Toward a Theory To Increase Mutual Understanding and Predictability

DaveyF said:

+1

Having been in a situation where i am making a 'live' recording of my playing an instrument, I certainly want that recording to sound as close as possible to what my playing and instrument sounds like...to me.
Therefore, i ask, does there really have to be a difference between what is on the master tape and the 'live'. i actually do think that the line between the two can be blurred to some extent ( On a great tape recording). However,
at the end of the day, the 'live' is always ( IMHO) going to trump the tape in SQ...even if it is not a vast difference to some.

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1. The guy with goal 2 (reproduce whats on the tape) in theory has an easier job...he makes his system transparent, and he is 'done', no matter what album he plays. A guy with goal 1 (reproduce original event) in theory should be adjusting his system EVERY TIME he plays a different album in order to adjust it 'precisely' to get it to 'original event' since each mastering was different for each album as well as each recording technique.

That said, i think there is still something to be said for 'assuming' Hyperion, Channel Classics, BIS and other labels like this are great references for trying to attempt Goal 1: original event live in the listening room. This is because i have found when a guy tailors his system so that his reference albums sound like live instruments, i have generally found most of my own test CDs also sound GREAT on such a system. And then i can sit back and relax and enjoy music...which is my REAL primary goal. And if certain albums do NOT sound great, so be it. (I still have yet to find a system that can extract a fulsome, lifelike sound out of certain Bruce Springsteen albums.)

2. In the extreme, when a guy tailors his system SO MUCH that he can make a thin, sterile recording 'seem full' in the false hope of making it seem lifelike again...it [might] seem better, but in my experience, i have found i can hear 2 mistakes being made...a not-so-good album being 'artificially reinflated' with thickness, glow, etc...and then on reference recordings, forget about it. Its difficult to listen to.

1) recreate the sound of an original musical event,

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Hello Ron

Hmm that's interesting as I don't think it's really possible but I use live music as a reference. I also listen to lots of Rock/Pop and electronica. In some of the really small venues I frequent they have very simple PA set-ups that end up being essentially live stereos as the band is playing through simple L/R stacks with subs typically under the stage. If you listen to the CD's for the bands that play these venues at high volume and compare it to the sound at the live shows it is remarkably close in many cases. You can also stream off of the internet using live shows recorded on Audiotree, KEXP or NPR Tiny Desk Concerts as sources for a similar experience. I find one of the keys is being able to keep up with power and slam of the venues sub-woofer systems as the bass at the live show can be remarkably clean and powerful.

Rob

Robh3606 said:

Hello Ron

Hmm that's interesting as I don't thinks its really possible but I use live music as a reference. I also listen to lots of Rock/Pop and electronica. In some of the really small venues I frequent they have very simple PA set-ups that end up being essentially live stereos as the band is playing through simple L/R stacks with subs typically under the stage. If you listen to the CD's for the bands that play these venues at high volume and compare it to the sound at the live shows it is remarkably close in many cases. You can also stream off of the internet using live shows recorded on Audiotree, KEXP or NPR Tiny Desk Concerts as sources for a similar experience. I find one of the keys is being able to keep up with power and slam the venues sub-woofer systems as the bass at the live show can be remarkably clean and powerful.

Rob

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Agree about bass wallop live. i always use albums with kick drums to gauge the so-called accuracy of the sub when its playing. Mainly because i know from a [few] years of listening to drums play live what it sounds like during rehearsals, and just as importantly what it 'feels' like. The compression of the air and the compression at your chest has to be a certain way to mimic that live drum kit.

On certain albums, i can get a satisfying enough kick that is really balances out the band performance on a CD [clearly, i am a 'Goal 1 man'!]. But man, it takes HOURS of listening to the same darn 10-20 seconds OVER and OVER again sometimes. I am no expert, so i have to admit it can be a little trial and error. We have just finished the last of the finetuning bits for [hopefully] some time now...and it took 6 months since professional installation.

