And then there's the question of the different distortions added by the various microphones and recording techniques/machines used...
Of course Nrchy you are right in your critique, but there's still validity in the preference for acoustic instruments recorded live with minimal mic'ing in a real performance space, and with minimal alteration/processing during mixdown (or no mixing altogether). I won't go into all the possible reasons for this here, other than to say that it *is* very easy to hear for yourself that such records are usually far more revealing of the fine nuances of things like timbre and harmonic structure, low-level detail, and spatial cues than are recordings of electric instruments cut in multitrack studio settings. In other words, when I want to really hear what some change to my system is doing to the music, I always make sure to put on some more or less naturally-recorded acoustic material in addition to whatever else I might use, because quite simply it will show me the differences in the most revealing light possible.
None of which means that one can't or shouldn't use electric rock or whatever else to audition with, especially if that music accounts for most of what you listen to at home. Such recordings can and will be more demanding of systems in certain sonic areas where many acoustic performances tend not to be, and thus can reveal other qualities about a system. But what really helps is to keep the law of averages on your side, by auditioning many different kinds of music and recordings: If one system configuration can consistently give you a more natural impression - with more of your recordings - than some other system configuration can, than it's a good bet that system is, overall, providing reproduction that's closer to the 'truth', whatever that may be for any one given record. By the same token, utilizing a broad spectrum of recorded sources allows more accurate identification of any constant colorations or other distortions that are actually being contributed by the system itself. My own philosophy is of the 'master-tape' school of thought: The best you can strive for in a playback system is to 'accurately' portray what was laid down on the master-tape, as opposed to the live performance that tape was attempting to capture. Some will disagree, but I think that by trying to do the former, you are apt to get closer to achieving the latter on a more consistent basis. But you'll never get all the way there, or really even near enough for rock'n'roll...
One more thing: The very best, most revealing recorded source you can possibly use is the well-recorded speaking voice of someone you know well (not yourself! - we don't know what we sound like to others). But even this test only illuminates a relatively small portion of the frequency and dynamic ranges, and is not terribly complex or demanding a signal compared to group music. Its virtue is that we are intimately familiar with that voice as a reference, and that evolution has provided that our ears are most sensitive to minute variations in the human voice. The fact that this ostensibly simple test can never be satisfactorily met tells us all we need to know about what kind of chance we stand trying to reproduce live music convincingly.
Which is why, in my system, I don't try to. I just want my system to sound pretty good to me, meaning fairly uncorrupting of what my own sense about the 'correct' sound of decent recordings ought to be, with as little obvious sound contribution of its own as I can manage given my budget and commitment limitations. At the end of the day, if I can get close enough to where I'm not thinking about the sound of my system but just the music I'm playing, I really suspect that's all I can ask for. The funny thing is, this is very easy for me to do when I'm listening to a crap system, like the one I purposefully leave as stock in my car or my kitchen radio - I dial it in as well as I can, and then proceed to just get lost in the music, if it's good music. Only with the higher fidelity sound of the big rig do I tend to focus nearly as much on purely sonic attributes - is that self-defeating, or just the nature of the beast (or both)? |
Back atcha, Frogman. I must say to you all, I was curious about Frog's forum history after reading his post, so I clicked on his threads and answers, and I thought it was notable that he boasts around three times as many responses in the "Music" catagory as in any other one catagory (which of course are all technical/gear-oriented). Now, *that's* an audiophile who's got his priorities straight!
(None of which is to suggest that Nrchy's points aren't very well taken.) |
Above, I said I wasn't going to try to go into detail about *why* 'naturally'-recorded live acoustic music might make superior audition material. But it seems to me like one of the main reasons should be specifically addressed at this point. From the comments so far, I make the observation that most of what we're talking about seems to boil down to questions of tonal balance, and the timbral signature of any individual instrument's (or voice's) unique harmonic structure. All of this is valid, but let's not overlook the issues of phase and time.
Only in minimally-mic'ed live recordings do we get a good portion of the original phase and time relationship information preserved in the document. Despite our lack of familiarity with the actual instuments and venue used, our ears can still make use of the phase and time coherence captured. This translates - provided our systems can maintain and transmit the information mostly unscathed - into a better comprehension of spatial relationships and transient events.
In typically multi-mic'ed, multi-tracked studio recordings, where there might be no one original performance captured live, this information either doesn't exist in a relational sense (as in the case of purely electronic 'instruments'), or is distorted, or is in conflict between the various elements in the cut, or is artificially manipulated in the mix, or very likely is a combination of all of the above. The result is a playback performance containing no coherent spatial or transient unity to reproduce, which yields a muddled message no matter how we might try to configure our systems for convincing effect.
