Truth and Tonality: can they co-exist?

amirm

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Amir-Do you really want recording engineers to be forced to have all voices coming out of your speakers at exactly 1:00 or all depth to be no more than 10’ behind your speakers?
If that is how the talent (singer/musicians) approved the mix then yes. As a minimum, I would want to hit a button, hear that and know whether if I am messing with the sound, I am making it better or not.

BTW, I didn't make up the example. Yesterday we were optimizing the sound of our Wisdoms. The processor suggested certain speaker distance and trim for each channel. We then played a song and one person said: "her voice is supposed to come out of the center not to the left." I thought, how do we know for real? We changed the trim and distance and now the voice does come out in the middle. I am just waiting for the day for someone else to walk in and say it is supposed to come out of the left :).

That would get pretty boring pretty quickly. I don’t want those types of standards. Where I think recording is broken is where engineers are forced to hammer recordings to 0VU so nothing has any dynamic range anymore.
How do you back that out? And how do you know your system is not compressing the dynamics?

Look at video. I can put a test signal and measure precisely if the color is off or not. After that, if you want your colors more red, you can. But we all know then that we have too much red.

If the magic button existed and the recording sounded terrible we would also have a great recourse regarding the original producer. Today, there is no way you can make a complaint like that stick because we never know if what we hear in our system is right or not.

That’s where I would like to see some standards imposed, but even that would be tricky. It might be helpful if every recording had a couple of paragraphs written by the recording engineer describing what you should hear based on how he made the recording. And if the engineer was forced by the recording label to make a loud recording with no dynamic range, he should be able to come out and say he knew better, but he did what he was told.
We don't have to boil the ocean as you say :). Simple things like measured response of the room using a standard Mic. I can them measure my room and a smart processor can then attempt to match those two curves.
 

mep

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Apr 20, 2010
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Really Tim? How do you measure performance? You can measure how a circuit performs electrically (electrical performance), but as I said, that won't tell you how it sounds. Measurements can be used as a predictor of how something might sound-specially if the measurements are terrible in some aspect. For instance, if there is 10% THD at 1 watt across the entire audio band and the frequency response drops like a rock above 10kHz and the circuit is not stable into any load below 16 ohms, you can reasonably predict the product is going to sound like crap. Once the measurements get to a certain level of "goodness," now your predictions on how something will sound are out the window unless you already believe that all amps and preamps sound the same. At some point Tim, everyone has to do what your tag line says, and that's to Close your eyes. Trust your ears.
 

mep

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Apr 20, 2010
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How do you back that out? And how do you know your system is not compressing the dynamics?

Amir-I don't know if you are joking here or not. If you know your system and you hear day in day out how much dynamic range your good recordings have and then you put on something new and you hear it as being horribly compressed, are you really going to question your system and think it suddenly turned into a sound compressor? I'm not. I can take any recording I have and pass the signal through my R2R and watch the VU meters and I can tell you if the recording was made with really good dynamic range or if it has been hammered to 0VU. All you have to do is watch the meters.

And I'm guessing the person who told you that the sound should be coming out of the center and not to the left is correct. If you have heard a recording for many years over many systems and no matter how many systems you have listened through, the singer is always in the same place until they walk into your sound room, chances are really good you had it wrong.
 

amirm

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And I'm guessing the person who told you that the sound should be coming out of the center and not to the left is correct. If you have heard a recording for many years over many systems and no matter how many systems you have listened through, the singer is always in the same place until they walk into your sound room, chances are really good you had it wrong.
It is "chances" I want to remove ;).

And no, I am not joking at all. Our system lets you fully dial in the response. Please tell me if I should push 180 Hz on 1 db higher or lower. How about 120 Hz? 95 Hz?
 

Phelonious Ponk

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Jun 30, 2010
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Really Tim? How do you measure performance? You can measure how a circuit performs electrically (electrical performance), but as I said, that won't tell you how it sounds. Measurements can be used as a predictor of how something might sound-specially if the measurements are terrible in some aspect. For instance, if there is 10% THD at 1 watt across the entire audio band and the frequency response drops like a rock above 10kHz and the circuit is not stable into any load below 16 ohms, you can reasonably predict the product is going to sound like crap. Once the measurements get to a certain level of "goodness," now your predictions on how something will sound are out the window unless you already believe that all amps and preamps sound the same. At some point Tim, everyone has to do what your tag line says, and that's to Close your eyes. Trust your ears.

You're taking me a bit too literally, mep. Or perhaps not specifically enough. I was responding to this:

My point is that measurements cannot and will not tell you how the parts you are using are influencing the sound you are hearing. Sure, you can measure their values, but that won’t tell you a damn thing about how they sound.

