Unfortunately, Amir, you're making the common mistake of saying, I can measure the competence of separate parts of a system, in certain, specific ways - and I can then extrapolate those findings to say that I know what the competence of the overall system is, in every possible way.
) they are infact a perfectly valid and serious criticism of one of the very worst shortcomings of vinyl in my experience. And it makes it even worse again because speed variations exist in analogue tape decks and record cutting lathes. They all add up in the final product and wow is one thing with vinyl that I struggle to live with on occasion, whereas other people have astonishingly high thresholds of sensitivity to it. Michael Fremer recently posted a vinyl transcription of the Reference Recording LP of Copland's Third Symphony (well, he did the Fanfare). The wow was horrible - worse than it was when I play my copy of the disk on my own turntable - even on his billion dollar turntable. If anything, I am actually finding that record cutting lathes these days are adding a higher percentage of wow to vinyl records than our turntables or analogue tape decks put together. I say that because I own some recent records where the source was fully digital (hi-res) and yet the wow on the perfectly flat and centred record is quite audible. Yet I am can play a sine wave on the same turntable with a calibration LP and the wow is far, far less than what I am hearing on the LP. This means the main culprit is the lathe which is equally alarming and disappointing. I have actually noted that the younger the LP in my collection, the worse the wow. This has me speculating that these lathes have churned out so many lacquers over the last two decades that they are starting to fall behind the 8-ball in terms of maintenance. To me this is a huge shortcoming of the whole analogue -thing. It is electro-mechanical and the mechanical side of it requires ongoing, regular maintenance in order to maintain performance.
Fair enough ... not the best memories, then - makes the job of getting competent playback even more critical
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Well, I'm emphasising that digital components may measure well, but often sound less than satisfying. It's easy to point to technical flaws in vinyl, measure significant distortion components, but it's usually still easy on the ears.
I wouldn't like to use the word "superior" - competence is what I'm after, and that combines very accurate reproduction on what's on the media, and, being "easy on the ear" - if significant amounts of information are discarded, so that the sound is not offensive to the listener then I wouldn't give it a tick; both "truth and tonality", as I called it in a thread about my then system, need to be present.
We have to be careful in our use of language - what Frank means by "less than satisfying" is not "easy on the ear" in the sense that you are using it.
Frantz, you asked this above "The concrete is How do your define "Real"? Real in this sense means "realistic sounding" - in other words, is the illusion portrayed sufficiently convincing based on our experience of how things sound in the real world? We all have this same internal model/map/knowledge that we have built from our exposure to the sounds encountered in the world & how they behave. It's this internal model that we all compare a sound to & if there is anything unexpected found in this comparison our attention is drawn to this & we sense it as unnatural
I recently realised that this is very like how we learn to speak. We aren't schooled in grammar before we are able to form grammatically correct sentences. How does this work then? How do we learn how to speak in grammatically correct sentences? How do we internalise the "rules of grammar" without actually being able to state these rules?
We do so by hearing again & again, in the world, many different examples of how spoken sentences sound. At first we simply try to ape the sounds we hear & over time & many corrections later we have internalised this in some abstract model. It's to this internal model that sentences are compared to subconsciously when listening to speech (or forming our own sentences). It's not a conscious thing but when a word is out of place or a non-native speaker uses a slightly incorrect word, we immediately notice it.
This, I feel, is what's happening in our listening to reproduced music - it's being subconsciously compared to the "grammar of sounds" & anything which does not quite fit interferes with our sense of it being "real" & the more of these things crop up, the less "real" it is perceived to be & the "less satisfying" it seems.
I've been looking for a soundbite that explains these concepts & "grammar of sounds" is a good one
) . Internally we may be wired the same .. Externally? The Nature vs Nurture debate comes into play. Our education, experiences, biases become factors that can be conscious, subconscious or all these. Examples abound in the literature where same listeners change their preferences when knowledge is removed. I know you loathe this kind of testing but haven't been able to propose anything better (Little jabbing in all good humor ). So I will repeat that there is an audiophile aesthetic, it is learned and it can come to be an important determinant in our preferences. Once it becomes dominant, it regularly overcome the internal model. Once the audiophile knows then his\her preferences come to play, he\she is often sincere but the internal model is blunted. The best example is what happen once a person learns about an optical illusion, then it becomes easy to see what was up to then invisible. So, yes, there is a point where all of us perceive the reality of things. We need to remove the other biases for this internal model to become dominant. It seems to do in blind tests .
