Food for thought

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beck
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Food for thought

Post by beck »

Comment taken from Stereophile:



"Right" gear damages the emotional musical impact the least.
Submitted by Golden Ears on February 2, 2019 - 11:26pm
Audio truth.

If the reproduced musical event were indistinguishable from the original, then you can say you have it “right”.

Music is an emotional experience. That is what we are after, to feel moved. Different instruments of different qualities help increase our musical enjoyment. Depending on the composition, they don’t have to always be the finest quality (“more cowbell!”) but they are selected for a reason.

To audiophiles, typically better sonic reproduction of the aspects that mean most to us gives use a greater emotional impact.

Everything in the recording chain, The microphones, cables, tubes. Mixers, recording medium , mixing editing, mastering, storage medium, playback device, amplification, cables, speakers, room and frankly whether or not you cleaned your ears recently has an effect on what we hear versus the actual original event.

Everything is a filter.

Not all filters are the same or have the same impact. We all know you can hobble together a system where everything measures well but sounds “too dark and plodding” or “ too bright and fast” . Indeed System balance is important and should compliment things like the limitations of your room.

So is more of the truth of the recording a good thing always? Not necessarily, for instance I have been at audio stores and heard the salesman say

“ There, did you hear that, did you hear the chair squeak in the far rear of the audience? These speakers?amps/cables have incredible resolution“.

Recording engineers go to great lengths in microphone placement to avoid highlighting chair squeaks, audience sneezes, coughs, cell phone buzzing etc. in mix downs you try to downplay these, and same cases in every part of the recording and mastering chain. So why should we try to bring these annoyances back to the forefront? It is “audio truth” but it is not part of the emotional experience. Far better for a salesperson to point out how emotionally moved you are by a speaker/amp/cable “Wow, I can see you have shed a tear”, “Really gets you dancing “ “Wants to make you sing along, right?” etc. Those feeling are also part of audio truth. And in my humble opinion they mean a lot more than the squeak of chair in the blackest of black backgrounds that go to infinity to let you hear the harpist’s quietest farts.

Thats not to say signal to noise isn’t important, I do think that signal to noise ratios of about 110db or better tend to sound better than lower S/N ratios but sometimes a bit of the baby can get thrown out with the bathwater chasing vanishingly low distortion with negative feedback etc.

Everything impart its own filter sound.
DAC’s , the vast majority of them, personally I have heard less than 5 DACs (made from 1990’s tp present ) that sound relatively natural without errors of commission that are gritty and spotty in high frequencies and make instruments sound vaguely out of tune or out of step. I don’t care f you call it jitter, or a steep brick wall filter, or low sampling rates, or the fact that there is thermal noise in the chip limiting us to 21 bits of resolution..whatever you want to call it, I hear something grossly unnatural and unpleasant so the only time I can enjoy digital from a DAC not from that list of those 5 pleasant DACs is when I am being distracted doing a physical activity typically where I’m moving faster than 50mph like driving or snowboarding 30-70mph or skateboarding 25-50mph. I need the mental distraction of a quasi dangerous experience to not have the Digital grunge and lack of emotional connection so apparent .

Some filters tend to add a rich presence to the sound… like tubes, tape, vinyl. And even though the lowly Cassette tape has hiss, and often was played back with dolby phase shift, noticeable wow and flutter (speed variances much larger than digital) the pleasurable filter added by the tape and what it may have left out made tithe most successful selling recorded medium despite Vinyl and Reel to Reel being around. Here was a medium you could listen to while distracted driving, or doing sports, and it had no surface noise save a bit of hiss, plus it was immune to skipping. This was the heyday of enjoying recorded music. And it was the most pathetic recorded analog medium (next to MP3 and mini Disc and frankly if you heard even a prerecorded ferric cassette through a Tandberg 3014a deck you would likely prefer it to most of what is considered the best digital, because most of the emotional content is not nearly as damaged as it is with digital.

Now I also feel that the average playback system acts as a filter which can determine what music becomes popular. The music whose emotional content is LEAST damaged by the jumble of filters in the playback system tends to become popular. So when we had mono tube radios Vocal harmony of mostly midrange was the least damaged. In the 1960s even Keith Richards realized that he had to make his music sound good though a diction type mono tape recorder (he used one to record street fighting man)In the 1970’s rock music that used distortion musically was least damaged by cheap solid state (Hendrix and Led Zeppelin ). Discotheques made disco and 1980s music sound less damaged at high volumes , Radio was popular because The Bozak Broadcast Mixer sounded so good.1990s had digital replacing vinyl and industrial bands like Nine Inch Nails embraced the harsh digital sounds and made it part of the music. In the 2000s iPods with low bit rates and crappy ear buds had groups like Edie Brickell and folk sounding groups emotional content least damaged. The subwoofers tossed into cheap cars without upgrading the front speakers had Rap and hip hop become the least damaged music emotionally. Computer speakers have rouble producing anything other then EDM. And well protools is a filter all to itself.

People vote emotionally for their music. And if their music doesn’t sound good- they will listen to talk radio. Club DJs noticed it early on in the digital era that people didn’t like to dance to Digital as much as with the exact same song on vinyl despite wow and flutter, feedback, and surface noise. And attendance started going down, and as vinyl became replaced by digital most of the nightclubs closed because digital through already glaring distorted PA systems was just too detracting from emotional enjoyment to make it worth going out anymore. Hardly perfect sound forever, more like I don’t like going out and listening to recorded music. EDM helped revive this, but IMHO we will never have the nightclub base playing analog music and rock we once had without analog music without digitization. So many clubs use digital compression and digital EQ, that there is no way to make analog pass through the system without being stripped of a great deal of its emotional impact. Again EDM, Industrial , and Rap Hip Hop and grudge seem to be the only genres that are least affected by digitization. Promoters try to emotionally involve the crowds with more lights and pyrotechnics when they really should be looking at the full audio chain.

So which amplifier is right? The one that gives the listener the greatest emotional connection. Having heard the Krell KSA series (great bass PA amps BTW and fantastic for difficult loads) and the founders edition of the Cary 805 founders edition mono blocks with a few mods and top tier tubes (I have demonstrated with those amps at RMAF and T.H.E. Show Newport Beach I’d have to say the Carys are the more “right” amp as the musical EMOTIONAL connection is stronger. I have done demos with Solid State amps like the Odyssey Stratos and also can get good results but the tubes dollar for dollar tend to be more right in each price class over $2500. Now if I were just listening to EDM, Pearl Jam , NIN through Magnepans Id go with the KSA in a heartbeat, but for the vast majority of wide genres of recorded music (both analog and digital ) the Cary will be the better fit.


Read more at https://www.stereophile.com/content/if- ... QUWtLOi.99
Playing cd’s…………
Charlie1
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Re: Food for thought

Post by Charlie1 »

My experience aligns to most of that. Just not sure about the correlation between popular music during each era and the limitations of the equipment of that era - seems like more of an assumption on his part.
donuk
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Re: Food for thought

Post by donuk »

I have often felt that early sixties pop music sounds more nostalgic when played on a three inch speaker driven by a couple of OC71s. I am sure early Beatles, Stones, Hollies and the like were mixed for this.

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