Can HiFi ever sound real?

IMO trying to recreate the live performance of an orchestra in your domestic enviroment is akin to tuning your road car to give the experience of driving the thoroughbred racing car you took round Silverstone. Forget it, just loads of money chasing the end of the rainbow.

With my preferred forms of music, you can come alot closer. If I go to a gig, I will be listening to a variety of instruments amplified by electronics and played through dynamic speakers. Hey I've got some of those So the illusion is easier to acheive, same with rock and soul vocals, we only ever hear them artificially amplified anyway. This falls down when it comes to a drum kit, often in a small venue this will be playing raw so to speak. That's why the reproduction of a big drum solo is way off the mark for most.

Even assuming your kit was totally transparent, any "perfect reproduction" would be decimated by your room acoustics anyway, leaving a wholly artificial veneer over the recording.

Now take acoustic instruments and full orchestras. Ever wondered what they would sound like through a PA Probably fairly close to a good sized, transparent home setup (eg, Titian's rig), assuming you can remove the influence of the room Now take the orchestra and listen without amplification or speakers and you have totally different transducers, different wave propagation, different dispertion characteristics, totally different scale and placement, oh and no electronics to interpret the sound and feed you a facsimile. Oh and then factor in the room again

Still trying The best hifi's in the world excell at presenting the essence of the music using as few additives as possible. Surely it's better to just buy something that allows the music to communicate with you on your own terms. At least that is a possibility.

 

I have thought long and hard on this..

the psychological element is a VERY significant factor...just try listening in a darkened room with your eyes closed(sensory deprivation...think of it like your brain is a processor and your visual takes up a huge chunk, so less is avaliable for hearing)
it does come more real
...also say a floyd concert with that massive speaker system...you are not hearing the live event there as such, you are hearing the P.A. system, tho have the performers in front of you , together with 'atmosphere' of other people around you...

...also, it is like said a facsimile...it is a substitute for live music, the speakers diaphragm is trying to be a drum, a violin, a piano...all these have individual methods of making vibrations and generating their individual harmonics...the cone tries to be all things to all men...

vinyl for some reason does capture the ambience better...this is beyond a doubt...just listen to a pipe organ, strings, or a classical guitar and you will understand....
..similarly for valves and electrostatic speakers....mpt tp say you cannot enjoy music without them,

..maybe there is a subtractive distortion, not added...what is missed off somehow...like chinese wispers too, the signal is getting cumulatively affected...

 

Data, you are right about the distortion thing, TT's, valves and electrostatics do add distortion, as you say, that is beyond doubt

 

Some rambling thoughts:

Recordings do not project a physical space the size of a concert hall, even if they were recorded in a concert hall. They are scaled down in the very process of recording. What's left (in a good recording) is a sense of the texture of the instruments and some of the ambience and staging of the recorded space, reduced in size and scope by a significant factor.

David Thomas of Pere Ubu wrote a very good essay about how virtual recorded space is its own environment, with its own dimensions and physicality, and its own temporal existence. In that sense it's as real as a physical space (like a concert hall), but it isn't the same thing as a physical space. The secret of good recording is to create a virtual space that is as palpable as a physical one, without pretending it's the "real" thing. A system that has timbral accuracy and low distortion can reproduce these recordings and give body to this virtual space without ever being "real" in the sense of reproducing the scale and range of live music.

All a bit undeveloped, but I've been in the pub all evening...

-- Ian

 

Interesting points all...

How close to reality do you have to get for something to be real? The first time I heard someone talkig about suspension of dispelief it was a cartoon animator talking about e.g. running hard to get back to the cliff edge you'd just run off before you started falling. Clearly this requires a fair stretch of the imagination. However, I suspect a far smaller suspension is required to believe a) a 25-year old bimbo is still in high-school and b) she packs a punch sufficent to see off a load of vampires and demons - I certainly know a few well capable of believing that, and I'm sure I could be persuaded to investigate with the young lady in question (purely in the interests of scientific research ). (My...this calvaldos is good). Now where was I...oh yes hifi....

Pursuing the psychoacoustics a bit further, I think an important point is the accuracy and adaptability of our audio memory. I think I have a particularly inaccurate one (e.g. I find it very difficult to be consistent in comparing the sound of a system with one cable vs it with another :newbie: , unless I can do back-to-back switching) - or at least one that is fairly swayed by what my brain is telling it. I have now removed most of the impedimenta to me believing that what my system is telling me is real - unless I hear the real thing in fairly close proximity, when the system's abject failure is quite obvious. The following day though it starts sounding pretty good again.

