cremona wrote:Problem is live music doseent really sound all that good espicialy rock concerts wich sounds pretty awfull from a hifi point of view.
Ever been to a sound check before the audience arrives ? i have alot being a musician myself , and it sounds pretty damm awfull and abseloutly not as good as what a good hifi system can give you.
It also depends higely on what kind of music you listen to, I listen mostly to None live recordings, mostly pop/rock , bands like the Cure , pink floyd, mark knofler,Eskobar, so my system goal is not making it sound Live becasue it never will with this music.
Hmmmm, some conserts are bad sounding but others are great sounding.
When the engineers makes the setup correct it's fantastic!
cremona wrote:Problem is live music doseent really sound all that good espicialy rock concerts wich sounds pretty awfull from a hifi point of view.
Ever been to a sound check before the audience arrives ? i have alot being a musician myself , and it sounds pretty damm awfull and abseloutly not as good as what a good hifi system can give you.
It also depends higely on what kind of music you listen to, I listen mostly to None live recordings, mostly pop/rock , bands like the Cure , pink floyd, mark knofler,Eskobar, so my system goal is not making it sound Live becasue it never will with this music.
Hmmmm, some conserts are bad sounding but others are great sounding.
When the engineers makes the setup correct it's fantastic!
Yes indeed
Havever going to a live concert experincing the atmosfear the anticipation and adrenaline seeing it live vs and a hifi system playing in a room is two intirely different worlds alltogether.
technicaly from a audio point of view the two senarios cant be comnpared ether,.
In my oppinion the psykological aspekt of a live concert is groosly undrerated when comparing live vs reproduced .
Live music vs great hifi in a great sounding room ? there are pros and cons on both sides here , a hifi sytem can do things that a live concert can never do , and thats why the two ways of listning to music in my oppinion should not be viewed as the same because the are not and never will be.
And thats the point if we lay aside that live music infact excists and music is only somthing thats recorded in a studio , what aspekts would make that music comunicate with the listener best ?
cremona wrote: Live music vs great hifi in a great sounding room ? there are pros and cons on both sides here , a hifi sytem can do things that a live concert can never do , and thats why the two ways of listning to music in my oppinion should not be viewed as the same because the are not and never will be.
Have you never been outside the living room (kitchen, hall or even outside the house) and thinking..."it MUST be a band playing live in there"?
I don't consider it being "two ways of listening to music".
A great HIFI system can give you an illusion of live music, if not - it's not a great HIFI system. 8)
cremona wrote:
And thats the point if we lay aside that live music infact excists and music is only somthing thats recorded in a studio , what aspekts would make that music comunicate with the listener best ?
Do I really have to answer that question
It's not even CLOSE...
Ceilidh, I have now carefully read your post from 2008-10-13 three times and I must say it's probably the most useful and intelligent piece of information about Source First theory that I have ever come across.
In comparison, most other texts contain generalisations and analogies that have basic flaws and therefore are of little use when discussing Source First and the Hierarchy with technically educated people. I have over the years tried to use analogies and examples from areas that are not audio related, in an attempt to get past the polarised discussions and the pride people put into defending their opinions of audio. You did this superbly on a high theoretical level.
I would like to ask for your permission to use your text elsewhere (with a reference to you on the forum). On my website under Info I have three articles that were written in response to frequently asked questions: What is good sound (about the Tune Method), about cables and about soldering. One idea would be to make a fourth article about possible theoretical explanations to why Source First works so well. I know that some technically educated sceptics would find such an article rather interesting.
By all means, please go ahead and use my posts however you feel fit. I've only three (optional!) requests regarding any re-use:
1) If you could, please make clear my disclaimer that I have neither worked in audio nor have particularly studied it, and the text is just a conjecture based on experience in other technical disciplines, written as a possible backdrop towards explaining Source First observations from trusted listeners.
2) Also, if you're focusing on the 08/10/13 post, you might wish to cut & paste (or paraphrase and extend in your own words) a conjecture made in my 08/10/10 post, regarding how Source components (in contrast to loudspeakers) might generate noise/distortions that (possibly!) appear similar enough to legitimate "signals" as to fool the brain's signal processing engine (or at least to confuse the engine and make its life more difficult -- perhaps that's why so many people report being "tired" or "fatigued" after listening for a while to a poor source?). That's a connection I didn't make clear in positing how Source noise might be akin to having trees and branches looking like horse legs in a distant thicket, whilst Loudspeaker distortion might be more like the gross changes in lighting and colour that come as clouds sweep across the sun.
3) Finally, you may wish to make more evident the basic point that if Source components do confuse the signal processing engine in the above manner (a big "If"!!!), then they will do so not because of their position in the audio chain, but because of the particular technical challenges those components face (e.g., whereas a good loudspeaker is probably not prone to generating spurious signals unrelated to the music (i.e., it might distort the incoming signal, but it won't be generating much of its own competing "music"), a jittery disc player / DAC or a vibration-prone LP pickup might be sending downstream all sorts of "information" that compete with the legitimate musical signal.
But the main thing is to make clear it's all conjecture! As this is not a field I work in, I can quite easily be wrong here! :D
Again, thanks for the kind words, and please have a good weekend.
I've just replaced a pair of Ruark Talismans (on the end of LP12+Akito+Kontrapunkt => Linto => Kairn => Klout) with a pair of AV 5140s. The resulting improvement is the single biggest upgrade I've made to my system since I started. My wife was in the kitchen when I connected the AV 5140s and she heard the improvement from there!No need for a formal tune dem on this one, the Ruarks are packed away in disgrace.
I then replaced the Kairn with an AV 5103. Very hard to do an A/B test, since it took me about 3 hours to program the AV 5103 (not doing that again), but the AV 5103 does seem to be a bit more tuneful than the Kairn. However if I had to choose between the AV 5140s and the AV 5103, as an upgrade, it would be no contest - the AV 5140s win hands down.
I think that this illustrates that upgrading piecemeal on a budget via the second hand market is not as straight forward as 'source first' alone might imply. Certainly this experience indicates that the Ruarks were a serious weak point in my system. The AV 5140s are not just more tuneful - they are better in every respect: imaging is now 3D(I'd assumed that this effect was just reviewers' exaggeration), lots more detail, bass is vastly greater tighter, etc etc. I was genuinely surprised at the scale of the improvement. It rather looks as though concentrating on improving the turntable and amplifiers and ignoring the speakers (which I've had since 1994) looks like a mistake.