Ron Resnick said:

How do you describe in a sentence your objective of high-end audio?

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Hey Ron,
If you don't mind me jumping in and answering this, I like to keep things simple and intellectually honest. My objectives are 2-fold:

1. Enjoy a luxury of great sound. I already greatly enjoy music off youtube and xm radio in my car (and obviously both of these sources dilute the musical signal)
2. From a social aspect, share experiences of great systems and components with other folks, to improve this luxury experience. And, of course, since experiences are not absolute, explanations can only be meaningful by comparing to other systems and components.

On certain albums, i can get a satisfying enough kick that is really balances out the band performance on a CD.

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Hello LL21

Yeah I do something similar I have several CD's where I have heard the bands do them live and I find the bass balance on the CD to be a bit heavy which is exactly how they balanced it out at the live show. I try to set-up the sub levels to be a bit heavy on these tracks and it typically works out. I can adjust the subs on the fly but try to avoid it because it plays havoc if you forget to put them back.

Rob

1. Enjoy a luxury of great sound. I already greatly enjoy music off youtube and xm radio in my car (and obviously both of these sources dilute the musical signal)

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Hello Caesar

I agree I get a lot of enjoyment in the same way and although they do dilute the signal it does not diminish my enjoyment as I tend to just get lost in the music and the source is secondary

Rob

andromedaaudio said:

1 isnt possible ,so we aim for 2 and settle with 3 .

Regarding no 2, an audiophile who is after that should own mastertapes how else can you compare , have a reference .

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Actually if you sit in on a live recording session and follow the chain of custody from the session to the original master, then the mastering and publishing you'll be surprised how much of that original event still exists. Of course I'm not talking about a multitrack made up studio hack.

david

LL21 said:

Nice one, Ron. I'll bite.

1. I fully respect that it is IMPOSSIBLE to recreate the original event since even the recording may not have done so, certainly not perfectly.

2. At the same time, i also accept i have NO IDEA what the original recording engineer and mastering guy heard at the mastering board either...so trying to be 'true to the recording' is also not possible for me.

In the end, the ONLY reference i have is what i 'believe' a piano sounds like in real life, a voice, a flute. Does it sound like that in our living room?

Following this alone, flawed as it may be, I can say that the more i have 'honed' my system to make certain recordings sound more and more like a real piano or a real voice in our room...funny thing, more and more of our various albums ALSO start to sound better and more lifelike.

With perfect correlation? Absolutely not...but certainly a 'trend' which continues to reinforce my instincts and my honing process.

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Without getting past post 4, this is my position too & I would extend it somewhat by saying I'm looking for the believability of the auditory illusion produced by our playback systems.
So this includes how believable the sound of each of the elements in the playback, piano, voice, flute, etc. but also the overall communication of the ensemble.
This becomes tricky when the recording is 'assembled' from individual performances done in different venues at different times, rather than an in-situ recording of the piece by all the performers concurrently.
In that case we are hearing the recording engineers art in assembling the track, good or bad.

I believe that this is all we can usefully do, imperfect as it may seem

Ron Resnick said:

(...)

1) recreate the sound of an original musical event,

2) reproduce exactly what is on the master tape, and

3) create a sound subjectively pleasing to the audiophile.
(...)

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microstrip said:

Ron,

Are you calling "sound" the physical waveform or the listener perception of it?

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Ron Resnick said:

In this context by sound I mean the listener's perception of it.

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Wow - that makes an whole difference! Now in some sense 1) merges with 3) most of us consider that we get a subjectively pleasing sound when it approaches our perception of reality.