So, only if program material succeeds in capturing some of this original performance integrity which we would hear live (no matter what the venue, or where we were inside it), will a recording be able to illuminate much about what our systems might be doing to transmit or corrupt it. This is especially valuable for assessing transducer performance, and for investigating speaker/room set-up possibilities, but can be helpful for listening to the spatial and temporal linearity of any device in the playback chain. No, you still won't be able to know exactly what the original performance sounded like, but you'll still be able infer more about what your system is doing, because your ear/brain can detect and interpret a coherent signal, and therefore recognizes compromises to or absence of same. |
As I suspect Newbee correctly infers, I'm not sure that Uppermidfi's (great username) interpretation of my take is exactly what I had in mind. Nrchy and Newbee are essentially on target to point out that in almost any instance of listening to recorded music at home, an audiophile is going to be making subjective, impressionistic, and to a large degree fundamentally uninformed judgements about the verisimilitude of what they hear.
I'm not trying to argue for a 'standard' as such - there *is* one in some senses, but we can't really know it for ourselves - rather, I'm just trying to point out why some recording techniques are going to yield source material where the degree of fidelity of our systems, especially in certain areas, is more critically brought into play than with other types of material. What it boils down to is that if we are listening to material which contains relatively less information that has a correlation to reality, then it matters less that our playback system be able to convey such information. This is why dance music will sound better played back in a disco than classical music will.
But of course Uppermidfi is correct (and speaks for many of us) when he posits that in the universe of playback systems, there *are* those which are literally 'higher fidelity' than others (and vice-versa), and I think we all take it for granted that, at least in a gross sense if not precisely in every detail, we will for the most part be able to tell - whether or not we are intimately familiar with the source material, as long as it is of high sonic quality - pretty easily just by auditioning where a system falls on this scale, depsite having no 'absolute' reference to work from. Which, when you think about it, is a fairly complete description of why there is even a high end to begin with. And a fairly good defense as to why, no matter what arguments you might be able to come up with in theory about why it should not be so, the degree of fidelity to *some kind* of real acoustic event captured in the source material must be significant for audition purposes, regardless of our not having been present at the original performance. You can hear it, so it must be the case - even though both the recording and the playback system are never going to reproduce reality, in order to even stand a chance of getting any idea how close you might be coming, both aspects of the chain have to first attempt the feat. |
Nrchy: Anything having to do with human perception is 'subjective'. You can of course measure some aspects of the performance of your gear, to establish some answers as to how faithfully it transmits its input to its output under certain conditions of possibly varying relevence. You can perform some other measurements on the whole system, including the room, that will show a rather marked deviation from the software-encoded input signal. But characterizing the sound quality of different systems will always have to be confirmed, and maybe correlated if you're lucky, by the way they play music to subjectively listening human beings, and all the psychological baggage that goes along with that. But don't misunderestimate :-) what experience and an educated ear can evaluate, or how much your brain can extrapolate to complete the sensual, emotional goal of it all. As an audiophile, your judgements about what constitutes quality sound reproduction will be light-years ahead of most people you could pull in off the street, simply due to practice, interest in the pursuit of accuracy, some knowledge about exactly what that consists of, and having learned a language to describe your impressions. That also applies to technical professionals in the recording industry. We can make subjective judgements that do have some basis in reality, because we have learned and acquired some tools to do it. We're not entirely flailing around in the dark here you know. |
Yes Onhwy61, but when we compare systems, should we judge which is superior based on which one most closely approaches 'the real thing', or by which one we find the most subjectively pleasing?... ;^) |
"No two people will share the same illusion" - Bomarc
"Use your illusion" - Axel Rose
(Offhand, I can think of no more illusion allusions...)
Newbee, I share your outrage at my suggestion that anyone here could prefer something other than the Real Thing, and to make up for it I am buying everyone a round of Coca-Cola's on me. |
To partially answer both Nrchy's and Onhwy61's questions (How long has your system been the same? What valid conclusions can we draw from the observations of others?) as they regard myself, here's some news FWIW:
Yesterday I bought an amplifier from a local Agonner, paid cash and picked it up. I did this not because I necessarily wanted a new amplifier, but because I've been planning on doing some modifications to my current amps (capacitor upgrade) and wanted a spare. However, I do confess to having another, additional motivation. My regular amps are VTL MB-185 tubed monoblocks, but for a while I have been somewhat curious to see how I would react to a modestly-priced solid-state stereo amp - like the ones I used have a few years back before I got my previous C-J tubed stereo amp, only more up-to-date. Call it a reality-check.