Tying this in with the earlier point about the piano - a few weeks ago I was about 8 yards away from a piano palyed by Maurizio Pollini - i.e. the kind of distance reproduced by the hifi facsimile. The energy in the real attack was quite deafening - and playing some of the same pieces when I got home (about 1.5 hours after the concert finished) it was staggering how blunted the reproduced piano sound was in comparison (but even if I'm not a bleeding-edge merchant it's no slouch - sideshowbob jumped out of his skin when he heard the Chopin Etude I'm talking about).

Trying to fit a 200 piece orchestra in a 4x3m room? While this is clearly a major problem/feat of disbelief-suspension, I think the important point for me here is the ability to project the image from the speakers back through the wall behind them. Maybe again it's a matter of the brain fitting what it hears into its expectations, but I hear an orchestral recording more distant than a solo recording, such that the apparent width of the orchestra scales appropriate to the angle subtended at the listening position by the speakers. With a system able to do soundstage depth, the orchestra then goes happily through the far wall. Of course its perfectly possible for the recording engineer to mess things up (I have some very 1-2D sounding recordings). I guess this is the same point as sideshowbob's (which has just turned up while I've been writing this).

Which leads on to Bottleneck's point about miking. There does appear to be a religious divide here - mike everything separately, or use a minimal set of microphones. Mercury Living Presence reckoned to use no more than 3 mikes - and it comes out pretty well (although the sound of the one or two CDs I've heard is a bit on the historic side). I've also seen concerts (e.g. LSO Live) miked up with about 3-dozen. I feel the most realistic results would be achieved with a single crossed pair set somehwere above the central stalls, with maybe the odd touchup from the other localised mikes only when necessary. Since this is nothing more than gut feeling it could be way off beam though.

There's also an important point to consider about mastering: if the expectation is for a system with low resolving power, channel separation etc then the engineer is going to put in greater spotlighting/stereo spread etc, which will then sound dreadfully artificial on a system that can do the resolution thing.

The most insurmountable problem I see though is reproducing the hall ambience. I've a reasonable number of live recordings where this is done wonderfully (e.g. Friday Night in San Francisco - Lee summed it up nicely when he said "I feel like I'm on the stage and the audience are all 'out there'). This is also why I like live orchestral recordings: the little coughs etc and other ambient queues from the audience do give a feeling of a huge concert hall. However that's all from around the region of the speakers back and through the far wall. What it doesn't do is give the feeling of space behing and particularly above you, which is what you get in a real venue. The TACT system tries to remove the unwanted reflections that say "this room is 4x3, tough", but I'm not at all convinced it can do the full ambience thing. Maybe this is where properly done surround would help. The only time I've tried this though was at those Classe/B&W demoes, where I've never been in the right place to get the proper front-back balance (which I see as one of the big problems with surround hifi), and so didn't really get the right effect. (The "put-you-in-the-middle-of-the-band" effect that the Meridian people did was a complete turn-off though.) So it's all round to Merlin's when he gets his TACT surround in - and he said he was done with box-swapping !

 

hi Graham ,
i,ve lifted the whole quote to help readers but this is the bit i,m interested in.
"I guess they're the ones with the more accurate hearing"

i think it,s the other way round , i think these are the ones with with less accurate hearing .
at least with a problem in how they re-assemble spacial information.

why?

it,s my understanding that when stereo was born , the leading developers wanted to use a centre speaker
it was decided against due to costs .(ie people wouldn,t buy a third speaker)
now if we had a centre speaker then it should be easier to form a solid central image .
so from the start the developers wanted to recreate a solid spread of image that placed singers/instruments in different places .
so although it was decided not to use a centre speaker (for cost /uncertain customer approval)do you think that the developers decided not to still try and achieve their earlier goal?
a soundstage.
not two seperate speakers making noise.

and thats why i think its not the people who can hear a soundstage that are imagining things/hearing deficient .
they are hearing what the kit was designed to do from the start.

 

Don't you think visual presence of the performers could also be one critical factor absent from all these experiences that oftentimes translate to unrealism? Can we possibly imagine an everage performing system turning into something very real if there were people infront of us pretending to imitate the performance? Just a thought really, if only to prove this point.When we hear something, we almost always want to find out what it is, don't we? Visual suggestions also help in creating a tangible presence of something that we normally define as real. I'm not suggesting to have real people in our living room, but maybe the concept of an AV set-up would help in a way. We cannot possibly turn off the lights or close our eyes all the time.

regards

 

To be fair Osama, I did mention in an earlier thread that Spendor arranged a blind real vs recorded comparison of various musical instruments for some industry insiders a few years back.

