What do we judge audio reproduction against ?

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"So what do we reference our systems and components against ?
How it sounds in our room(whether it can accurately reproduce the sound print of any type of instrument)?
Do we judge it against how much more information we can hear or how much wider the soundstage is or deeper(these in the case of a live recording are important and can reveal the sound print of the venue) or any of the other HI-FI terms of describing sound ?"



I think this is an intelligent question....some what along the lines of ...what does hifi mean to you?

.....but with a sightly more scientific twist to it.

gonna be different for everybody.

From my point of view, its as compared with what it sounded like yesterday or the day before.......before the last adjustment I made.

 

Hi Davidf

Yes we can do that but is it accurately reproducing the Sound Prints of human voice etc? Is that not what we should compare it to ? I think ,what does hi-fi mean to you while a valid question this is not what i am asking about strictly speaking . I want to see if there is any consensus on what we reference our hobby to and as our electronics speakers etc are making music ,should that not be what instruments sound like in real life ?

Regards D Louth

 

I think that the question may be putting a different emphasis on the systems a number of people have and how they were chosen.

I would not put my system against any live concert I have been too. Assuming that the sounds at the concert where ''good'' which is far from the norm, I could not hope to re create the size and scale of the venues. The ''being there'' buzz can not be recreated either, as more than half of the enjoyment comes from the atmosphere generated by the audience.

I look (listen) for a system that re creates the basic colours of music, by that I mean that vocals are produced in such a way that the inflections are carried across, the feelings that a good singer manages to have caught in the recording is maintained. I could not tell the make of a string on the 3rd Violin from the left, but I can tell if the guitar string is pulled or flicked, I may be able to tell makes of Brass instruments apart, but I would not money on it, but the playing style certainly comes across.

I am looking more for a involvement factor rather than a Hi-Fi experience. It could well be that makes me a flat earther and if so then that is what suits me.

I have two systems around the house (as well as various one box systems in bedrooms etc). The main system involves me in the music, the second system that was more chucked together to provide music in my office does not. It does not do anything particularly wrong, but it just plays Muzak rather than drawing you into the music. In fact that is a criticism I would level at a number of components and systems, they are very good at muzak. Strangely these are often the items that measure very well.
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actually possibly not!

I remember having precisely this conversation with my uncle (who was into it at the time........early 80s).

His summation as that you are trying to get a sound that pleases YOU......which may not bare any resembalance to the origional artical........from rcording studio.....to vinyl, or cd, things are chopped and changed so much.......

Of course , if you are listening to classical, its good to get wood and wind instruemnts sounding life like and realistic.

Generally though, its (amybe ) your own interpretation on what you want to hear?

 

Hi dudywoxer I think most of us are a bit like you but should the absolute sound be how an instrument sounds its sound print. If nothing the Musical Fidelity experiment proves that the demands of trying to reproduce live is very hard . I think their power and vanishingly low distortion level approach is missing the point as the last range of products they made measure well but aren't very musical IMHO.

No it is impossible to recreate the weight and scale of a big concert but it must be possible to get the sound of the instruments right to reproduce their sound print.

I don't think what you have said makes you a flat earther at all .

Regards D Louth

 

Your life experiences.

So however old you may be you'll have likely heard thousands of voices and sounds over the years, in different acoustic environments, at different loudness and juxtaposed to other simultaneous sounds.

Compare audio reproduction to your experience of real life sound and you won't go wrong.

One thing i can ell you for sure - forget silky highs, warm voluptuous mids etc and other hi-fi nonsense because real life sounds are often nothing like audio systems, especially audiophile high end systems, present them.

 

That isn't necessarily the case but I agree most systems lack the cone real estate to deliver in this area. Weight and scale are very important to me in getting closer to the performance .

 

I think the question could also be 'what could we judge audio reproduction against'?

I think it's a tough question either way. I don't expect my system to reproduce the sound of a live band, because most of my albums are not live recordings, and I when I attend a live concert the sound doesn't get recorded/mixed/mastered on its way to my ears. And I don't live in a concert venue. I'd like to get that sense of weight and scale if it exists on the CD, but I don't have the room for speakers like Cookys, sadly .

I'm thinking along the same track as Dudywoxer and DavidF, in that I hope my system will be enjoyable/involving to listen to, and the only thing left to judge its performance against is pre/post changes I make. Mind you, as I travel along that upgrade path I do feel that I'm getting closer to something, but I don't know what, and I don't know how long the path is or whether it has an end, or just goes round in a big stupid circle with me throwing money around willy-nilly as I go .

 

Me, too actually

I know at my end of the spectrum ( as opposed to the krells /Mark levinsonsof this world shall we say) I 'm unlikely to acheive miracles ....but I was getting a bit of presence; soundstage; + definition.

 

Hi D,

Sorry if it was I that was critical - I think it probably was!... sorry. The internet forums are a harsh place sometimes

So, what to compare against? - for me it's ''the way music sounds in my head''.. or, if you like, the way I want music to sound. Whether that is strictly ''accurate'' or not, I care not a hoot.

I do play guitar and have recordings of acoustics straight into a board/tape..and I know the instrument inside/out..so there's that - but again I don't play these recording samples to test equipment, I go by the above instead..