Even the real reason behind believers of 2) is hidden in 3) - these people believe and feel that reproducing exactly what is in the mastertape in a system created to maximize our enjoyment of recorded music by statistical analysis of preference is the way to subjectively enjoy the musical experience.

bonzo75 said:

You talking to me? You talking to me? I put this in my first few paras http://zero-distortion.org/kedars-style-of-blogging-reference-components-and-reference-recordings/

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Wow, thinking about this subject makes my head hurt. Personally, if I had to pick, I would say I fit into category 2. Hopefully, the recording captures the sound of the original event as closely as possible. However, there are several issues to consider. In a lot of recordings, there is no singular event to capture. I am thinking of most pop recordings that are multitrack and recorded on different days and even different studios and pieced together. This is even the case for some jazz recordings. Whenever you have a piano in one room, drums in another and a vocalist in another sound proof room, all performing at once, there can be no singular event to capture. Classical is the one general recording category where you are capturing a singular event. In those cases, I want to hear as closely as possible, what the microphones really captured. The other fly in the ointment is that we have to use our experiences with live music to make any of the judgements which Ron references. We can't know what the sound was like in the venue of the recording. Considering that we all have different processors between our ears, we all have different takes on what we perceive, which can form the basis of some our disagreements. Personally, I know what I like. I can't tell you what sound you should prefer anymore than I can tell you what flavor of ice cream you should prefer. That is up to you to decide. The fact that I may not like the sound of your room doesn't matter as long as you do. You have to live with it. If you live it, who am I to complain if pass judgement?

Ron Resnick said:

Audiophile discussions are more convoluted and argumentative they have to be. A lot of our posts talk past each other, rather than attempt at the outset to understand the other person’s frame of reference and perspective.

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Hi Ron. I think as much as we argue about our objectives in this hobby, our actual evaluation is quite close to each other. I was at Mike Lavigne's house and just about every track he played, it matched my view of an "audiophile sounding" track. As you know, he and I could not be more different in our approach to the hobby yet we both focus on the same set of musical tracks and performances as the judges and verification of system performance.

Where we wildly vary is what words we than attach to why we liked that sound, and explanation of thereof. Confusing perception with actual sound waves in the room, improper understanding of technology and science, believing myths and our own (incorrect) intuition is what keeps us from coming together. There is no "compass" that unifies subjectivity in audio. It is a world where anything goes "because I heard it" no matter how incorrect that assessment may be.

There is an answer here of course that we should be rallying around but we don't want to go there for religious and human reasons.

All I really want is an all immersive experience
I know I cant do live and most of the music I listen to isnt live anyway .. I have no idea of what it sounded like in the final mastering so the best I can do is assemble a system that makes ME suspend belief.
Until you know whats in another's mind and their preferences , the talking we do to each other is sometime meaningless from one's own point of view

Rodney Gold said:

All I really want is an all immersive experience
I know I cant do live and most of the music I listen to isnt live anyway .. I have no idea of what it sounded like in the final mastering so the best I can do is assemble a system that makes ME suspend belief.

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This makes a lot of sense to me and in that regard I'm betting Amir and Mike (all of us?) are in far more agreement than not.

Ron Resnick said:

1) recreate the sound of an original musical event,

2) reproduce exactly what is on the master tape, and

3) create a sound subjectively pleasing to the audiophile.
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Troublesome in ways...

1. If you're interested in this, that's fine, I respect it. Obviously live recordings will work best. But the most important thing to realize is that you should toss out ideas like accurate, non-colored, pure, authentic, etc... You are 100% trying to tailor the sound. As mentioned you may be trying to EQ for every album you own since recording and mastering engineers rarely are trying to make the music sound live/like the experience. They just want it to sound good, and whatever that means varies a lot, but may include compression, alternations, etc.

But even though some audio companies do this, they would never admit to it. The audiophile that says they want totally manipulated sound, well, I've never met or heard of one. It's basically against the code of ethics audiophiles believe they have. So they say they want one thing, and say they want the opposite all at the same time. This is one of the biggest problems in the industry. If people could just admit it, there would be more products people want. As is countless products essentially aim for #2 and mix in a little bit of 1&3 so otherwise OK products will be "great" to the ears of whomever.

