My new DeanG networks…

[Mallette]

Frankly, I think it rather obvious that one cannot reproduce an acoustic time/space event. However, it is possible to reproduce the EXPERIENCE, and do so precisely. The technology already exists but is, for whatever reasons, not pursued.

If you want to get technical, it could be argued that mechanical recordings actually froze an event in time, as the records were cut directly by the air moved by the musician's actions. Some of these have a transparency that is downright spooky and unnerving.

I've often wondered if a skilled craftsman could build a "high fidelity" mechanical playback device using electricity for nothing but turning the disc and whatever we've learned since then about materials and horns for more faithful playback.

Also, I read predictions years ago that computers would someday be able to analyze acoustic recordings and determine the position of the instruments relative to each other and the recording horn yielding an acoustic image. Not sure if anyone has tried this yet.

Dave

Edited August 7, 2014 by Mallette

[Mallette]

Ever hear of a player piano? The newer ones are digital, BTW, capable of storing hundreds of songs and sounding exactly like a live person playing a piano.

Actually, they ARE a live person playing a piano. Hadn't thought about that, but if you use the piano in the same space as the person making the roll you are, in fact, reproducing the acoustic/space time event as it happened.

This link will take you to Scott Joplin playing his compositions, even though he has been "decomposing" for a hundred years.

Dave

[Mallette]

This distinction is not a minor thing.

No, it's really not even that. For some of us, there is no distinction. If you want to get SERIOUSLY semantic, try to actually differentiate what is an illusion and what is not...

Dave

[Mallette]

For my edification, how does a "space/time event" differ from a sound in a room?

I thought you didn't want to get into semantics. The terms are clear enough, though you may interpret them differently.

Dave

[Deang]

Three or four pages of really great stuff.

Mark, did you really want me to elaborate on the capacitor thing? It seems out of place now and I think people are sick of hearing about it.

[Mallette]

I enjoyed the thread.

And performed yeoman peacemaker work. I enjoyed your posts as well.

Dave

[Don Richard]

We just assemble gadgets to pretend we are listening to music. All pretend from one end to the other.

Maybe you don't remember how 2 Khorns reproduced the sound of a full symphony orchestra well enough to fool nearly everyone that was there. That's a convincing demonstration of accuracy of reproduction.

[Don Richard]

I have always said that all we are doing is creating amusing illusions. I have no pretense that it is "faithful" to anything. A set of pistons moving in and out on one axis is never, ever, ever, ever, going to be the same as the combination of big brass horns pointed all over the room, guitars, drum kits and pianos and human vocal chords whacking away at the air in 3D space. Never going to happen, ever. So, unless you have some new 'air-moving device' that is nothing like a box of pistons we call speakers, "faithfulness" is a 100% meaningless idea in the context of original events.

What about a rock (or jazz, or country) band with 2 guitar players, a synthesizer, electronic drums, and electric bass, sometimes playing through individual amplifiers, sometimes playing through the PA directly. Let's say they have made a live recording of this event through the mixer used to feed the PA. When you play this through a home system, what's the diff? You are listening to loudspeakers. Some of us here have speakers and amps similar to the PA's. There is a good case for saying that you can reproduce that event, displaced in time, accurately. Certainly accurately enough.

[Mallette]

Much as I am with DR on the issue of convincing reproduction, fact is the live vs. recorded thing was done with a mechanical recording a 100 years ago and the audience was fooled.

Dave

[Don Richard]

So it seems that, at the least, the three of us can say the illusion is good enough to be considered a convincing reproduction of a musical performance.

[muel]

Imagine Oscar Peterson's wife, standing in front of the piano hearing her (deceased) husband play from a vantage point she had never heard before.

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/10/05/players-piano-new-oscar-peterson-album-a-re-performance/

Check out a Zenph Re-Performance. I really enjoy their recordings of Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson. I would feel a little strange sitting in a performance hall looking at an empty piano bench but I'd get over it when the music starts!

[Deang]

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Edited August 8, 2014 by DeanG

[Mallette]

So it seems that, at the least, the three of us can say the illusion is good enough to be considered a convincing reproduction of a musical performance.

Yes, sir. I think we can say that.

Dave

[Mallette]

the engineer didn't record what I heard, from my position, with 2 mics in a binaural head, he used maybe 16 mics hanging all over the place that creates a signal representing a synthetic sound pressure field that was never heard by a human being's ears.

So true as far as it goes. I remain mystified as to why you seem to be dubious that 4 microphones placed coincidentally would not actually record "what I heard, from my position," Your ears cannot get anything like "...what I heard..." with only two microphones. Triangulation requires at least 3 points, and the human brain is much happier with 4.

Dave

[Daan]

So, assuming the idea was to use Jubilees or something like Mark's giant K-stack, I think there is a third alternative. Yes, there is the digital processor, and yes, there is the fork-lift slab of coils and caps ala Rigma, but what's wrong with a nice high end parametric like the NSEQ-2, connected with an analog source and analog amps? Has anyone tried that?

No, I didn't. But I did move from ; CD player- passive pre [only a high-end pot actually] - two Decware Zen tube mono's- ALK Universals- University Classics [three way] to a completely different setup.

Now it's ; CD player- passive pre- miniDsp- two Decware Zen tube mono's [mid-high] and Bryston 4B [lows]- University Classics [two-way].

Ofcourse it's no real comparison between passive and active because I changed more things at the same time, BUT to our ears well-known CD's especially the live recorded ones never sounded so realistic.

Now I'm not a sound engineer [.....far from that....] but always use the ears of my wife and myself to decide wether a change in the setup is a UPgrade or DOWNgrade.

Both our opinion is that this mix of tubes, SS and active setup sounds better [as in more realistic] after carefully finetuning than with any passive setup we previously had.

