Scientists vs Audiophiles

A great article from Stereophile:

http://www.stereophile.com/thinkpieces/165/

...seems relevant to some of the discussions we've been having here lately

Michael.

 

Not wishing to fan any flames, but anyone who can't understand how somebody (the pro-audio target of the article) can simultaneously believe that cables and connectors make no difference, whilst also believing that hi-fi is both art and science, is an arse.

1-0 to the scientists IMO, an own-goal by the audiophiles puts them in front. A couple of the letters are quite good, particularly the engineer from Harman:

"Experiments, properly done, are crucial to progress in engineering. But audiophiles (in the sense that Reisch uses the term) are, in fact, the anti-experimentalists, rejecting the results of any (blind) experiments that conflict with their worldview, regardless of overwhelming evidence of the efficacy of blind experiments developed from experience in professional practice. I think that some of the antipathy that pros have for "audiophiles" is that, ultimately, pros have to make things work and to please their clients, while audiophiles are required only to please themselves"

BUNDLE!!!

-- Ian

 

about the best thing ive heard from a harman product since turbosound moved out

 

so one of the guys who takes a good bit of music and then compresses f*ck out of it is saying that he knows best...
cough*bollocks*cough.
sorry some cro magnon throwback who lamps his mixing desk with lumphammer in order to adjust it saying that audiophiles are fools is just too funny.... i'm sure tony has mentioned his anecdote about the engineer who mixes using the meters rather than his ears, seems this is more than just an isolated case.

cheers


julian

 

I perfer tin-bashing and it's dbt free too

 

I have to say I have always found it very strange how so many sound engineers poke fun at audiophiles.

I am a sound engineer and audiophile and I really don't find there is any problem being both!

Only this Monday I was talking to a man who has been a sound engineer for a long time (I guess at about 25 years) and has a huge amount of experience and knowledge. He started talking about digital and analog and stated that digital WAS better than Vinyl. End of story.

I said that it isn't so simple and that I knew a lot of people who would disagree!

He said that if you put both on a 'faro-graph' ( ?) then the digital system would come out better on everything.

I didn't bother pursuing it further, but in his defence he did say that he has directly compared original master tapes pressed onto digital and analog and the digital always sounds more like the original, even if the analog one sounds 'nicer'.

anyway, I don't see why most pro audio engineers can not understand both, room acoustics matter as does the mic pre-amp but why don't they believe a cable matters?! I think most sound engineers have a hidden audiophile inside

Nice article.

BTW I have to say Julian, the people who have spent their life's learning how to best record and mix music do know best The heaps of compression are more to do with the record company wanting their record to sound the most loud and exciting on the radio and as a free-lance engineer you will compress or not be hired!

 

The most interesting thing about that piece is the contrast between the article and the letter from the Harman engineer.

The article itself is a "touchy feely" piece of fluff, which presents no actual facts to support the "audiophile" case. It's title is deliberately provactive "Scientists vs Audiophiles" and actually false - the correct title should be "A sound engineer vs. an Audiophile" (singular) in both cases. The sound engineer is being branded a Scientist in order for Reisch to throw a few shots at science. This is the usual "oh science is lacking", baloney to cover up the fact that the "audiophile has no evidence". So what if there's no unified field theory, we don't need an all encompassing theory - all Science is asking is that the reported "audiophile phenomena" are demonstrated in a proper test - the Science about the phenomena can come later.

Orban (from Harman) takes another tack - although I'm not sure what he was driving at with the "huge erection".. It's a patient explanation of some science followed by a verifiable set of claims (about op amps). And it doesn't decend into a them versus us rant of the article, or general rambling about what is wrong with audiophiles (cf science in the article)..

So what about Scientists and Audiophiles? Well, here's the science:

Acoustics is fairly straightforward physics.

psycho-acoustics: what we know about hearing, and what can and cannot be heard.

electrical engineering..

The problem is that you need to know a lot of science, most of which doesn't come nearly as easy as reading an "appeal to common sense" article in the hifi press. The hifi press touches on acoustics every once in a while (and I mean beyond speaker placement); it almost ignores EE, to avoid running into all kinds of problems; and I don't think I've ever seen any psycho-acoustics discussed ever discussed in the popular hifi press.

I guess there's no advertising dollars in science

 

tenson,
if the recording engineers really do know best then why are there so many shabbily recorded and engineered cd's about (and not only those that are destined for radio play).

dat,
so what you're saying is that neither side knows everything? bravo.
i would also include psycology in your list of relavent scientific disciplines as without someone hearing the music, is there really any? And that's the one that makes this such a contentious subject.
cheers

julian

 

First off, I can't say I hear that many! But I do tend to buy CD's partly based on the recording quality so maybe that's a reason.

What I was saying is if they don't know best, then surely it must be in comparison to someone else? Otherwise there is no basis to say they do a bad job. So who is it you think can do it so much better?

The reason why there are some bad recordings is first because there are some bad engineers around, as well as people who don't want to spend much on the recording. If you listen to commercially released recordings though, there are very few of 'bad' quality.