The amp I got is a McCormack DNA-125. My reference amps cost about $5K new, the DNA-125 about $1.7K new. Truthfully, I am still only warming this thing up, as I literally inserted it into the system less than 12 hours ago. But already I can tell there are some things it does at least as well, if not better (or merely as well but differently) as my reference. Based on my past experiences, I was in no way expecting to be seriously tempted by this amp, and probably planned to sell it once my mods were done. However, I admit that part of the reason I'm auditioning something else now, before I do the mods to the VTL's, is to confirm in my own mind whether my reference should be a 'keeper' that I sink more money into, and also to double-check my overall commitment to tubed power by bringing in something solid-state. That the comparison could be called 'unfair' from a price standpoint (the output power isn't very different between the two into 4 ohms) I'll just have to let slide, since I wasn't going to drop much more than I did for a presumed temporary experiment.
But this little McCormack is obviously a very fine performer, maybe even 'good enough' - if we can ever admit to such a thing in this hobby - and I am going to enjoy listening to it for a while. Anyway, to get to the question touched upon by this thread, I just returned from rereading Jim Merod's review of this amp, and then going to audioreview.com, where there are 35 user reviews, who gave it an average of a perfect 5 out of 5 rating. And let me tell you, both Merod's piece and almost all of the user reviews are, I think at this early stage, dead-on acccurate in their assessment of this amp.
Now, this may not mean much in isolation, especially since it kind of surprises me, as I routinely find myself disagreeing with reviews both professional and amatuer. And, of course, I have a ways to go with this amp before coming to any final conclusions - there are still things I suspect my reference does better, although in terms of value for the money I likely have some thinking to do. But clearly, this McCormack is doing many things seemingly 'right', and everyone I've read about it so far thinks so too (next stop, Agon archives). That's got to mean something I believe ; that kind of consensus, jibing as it does with my own tentative experience, cannot be easily dissmissed as devoid of significance, at least not by me... |
Oh, I agree Onhwy61, and there have been times that I've recorded or produced in the studio where what I heard when I got home made me sick by comparison. Unfortunately though, unless you're able to afford an unquestionably top-flight studio and engineering, this may not mean as much as you imply. Reason being, if the studio has deficiencies or anomolies that will always skew the final product - and probably the majority of modest-cost studios do - then the deck is stacked mo matter how good your home reference system might be, and you can't use your suggested method to make judgements about its fidelity. Your position assumes that the engineer will have a system at his diposal which enables him to make 'correct' judgements (another subjective area), and this just isn't often the case for most amateur musicians. The result (that the master sounds different, and better, in the studio than it does at home) is not necessarily an indictment of the home system in such cases, and is usually to its credit. |
Nrchy: The way to know the difference between the mastertape and the original event would be to listen at the mic position during the original event - except that you can never know exactly what was captured on the mastertape without putting it through some kind of playback system that will distort it. And that includes the original studio's monitoring system, which may be no better than a good home system at representing the mastertape signal fed into it...
You would, however, gain insight into what the mastertape engineers and producers heard to work with. |
Pubul57, despite the rhetoric about the standard being unamplified live acoustic music - a standard that (within limits) is still useful and admirable, and which I understand aspiring to - I think that in actuality, most gear is essentially reviewed in relation to other gear the reviewer has experience with. Which makes perfect sense to me, since the different sounds of components will all be more similar to one another than they will be to real live music (a large part of the reason for which has to do with the recording process of the source material fed them, BTW). |
Of course. It's like asking to be able to depend on some sort of standard for how good food tastes, or which people are the most physically attractive. The only difference is that in audio, we are presumably trying to *recreate something* (more so in the case of live acoustic music), which by definition implies an original creation, a standard if you will. But since we can never be certain what that original was - only that we won't be able to perfectly capture and recreate it - things become, as we see in the high end, to a large degree simply a matter of taste. Still, the concept of standards does apply, for if we stray too far from a seemingly plausible attempt at faithful recreation in the pursuit of imposing idiosyncratic qualities, the majority of us will recognize this as no longer being high in fidelity - which gets us back to the question of fidelity to what? That's where the cognitive dissonance lies - the relatively peaceful acceptance of which is something essential to achieving, if not really the suspension of disbelief, at least the blissful ignoring of it. Which is to say, Don't sweat the whole concept so much that you can't hear around it, just enjoy as best you can! Some of my favorite 'lo-fi' recordings capture primarily a feeling, not the literal sound of a performance, and maybe not even the exact feeling I would have gotten had I been there in the room with the performers. Nevertheless, I have received the artistic feeling of that document listening over a high end system and over a table radio or a car radio. The most important part of the music can easily transcend fidelity for some mysterious and wonderful reason. |
I often think that one of the reasons I find it so easy to enjoy the music on my crappy, stock car radio is precisely *because* it eschews literal fidelity, and I know that it does, so it frees me up not to worry about such concerns and just groove. But then again, there are often times and recordings where it fails somewhat by not being able to clearly transmit content important to the musical message, this mostly being dependent on the type and complexity or subtlety (sonically speaking) of the music in question. |
What a priceless 24 hours. This afernoon, I did some critical comparisons of the DNA-125 vs. my VTL's after leaving the SS amp playing all night to get it really warmed up. Then, taking a cue from Nrchy, I played a CD-R of some stuff that I recorded with a band I was in a couple of years ago. My familiarity with the sound of my own guitar and the singer who's been a friend of 20 years made for enlightening auditioning, and I have to admit that the results took the bloom off the rose somewhat as far as the SS amp is concerned. Such is the danger of first-day judgements. There are still things I think it points up that my tube amps don't do as well as could be wished for, but most of their flaws I was already well aware of. More significantly, I think I've decided upon further listening that the deviations of the SS amp are more detrimental to my musical involvement than are the deviations of the tube amps. I guess I'm back where I started, thinking even more about modding my tube amps, but an educational reaffirmation is exactly what I hoped for from this experience, so I'm not at all disappointed.