I was told that the assembled throngs fell off their chairs laughing when they heard the differences

 

hi,
just to add my tuppence to the discussion and to touch on a point raised earlier:
i think the realism that can be created very much depends on the music that you are trying to create. purely accoustic music, such as orchestral or unplugged style pieces i would guess would be the hardest to reproduce as you are trying to reproduce stringed or wind instruments with flapping bits of cardboard, kevlar, or metal which may be able to get close but are never going to be exactly correct.
amplified music is a step easier as it is intended to be reproduced live or in the studio through loudspeakers however you are still one step removed from accoustic instruments like drums and guitars for the same reasons.
purely electronic music, such as dance or trance i cannot see why this cannot be reproduced exactly as is intended (within the limits of cd and / or vinyl anyway) studio sound should be possible with only a slightly coranary inducing outlay whilst a club sound would be possible but expensive due to the necessity of siting your system in a warehouse.
perhaps the easiest music to recreate would be live dj sets where the 'artist' is mixing vinyl and playing it though amplified equipment. of course for that truly 'there' experience you may need to rent out brighton beach for the day.
i would think though that the main limiting factors are the quality of the engineering and production of the recording.
as an asside i read somewhere that the wattage necessary to reproduce a concert grand piano at realistic levels through an average speaker is somewhere around 680 watts!
cheers

julian

 

Actually merlin..I'll have you know that valves are intrinsically less distorting than transistors....trannys need more feedback, tho I don't know if this is as bad as has been made out...and they go and apply loads to get the distortion minutely low

anyway, I like me music soft and slushy with all those lovely distortion harmonics to colour it...

maybe I should do a limvalve like thing and say how sceintifically superior that is...then again, maybe not..:SLEEP:

crikey though moving coils typically add 1% distortion,..I don't know how many people know that?

 

Actually the distortion figures I have seen for many valve amps are quite shocking, as is the S/N ratio. Having said that, it's mostly 2nd harmonic which adds a certain nicee stylee to the sound OTL amps can employ large amounts of global feedback.

There are amplifiers that use transistors and no feedback whatsoever Data, very few but the transparency can be glorious and the distortion is negligable

 

talking of our good ol friend lim, I think he is playing around with some new amps..inc maybe a 300b, having initially decried them...so that would explain why he has been busy

actually I have just properly read the hifi choice review of limamp, and it is not actually far from the truth..in terms of describing its tonal qualities..the piano and strings are slightly off tone, and it does have a lower bias current..

check this out for some classic lim speak..no pun intended

http://www.affordablevalvecompany.com/speak1.htm

WM...? fancy a nice musical fidelity watch on ebay...? maybe they should do one with a luminous blue face, or with michaelsons image on the face?

 

Guys - can we not let this descend into a valves vs. solid state argument? If you want to do that please start another thread

Graham - I also hear an orchestral recording more "in the distance" on my hifi than a jazz trio or piano music and that helps a lot. It's kind of like sitting in one of the higher up boxes at a concert hall but it's still harder for me to imagine it (even though I have a soundstage going some way behind my speakers) than 3 blokes sitting almost infront of me with their instruments.

On the subject of micing - I don't really understand the subject well but I would have thought intuitively that minimal micing is the best way to go. Certainly the best orchestral recordings I have are all done that way.

Surely to get the most realistic sound recorded from a concert hall you have a single stereo mic (binaural head?) in the best seat in the house and that's it - job done. No mixing required. If anyone can explain why it should be different I'd love to know!

One thing that really irritates me is in recordings of concertos where the solo instrument is mic'd separately and then put way louder in the mix than it was in real life...WHY???

Michael.

 

maybe they should make them with a green glowing strap too and 'Comfy' & 'Tri-wrist' protectors that would be Nice

 

...they should start making pipes and slippers, together with 1/2 moon spectacles on chains ...mandatory fashion accessories...

 

Aaaww go on Michael, ZG could do with some lively debate

Seriously, IMO the first thing you have to account for is your room acoustics anyway. Regardless of how a recording is miked, the resultant ambient clues are going to be totally decimated by the dimensions of your listening room. What you will hear is far removed from the original recording. Once you reduce the room's affect, the colourations and limitations of the electronics become the dominant problem.

So, what do we reckon to sticking a Tact on Titian's system then

 

Must resist, must be very P.C. core meltdown...................arhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

 

Go on Tone, he's asking for it... :JPS:

-- Ian

 

Now, Now Ian that is very provocative, and if I were a less a man, then I might respond with 'Lock all weapons on target' and wait til you see the whites of their eyes' :clint:
However, I'm a more enlighten individual these days, especialy after seeing the Delia Larma last wednesday my life is so full of spiritual enlightenment, it would be 'Negitive Karma' and will upset my total Harmonic balance, which in turn screws my Ying/Yang equlibrium, which I'm afraid doesn't bare thinking about Peace and good vibes fellow traveller of the Music waves. Tone

 

order me a dozen of whatever WM has been on