But the truth is that it is an extremely hard thing to do.

I do agree about the compression on the final mixdowns, but as I said that's not really the engineers choice.

Who does know best? You?

Rgds,

 

tenson,
i'm not saying i could do a better job if those are the words you are trying to put into my mouth. what i'm saying is that there is a lot of poorly engineered music out there, this is in comparison to some well engineerd music. this may of course be down to the artists or record executives making the call: 'make it sound like crap' however somehow i doubt it.

as to who can do better? well, the mere existance of some well engineered music suggests an answer to that one.
cheers


julian

 

Remember that the main way the mass market listens to its music is over their car stereo or on a walkman - and stuff will be mixed to sound good on that. I once heard (IIRC) Elton John say that the first thing he did when approving a new release was put it on the car stereo - if it didn't sound good on that, then it went straight back for remixing - and I would guess a load more compression . So don't expect any 'popular' stuff to sound any good on a hifi system!

 

Okay, so in fact what you are saying is that recording engineers do know best!!

Yet as with everything there are some good ones, some not so good ones and everything in-between.

 

no,
what i'm saying is that VERY FEW audio engineers seem to be able to produce a decent sound. for the money that we pay surely we should expect more.
cheers


julian

 

Julian, agree entirely, seems as Graham has put forth, the Teeny bobber mix is most previlant in the current clime.
I have a good friend who is one of Sony's top producers/Mr fix it's last meeting I had with the man, one of his comments were 'Our best market is 13-22 Yo's', as they get mummy & daddy to buy Briteny/justin/blue/busted/atomic Kitten lastest, so are main marketing is aimed at them' and most of them listen on a..............
Tensen how many years experiance have you had a sound engineer ? 10, 20 ? could you explain how the trends have changed over the last 20 years or so for us poor music lovers don't feel too dispondent.

 

I dont buy that something is engineered to sound good on a crap system, if it sounded as good as it could sound, then the crap hifi will play it back as good as it could sound. I experienced this myself with my crap systems in the past, good recordings were still fairly easy to tell apart from bad ones. How can a crap system make a crap recording sound good? It cant, simple as.

Truth is, something is either well done or not IMO.

 

Not true outside mainstream music. There's plenty of small labels who have no problems producing excellent sounding records.

Compression is the problem, and that's generally not used outside the mainstream, where CDs aren't produced to appeal to teenagers, MP3 users, and people listening in their cars.

-- Ian

 

I understand compression has been used on certain SACD rereleases (KoB if memory serves me right is supposed to be one).
Most of the dance / world stuff also has nice heavy doses of compression bringing everything right up to zero, and in the case one latin/hiphop record, which was nominated for a grammy and engineered by a very famous engineer with over 30years evperience, actually into clipping

 

Well, I guess I just disagree then! I very rarely hear a CD that I would say is badly recorded. Even bands that are hardly known have very reasonable recording quality IMO.

Apart from too much overall compression, is there anything you can point out as something you find disappointing in the recordings?

Wadia-miester, I am only 17 so I have not had much experience, but it is defiantly true that compression was not used as much even just 10 years ago. If you stick on a CD like Supertramp (very well recorded!) you can tell quite easily because they are so much quieter!

The only other thing that has really changed is that with the take-over of digital from analog, multi-tracking has been taken advantage of more. When analog tape machines were used a typical number of tracks for a high-end recording would be about 16 - 24 max. (Except for Queen who had a 24 track recorder JUST for backing vocals!)

However now with digital equipment, because there is a lot more accuracy and much lower distortion, noise floor etc.. recordings sound extremely thin with only 16 or so tracks. So a typical high-end recording now, can have around 60 tracks helping to add more 'musical strings' and give it more depth.

I'm not too sure about trends in mixing and mastering technique. Obviously there is more editing going on and you need to spend a lot longer to get all those tracks to sit in the mix nicely.

You complain that pro-audio people poke fun at audiophiles, but hey, it goes the other way too!!!

 

tenson,
this is where things get hazy as i could list a bunch of things i find annoying and you could quite validly counter with, but that could just be how the artist wanted it. however i'll take the bait

1) instruments / vocals wandering in the soundstage. one minute the lead guitar is on the left, then it's in the middle.

2) audiable distortion / clipping on instruments.

3) bad miking / innefective or no spit shields (or whatver they are called) leading to poping and sibilence.

4) instruments drowning out vocals or vice versa.

5) bad quality samples. not strictly an engineering problem i guess but anoying when you can hear them.

6) instruments that change volume noticably when things get going, rather than set the level for the whole track so that when that awsome guitar break happens that pegs the vu's in the red it doesn;t distort. the lazy shod meister just tweaks the level down a bit for that part...arrrrghh.

7) bad mixing of different takes into the final mix.

i think that's about it although voice tweaking when it's done to improve a crap singers voice also rankles but it's hardly the engineers fault pre se.
cheers


julian

 

I thought they did that on purpose
You make some very good points Julian.