The funniest thing is though, last night I emailed the guy I bought the SS amp from, saying I may just wind up keeping it as a spare for emergencies, adding, "You never know with tube amps!" Well, no sooner had I completed this latest round of auditioning and decided I was on the right path with tubes, lo and behold one 6550 lets go with a light show! I think I caught it very quickly, so I'm anticipating nothing more serious than replacing the tube. But I was laughing ruefully...
P.S. - Update: No problems after replacing the tube. In fact, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. When I got in there and started changing tubes and rebiasing, I began to notice some chassis reverberations making themselves heard through the speakers. Come to find that the NOS 60's Sylvania gold-pin 12AT7's input tubes I had upgraded to when I first got the amps, which I had liked for their treble extension and bass firmness, had become microphonic. Switching back to the previous GE's tidied-up the soundstage, toned-down some lower-treble brightness, and kept HF images from splashing forward - some of the areas the amp comparo had pointed up as wanting. The fun just never ends... |
I know that neither amp, nor my system generally, could exactly capture the sound I worked to achieve in the recording and mixing of the sessions. For one thing, the control room at the studio we used was purpose-built with angled walls and ceiling plus extensive acoustic treatments, and floated an image better than any home stereo I've ever heard. Hearing the mastertape during playback was so often startling in its physical embodiment of our performance that it could be downright spooky. However, I'm not depending on my memory of those sessions for my verdict on how close my system can come - I routinely took home rough and completed mixes throughout the recording process at the time, and knew then that I couldn't completely recreate what I heard in the studio when I got home.
At this late date, all I'm doing is listening to final product over the two amps and comparing for which rendition gives me more of that feeling of recognition for my own guitar and the band I practiced with every week for three years. Also, I have an innate sense of the recorded sound I was stiving for in my production, and listening over the tube amps, I am satisfied I had come fairly close to what I wanted ; heard through the SS amp, I don't feel the result was as consistent with what I was attempting to capture - it sounds more like the work of a stranger. But this still a very subjective judgement and open to question, because I've heard this disk played back on my regular system many times since it was recorded, so I'm accustomed to this particular presentation.
And I still think the McCormack is a very nice piece, particularly for it's low cost, showing amazingly little of the negative qualities I was prepared to find in an amp of its type. Having it here definitely helped me get a better grip on what's going on, and what needs to go on, with my reference amps ; I've done several other gear upgrades or substitutions over the past 18 or so months, but it had been too long a time since I heard any of it through an amp other than my VTL's. (It's no accident that it took a SS amp to show me I was having some tube-wear issues.) I can only imagine the hilarity that will ensue whenever I get around to upgrading my speakers...
Oh BTW, I was playing a Micro-Frets though a Super Reverb :-) |
Nate: Actually, there were just two songs from those sessions, which were issued on two of the annual compilation disks that get released for the Xmas holidays by a local charity against hunger to raise funds. All the tracks are donated by the bands, some of whom play a live benefit as well (which we did). The stuff wasn't audiophile-type material though - we played seedy garage rock... |
Well, if you really want to hear humorous lyrical rewrites about Santa Claus (all songs must be holiday-themed) set to covers of tunes by The Pretty Things and The Chocolate Watch Band and raucously banged-out by a bunch of never-were's on a spree, email me and I'll be glad to send you one of the dubbed copies I so thoughtfully made up for friends and family... :-) |