I see this as the biggest step forward, to moving forward in how we discuss things. It would however be hard for me to believe that people can get over themselves. I'll personally tell you that I've considered adding the ability to manipulate these attributes for fun, but be able to go back to "#2" at will, on some of my products I've been working on.

2. I prefer this most of the time because I think there's good and bad engineers that mix and master. The difference is I don't believe it won't lead to a very life like performance or very enjoyable. In fact to the point I'd say most gear that aims down this road isn't even very good at it. They have the basic signal so you might get articulation but it hardly sounds like music and this isn't actually due to lack of manipulation even though that's the most common road to correct it.

The most interesting thing to consider here is that the audio engineers' playback setups probably weren't that amazing. Many, many audiophiles have much better equipment for playback. In other words we can exceed what the "master tapes" were intentioned as, in a manner. The signal is retained throughout the process due to good equipment, but what the engineers heard can often be a less authentic representation of the signal than many audiophiles get. Our albums would be better if more engineers had better capable systems for doing their work, really. Not everyone has stuff as nice as Bruce does! In fact tons of work is done on awful stuff like Yamaha NS-10's. (speakers that cost like 1/25th what one rack mount item they use might)

3. Probably what most people are doing when trying to achieve 1 or 2. I'm not really sure how it's a catagory.

marty said:

This makes a lot of sense to me and in that regard I'm betting Amir and Mike (all of us?) are in far more agreement than not.

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Quite true. I found Mike and I had different descriptions for things at times too. But there was no doubt we both responded to similar things. Part of this is coming from an electronics background. I'm sure a sound engineer would see another aspect that's different from say Mike and I.

I believe purchasing patterns often show people are looking for similar things, despite different language.

Ron Resnick said:

How do you describe in a sentence your objective of high-end audio?

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My objective is to separate the audio signal from noise. If that is done one might not have to settle on just one option.

Controversial perhaps, but I think that everyone who uses their ears (rather than an oscilloscope) and isn't a recording engineer is by definition a 3. I think we like to pretend we're looking for something more noble, more pure, and it's nice to think that we're chasing lofty ambitions like 1 and 2, but in reality I think that all goes out the window when we listen. Of course "subjectively pleasing" covers a multitude, and it's possible for everyone to have a different idea of what that might be -- "subjectively closer to the experience of live performance", or "subjectively more accurate-sounding" (whatever that might mean) easily fall within the expression -- but I think we're kidding ourselves trying to claim anything else. We're all 3s, and that's why the arguments happen.

Probably not so helpful from me, Ron, sorry about that! The thing is, I ultimately know what you're getting at, but I think the divisions are sufficiently artificial that very few people will feel they're fully in any one camp. Surely in the best case scenario we're all impossibly striving to attain all 3 goals, so the question remaining is which inevitable compromises we're each personally willing to accept. Some can't cope without full range reproduction, some can't live without explosive dynamics, some can't do without pinpoint imaging. All of these are points of departure for any of the 3 goals listed, and they all suggest equipment decisions and styles, and that's where I think a certain degree of self awareness would be well served. I don't think people in general are good at recognising their own blind spots, their own sonic ideals. We all want accuracy at the end of the day, but I don't think it's to a live performance, or to the master tape. I think the accuracy we want is to our own personal view of what "accurate" means to us.

Edit: For what it's worth, I'm a 1...!!

Diapason said:

Controversial perhaps, but I think that everyone who uses their ears (rather than an oscilloscope) and isn't a recording engineer is by definition a 3. I think we like to pretend we're looking for something more noble, more pure, and it's nice to think that we're chasing lofty ambitions like 1 and 2, but in reality I think that all goes out the window when we listen. Of course "subjectively pleasing" covers a multitude, and it's possible for everyone to have a different idea of what that might be -- "subjectively closer to the experience of live performance", or "subjectively more accurate-sounding" (whatever that might mean) easily fall within the expression -- but I think we're kidding ourselves trying to claim anything else. We're all 3s, and that's why the arguments happen.