Only work the miniDSP does; provide the crossoverpoints, minimal EQ on the Beyma CP750Ti drivers [to correct the high frequency-rolloff of that driver] and 3.4 milisecond time-delay for the woofer.

We hear more detail, ambiance and depth in all our favorite songs we know so well, so for us it's a UPgrade; our toes wiggle and our two little boys dancing thru the room with lively music-material

A few days ago my wife said " it's like the words of the song have more meaning now", which told me we were heading in the right direction.

My 2 cents......

Nico

Edited August 8, 2014 by nico boom

[erik2A3]

Decware has some good, very well-built stuff! Their Mini-Torii, which my wife got me as a gift a couple of years ago, is a very well-made SE 6V6 amp that is a great match with Klipsch Heritage.

Nico Boom-

Glad to hear your system makes your "toes wiggle"

I love how kids, whether they are drawing or listening to music, have a sort of let-go-ness, an ability to enjoy something for its own sake, that many adults do not. Picasso often praised and expressed respect for the spontaneity, inhibition, and energy found in children's artwork.

Leave it to the adults to dissect, analyze, and intellectualize music and art into something else altogether. The modern painter Mark Rothko observed that if someone were to sit and analyze one of his paintings in the hopes of uncovering or extracting some greater and/or profound meaning or message -- then that person completely missed the point of the work as a whole.

Why not get up and dance with the kids!?

Edited August 8, 2014 by erik2A3

[Don Richard]

the engineer didn't record what I heard, from my position, with 2 mics in a binaural head, he used maybe 16 mics hanging all over the place that creates a signal representing a synthetic sound pressure field that was never heard by a human being's ears.

So true as far as it goes. I remain mystified as to why you seem to be dubious that 4 microphones placed coincidentally would not actually record "what I heard, from my position," Your ears cannot get anything like "...what I heard..." with only two microphones. Triangulation requires at least 3 points, and the human brain is much happier with 4.

Dave

Let's break it down. A human head has to "pickups" and they are spaced in a way that shades each from each other, and shades rear sounds down in level from front sounds. It's a very special acoustic map that the brain draws from its two ears. Let's call it then, the human brain map, or just brain map.

Now, the orchestra is assembled, you are seated in row 10, and a recording is to be made by a professional engineer. They will set out something like 16 or more mics. You know, some are above, some are right in front of sections, some are for ambient pickup and so on. These 16 mics go into the mixer and come out as 2 channels in the control room. Let's make the first set of claims:

1. What those 16 mics hear is far broader than your brain map. You can't be in all those 16 positions. Depending on how the engineer mixes the 16 down to 2, he creates a synthetic map of the sound. I say synthetic meaning it is not intended to mimic NY pair of human ears. It's a "2-channel abstract mixdown" not a human brain map of the sound.

2. What the engineer listens to is another pair of speakers! He isn't listening to what you in the audience are hearing. He listens to the synthetic mix.

3. Therefore, we now have TWO reference sounds. The first is the performance as heard by the man in row 10 with his ears. The second is the synthetic mix heard in the control room over the mixdown speakers.

4. Whomever buys the CD/LP that eventually follows this process never heard either of those reference sounds. And never will.

Now, you play your purchased CD/LP on another set of speakers in another room. It's not very likely your speakers are the ones used in the control room, and it's not likely your room is like the control room. So what is it that you do hear? You hear a new version of synthetic abstract mix that you are creating right on the spot. You can not reference it, or compare it to either of the two original references. You can't compare it to anything other than your imagination of what you recall such things might sound like.

That covers 99% of the material you will buy. Now, as to your 4 microphone setup, it isn't going to hear what the two human ears would hear, unless you shape all the pickup lobes to be like one pair of ears. If it isn't so shaped, it's just another synthetic mix.

There is an exception to all this, called binaural recording. In the binaural recording a dummy head is employed which has a mic implanted in each ear. The ears are anatomically correct, so that all the proper shading is employed. Now, this head is put in row 10, or row 1 or wherever the recordist wants, and nothing but these 2 mics are fed into the board and recorded. Now you have a realistic brain map of the performance which is recorded. Now you play it back and other than using speakers that probably weren't used in the control room, you have a reasonable "transcription" of the event that is mapped in human form. Most binaural recordings though require the listener to use headphones. It's very tricky to play them on speakers.

Normal multi-mic recordings produce completely synthetic output that offers no possible reference to the person playing the CD/LP at the end of the chain. So, all you can do is create an illusion.

You have described what I would call a bad recording, designed to portray a distorted view of the soundfield in that room, for that performance, in order to create a 3D effect that cannot be heard in reality. You have stated previously that this 3D effect is what you prefer to hear, versus a realistic representation of a performance. Okaaaay, whatever floats your boat. I'm glad we got that cleared up.

Edited August 8, 2014 by Don Richard

[NOSValves]

We just assemble gadgets to pretend we are listening to music. All pretend from one end to the other.

Maybe you don't remember how 2 Khorns reproduced the sound of a full symphony orchestra well enough to fool nearly everyone that was there. That's a convincing demonstration of accuracy of reproduction.

And without EQ, room correction, active crossovers or time alingment imagine that..

[mikebse2a3]

Look at the block diagram of the system......what's that....Could it be......EQ !!!!! They were compensating for system and room characteristics.

Page 21 and 22 gives more details

This paper is a must read if you care at all about audio reproduction...

miketn

auditoryperspective.pdf

[Daan]

Why not get up and dance with the kids!?

Haha, you got me there. The favorite position of my legs [after standing on them all day], is horizontal and pointing to the middle of the speakers so I let my children do the dancing.

You can say a lot of things about any given audioset, wether passive or active but when your toes come to life while listening you know it's GOOD !