It's my humble view that hifi (most especially speakers) throw ''a lifebelt'' to the aspects of sound you like the best - be they dynamics, be it a flat response, directionality etc. A series of compromises to get to something you like the sound of. Accuracy and compromise are strange bedfellows I think, and the word compromise seems so much more appropriate to me in the description of audio equipment... ''no compromise'' being a meaningless sham of a marketing quip.

 

Me, LS? (edit; BN rather)

Nothing YOU'VE written has upset me, not knowingly anyway.

Thanks anyway!


yes ,they can be.....

 

Hi David - no, I think I was a little critical of D louth's ''listen to live music'' when picking hifi thing.

Hey, whatever works for the individual though..!

 

my view from another thread.


every single recording played back on your system should 'sound' very different to one and other.
this is due to the fact that different musicians , instruments , engineers , studios etc have been used in each recording.
this is the only fact that we know for any degree of certainty.
so a system should sound entertaining and accurate to the recording , accuracy explaining my first comment that all recordings should sound different.
hi fi that does not allow the listener to hear the differences are not hi fi.

 

ahhh!

OK!

 

I think I go along with the "like live music" train of thought to an extent, although there are some significant caveats to that. Certainly, what I'm looking for most out of a home listening event is suspension of disbelief - forgetting that I'm listening to a recording through reproduction equipment and feeling like I'm listening to the musicians directly. I think that's broadly the same thing as trying to recreate the live music event.

My major problem with this is that it relies on a recording that is faithful to the original performance and a mental benchmark in the mind of the listener. Outside of the world of classical music, neither are very likely.

I primarily listen to acoustic music (folk, blues, etc) and have been to literally hundreds (several hundred in fact) of gigs over the years. The majority of these have been small local venues, but even so, I have been to exactly three non-classical gigs where the music was unamplified [as a side note, all three were at the same venue, seating around 20 people, in the same week at a festival - as it happens, three of the most memorable gigs I've been to]. All of the other gigs have, to a greater or lesser extent, been listened to through crappy amplification and worse speakers - not an experience I am trying to emulate at home!

So, when I'm evaluating a change in my system, I'm listening for a number of things but in the end the decision will be based on an assessment of how easy it is for me to believe that I am listening to musicians in front of me. A lot of that for me is based on my own personal experience of playing instruments.

All of the above assumes the source recording allows such an assessment and it has to be said that a lot of studio recordings do not. I do listen to such music of course, so I also need my hifi to reproduce that in an enjoyable way. However, I do find that, bass reproduction aside, if a system is reproducing the well recorded stuff in a convincing manner, then it is very likely to fare well with the studio gimmickry too.

 

Not a bad way of putting it.

 

enjoyment... nothing else matters


unless you're talking about studio monitoring - but this is a hifi forum not a pro audio one.

 

Hi Guys

The range of posts on this thread so far express a wide range of experience and approaches to the thread subject and while none are wrong as such IMHO ,it does worry me that so far there does not seem to be a strong realization that many of our approaches in a broader context may be wrong and only of value in our own homes. If audio reproduction is so nebulous (being only what we want it to be) then how can we offer a broader opinion if the only truth we can offer is our own and not a reference standard against which all audio is judged. This reference must also apply to designers and us as listeners(civilian and professional).

So far i think lbr has shared what i was living in hope to hear from the forum but i also think that mike defacto makes a very valid point.Your system must be enjoyable to listen to(live music is not always so,something hinted at by another poster). If nothing else
i think the posts so far have shown that a standard approach to
audio reproduction may be more difficult to arrive at.

I think the danger of it works for me(my truth) is it leaves us open to confusion and misunderstandings,something i think all of us can agree is a problem in the audio house at the present. If the non-audio world is to take us seriously would it not help if we had a bench mark to work towards(this will still i hope allow individual approaches to that goal).

I am not suggesting that we end up with a ruler flat lifeless set of rules but just that we should be able to agree on a frame work on which we might collectively hang our hats on .

We can all agree to do our own thing but does this help audio in the wider sense the pursuit of capturing the essence of what makes music,thrilling,emotional,enjoyable and something we are all in love with (not our systems) but the listening experience.

Regards D Louth

 

What are you looking for, some kind of EU standard for Hi-FI, it must measure within these tolerances, it must have this and do that, it must cover this frequency range, the THD must be within, the damping factor must be-- All we would finish up with is a commitee designed standard that wrapped itself either around the lowest common denominator, or around the current standards of the most powerful producer that managed to get themselves on the standards commitee. In fact a re-hash of DIN 45000 .

The enjoyment of music is, and I trust (hope) will remain a subjective thing. I can not for the life of me see how people who are putting systems together who have as a main listening pleasure music as varied as Classical, Heavy Rock, Jazz and ''Pop'' would choose the same system. Any music reproduction system is a set of compromises, and the purchaser balances those compromises in such a way that the resulting system gives them musical pleasure and satisfaction. That is, and has to be, a subjective process.

If we wanted to interest the non audio world in our hobby/pastime, then we need to realise that magazine's promoting ?30k systems are only going to preach to the converted, that suggesting ?2k cables in a ?2k system is a touch pointless, and that in the real world, most things are not sprinkled with fairy dust.
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