the uninformed. Marketing will always try the bigger/smaller number better routine.
Thats not measurement, thats guesswork. Thats just tuning to your personal preference, which of course there is nothing wrong in doing so.
The other night a bunch of audiophile friends thought a recording of a DAC output was superior to the original. (blind test) It of course had been degraded in every respect by the re-recording process.
That's fine except you're really trying to gauge the amount of noise in the system, and clipping. You couldn't tell a 5% distortion from a .0005% distortion by ear.
So if you get into your car, and there's a rattling noise that wasn't there yesterday, then it's only a guess that perhaps something is not quite correct? Would you require someone to do a spectral analysis of the interior sounds, before thinking it might be worthwhile lifting the bonnet, or having a quick gaze under the vehicle? My personal preference is for a system to work 'correctly', not 'wrongly' - "superior" means nothing unless it actually relates to an absence of flaws ... if I didn't want to hear unpleasant noises inside my car then as a quick fix I could always stuff cotton wool in my ears - that's classy problem solving, right there ...
The answer is to focus in on precisely one aspect that's wrong - one and only one for the moment - you're looking for a signature to the system sound. If the playback is "perfect" then it has no signature, it just sounds like the original instruments and the distinctive quality of the recording environment, which includes the electronics used at that time. As soon as you hear the same quality, in some area of the reproduction, being imparted to the sound through a diverse range of recordings then you know you've got distortion of the playback happening. Of course, you may like that "tonality" being injected all the time, but personally I don't ...
Though, the good news is that the level of distortion can be reduced to a point where it's not audibly significant - audiophiles recognise this in a system, except they call it "magical", "organic", "immersive", "just music", "natural", etc, etc, etc ...
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