Do we really know what "Live" music sounds like?

This post will spare me to wrote one.... Anyway it is better said than mine would and he says it all... Thanks to the poster...

A couple problems with this article. 

Unamplified live music is affected by the room. This has just as much or more bearing on the sound then an "amplifier."

Secondly, it depends on your position relative to the instrument or vocalist. As a guitarist, I sit behind the instrument. An acoustic guitar is going to sound different to me than it does to someone who sits in front of me. And if you're sitting off to the side it'll sound different. And if you're sitting in front of an amplified guitar cabinet it's going to sound a lot more like the recording than if you're sitting 50' away because guitar cabinets are close-mic'd. And if I move my head 1" it'll sound different. And on and on.

And do we really want it to sound real? Almost all recordings are post-processed. Why? Because live performances have real or perceived flaws or deficiencies. Or some instruments are too dominant in the live setting and must be dialed back. Or the room doesn't have enough reverb, or too much reverb. Or slap echo. And so on.

And I'll end with our limited acoustic memory. How do we remember what "real" is? A good example is an Anderton's YouTube video called Head or Tread. Rob Chapman, a very experienced musician and guitar company owner, did a blind test of various tube amps, solid-state amps, profilers (computers that mimic an amp) and pedals to determine which was an amp head and which was a pedal. He owns some of these amps and the profiler. He got almost all of them wrong, including the amp he uses at most of his guitar clinics. And again, according to studies, musicians are supposed to have better acoustic memories than the average person.

 Re

The perception of timbre is not only the perception of a "sound" but  the perception of a  meaningful sound...

We were conditioned to perceive human voice for a million year....

This is all we need to create an audio room...

Make a search and read: the word to search for is "acoustic" the second word "psycho-acoustic"...

If you dont have any experience and fresh remembering about instrument timbre, if you dont learn how to perceive his micro-structure in space, how do you test by listening experiments your room?

Do you think like most that the sound comme from the gear in an immaculate conception OUT of ANY ROOM ?

His point: "....In short, you need to know what music sounds like if you’re going to try to effectively reproduce it." I disagree. Maybe for recording engineers.

 

Nobody know what live music sound SAVE with his own specific ears and history...

We were programmed to recognize human voices apparatus for million of years , sound coming from any direction...

No one is programmed in life to distinguish live music and playback music, it is an acquired skill and never exactly the same for everybody, SAVE for musicians practising the same instrument and exhanging impressions between them...

But even for them live music and playback music are different birds...

We can only compare the playing micro-structure of the tonal timbre of only one instrument at a times to improve our audio system.... Or use choral voices....

Pretending live instrument an recorded one sound the same make no sense...

A recorded instrument can sound natural for sure so much that even a musician can be surprized... But even a virtual 3D movie where we will be someday would not fool reality for an astute observer...

 « "Reality" is God kingdom smell's in us »-Anonymus Smith

Another great post! 

By the best mechanic on audiogon....

😊

I will not add anything to this very good post! thanks...

He wrote more economically than me anyway..... 😊

Skoff: "Correct judgment requires a fixed standard – one that is absolute and unvarying....we need to know what the reality we’re trying to re-create actually sounds like. And in order to gain that knowledge, we need, somehow, to experience the real thing."

From which row? Which side? There is no one fixed standard at the live event itself. There is no "the" to the initial reality.

@edcyn "I know my system doesn’t sound like live music. In many cases that’s a good thing, my system sounds better than live music."

Great observation. Indeed, the quest may be to get back to the music as conceived not as performed or performed and initially reproduced. This was Glenn Gould's idea. Concerts were not ideal ways to approximate the music. Concerts are dispensable. He did so and to all our benefit.

Unamplified listening acoustic music HABIT is key...

Timbre perception is the key factor...

Engineering audio vocabulary is USELESS to tune acoustically an audio system....

Speaking about "bass" or "highs" end of the spectrum made no sense, save to compare 2 amplifiers or 2 pieces of gear... This is USELESS in listening experiments and experience in acoustic...

Acoustic is the sleeping princess and all pieces of gear are only the 7 working dwarves...