How close to the real thing?


Recently a friend of mine heard a Chopin concert in a Baptist church. I had told him that I had gone out to RMAF this year and heard some of the latest gear. His comment was that he thinks the best audio systems are only about 5% close to the real thing, especially the sound of a piano, though he admitted he hasn't heard the best of the latest equipment.

That got me thinking as I have been going to the BSO a lot this fall and comparing the sound of my system to live orchestral music. It's hard to put a hard percentage on this kind of thing, but I think the best systems capture a lot more than just 5% of the sound of live music.

What do you think? Are we making progress and how close are we?
peterayer

Showing 1 response by br3098

Elizabeth,

I do not believe that even the best home systems are anywhere near 90%-95% percent in terms of realism, but I will qualify my statement by stating the obvious. There are many, many factors involved in what we consider to be "real" sound - too many to discuss in detail here. So, equipment aside, I will limit myself to three.

1- space/distance/time acoustics (aka room ambiance). This is pretty self-explanitory. Your room is not a concert hall. Or a sound stage. Through technical gimmickry (hardware) you can kinda sorta reproduce the same sound, but not really.

2- our perception of sound and how we process it (psychoacoustics). Neuron action potentials and other interesting stuff.

3- simple physics. A speaker is not a piano, a guitar, or a human voice. Although you can mimic those sounds closely enough that it the differences between live and recorded are almost indetectable to a spectrum analyzer, most people can still hear the difference. Well, except Bose customers anyway.