Probably not so helpful from me, Ron, sorry about that! The thing is, I ultimately know what you're getting at, but I think the divisions are sufficiently artificial that very few people will feel they're fully in any one camp. Surely in the best case scenario we're all impossibly striving to attain all 3 goals, so the question remaining is which inevitable compromises we're each personally willing to accept. Some can't cope without full range reproduction, some can't live without explosive dynamics, some can't do without pinpoint imaging. All of these are points of departure for any of the 3 goals listed, and they all suggest equipment decisions and styles, and that's where I think a certain degree of self awareness would be well served. I don't think people in general are good at recognising their own blind spots, their own sonic ideals. We all want accuracy at the end of the day, but I don't think it's to a live performance, or to the master tape. I think the accuracy we want is to our own personal view of what "accurate" means to us.

Edit: For what it's worth, I'm a 1...!!

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This post gets the gold medal for me.

I'm a four. I try to use one and two to get to three. I want a hand in creating the experience.

I have been in recording spaces and behind the glass during monitoring and recording. I've chosen and laid down the mics, set the groupings, recorded and mixed the sucker then to the final multitrack bounce onto 1/4 tape and CDR simultaneously. This is not a binary experience. The changes on both sides of the glass are so large you're not even thinking about the dichotomy. You are working in the recording space in order to get particular sound in the monitoring space and on to the tape or disc. It isn't the other way around. Your not trying to capture the studio performance as is, you're trying to make it a translation of it. One that is better. Trust me. Being in a recording studio with the band at full tilt can literally be a painful experience. Even Acoustic sets just don't sound right because the acoustics are not the kind you would find in public. So, the line continues on to mastering and finally mass distribution. It is a creative process and the medium we hold in our hand is the product. We take the ball from there. Do you try for 1? Maybe 2? Like it or not as Diasapon so perfectly put it, we will end up giving in to our human desires and do 3 anyway. Only the most masochistic would convince himself that fun be deferred to such an extent. Who wants to spend more time roaming around and tweaking or going around with a mic more than just kicking back without having to have any lingering sonic insecurities? LOL. All roads lead to 3.

Diapason said:

Controversial perhaps, but I think that everyone who uses their ears (rather than an oscilloscope) and isn't a recording engineer is by definition a 3. I think we like to pretend we're looking for something more noble, more pure, and it's nice to think that we're chasing lofty ambitions like 1 and 2, but in reality I think that all goes out the window when we listen. Of course "subjectively pleasing" covers a multitude, and it's possible for everyone to have a different idea of what that might be -- "subjectively closer to the experience of live performance", or "subjectively more accurate-sounding" (whatever that might mean) easily fall within the expression -- but I think we're kidding ourselves trying to claim anything else. We're all 3s, and that's why the arguments happen.

Probably not so helpful from me, Ron, sorry about that! The thing is, I ultimately know what you're getting at, but I think the divisions are sufficiently artificial that very few people will feel they're fully in any one camp. Surely in the best case scenario we're all impossibly striving to attain all 3 goals, so the question remaining is which inevitable compromises we're each personally willing to accept. Some can't cope without full range reproduction, some can't live without explosive dynamics, some can't do without pinpoint imaging. All of these are points of departure for any of the 3 goals listed, and they all suggest equipment decisions and styles, and that's where I think a certain degree of self awareness would be well served. I don't think people in general are good at recognising their own blind spots, their own sonic ideals. We all want accuracy at the end of the day, but I don't think it's to a live performance, or to the master tape. I think the accuracy we want is to our own personal view of what "accurate" means to us.

Edit: For what it's worth, I'm a 1...!!

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Diapason,
Excellent post, I can easily agree with most of what you say, but are you an oscilloscope user or a sound engineer?
BTW, which model are your Graaf's? I had really great sound with the GM20's.