I agree that it is not all that telling to measure individual caps, resistors, etc. I don't imagine those measurements will tell you all that much about how those parts will sound in the completed component, though I'm not sure, as I don't design components. All I was saying is if you don't expect to learn much from measuring parts, try measuring the finished product instead. Will that tell you everything that can possibly be heard? Maybe not, but it can tell you a lot. Relevant to this conversation, if you measure a component and it shows a rise in the mid-bass and/or a dip in the mid-treble, you can expect a "warm" sound, and I'll bet you'll get it.

I think there may be a part of my tag line you're not getting: "Close your eyes." What this means is that I believe in blind listening and believe very strongly in the power of expectation bias. I know you don't believe measurement is a good indicator of sound. I respectfully disagree with that and expect that if you listened blind, much of what you hear that can't be measured would disappear.

In my case, "Close your eyes; trust your ears," means that if you are unwilling to close your eyes, you must not really trust your ears.

Tim
 

mep

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Tim-Measurements can't tell you how something that was comptently designed will sound. I gave and example and you gave an example of how measurements could be a good predictor on how something will sound. And that is because the measurements show there was some jigger-pookey going on or just plain bad engineering. We both agree on that. But again, once the measurements are beyond criticism, how are they going to tell you how something sounds? They can't and that's my point.
 

mep

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Apr 20, 2010
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Well, if measurements really could tell us everything we need to know about how something sounds, we wouldn't need dealers because we would no longer need to audition anything before we buy it because we already knew how it was going to sound. Which of course isn't true.
 

garylkoh

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The problem is worse. I do not think you have clearly defined the issue. I still do not understand how a transparent system can have or endow any tonality that was not present in the recording. In fact, conveying that original tonality (still an uncomfortable word application) is function of truthfullness.

I think that this dialectic is a little difficult as Kal pointed out, we have not clearly enough defined the issue. Conveying the original tonality IS the truth. Hence, truth and tonality must co-exist. Then, we started discussing taking measurements to specify the truth and that will get us into a food fight into what measurements to take, and whether it can tell us everything about how something sounds.

Back to the OP, if conveying original tonality is the truth, and adding/changing tonality is then not the truth, how do we know if a system is truthful - especially if we do not know what the truth in tonality is? Or what the truth in soundstage or imaging is?

Amir's point about the voice coming from 12:30 or 1:00pm brings me back to a couple of sessions I had in a studio making recordings so that I would be able to use these as a reference in design. I wanted to be able to hear what the recording engineer was hearing and then hear the difference at home/in my lab.

The voice is recorded with a single mic, and then he pans it left and right until he thinks that it sounds in the middle. Unfortunately, the monitors he uses were just plonked on top of the mixing console, and they weren't even pointed symmetrically. The studio itself wasn't acoustically symmetric. He had a bank of tape machines on the left, and he had a much larger space on the right.

In that context, a voice that was coming out at 12 o'clock to him, might not resolve to 12 o'clock after it's been recorded. And I confirmed that when I brought the first take home - the voice sounded like it was coming out from 10:30. This was one of the CD's that we did:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Don-Gomes-Ult...s=63&clkid=6721041541078472790#ht_4981wt_1196

Until we know what the recording engineer heard, and what the mastering engineer heard, and can re-create the sound environment in which the music was created, we can never achieve the truth - we can only achieve what we prefer. Even knowing the singer and knowing his voice, and being inside the studio during the recording, we can never know the truth.... because every microphone imposes its own sonic signature on the recording.
 

garylkoh

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Again, why is the industry in this position? The measurements SHOULD tell you how it sounds! So why don't they? Are we measuring the wrong things, or not enough things ...

Frank

Frank, you are on to something here. Are we measuring the wrong things, or not enough things? For a long time, THD was all that was important - and we ended up with amplifiers that measured 0.000001% distortion using massive amounts of feedback and sounding like crap.

Let's take this another direction - what sort of a measurement can we take to measure a product's truth in tonality?
 

Phelonious Ponk

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Tim-Measurements can't tell you how something that was comptently designed will sound. I gave and example and you gave an example of how measurements could be a good predictor on how something will sound. And that is because the measurements show there was some jigger-pookey going on or just plain bad engineering. We both agree on that. But again, once the measurements are beyond criticism, how are they going to tell you how something sounds? They can't and that's my point.

Do we agree what is jigger-pookey? I'm not so sure we do. I think there are many revered audiophile components, even entire revered audiophile technologies that have some measurable and audible jigger-pookey going on. And these are the very technologies and components in which audiophiles hear immeasurable magic that not only raises the performance above the jigger-pookey, but above jigger-pookey free components to more natural, more musical, euphonic, more jigger-pookey descriptors...

I love jigger-pookey, by the way. That's my new word. I'm going to see how many places I can use it. :)

Tim
 

fas42

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Until we know what the recording engineer heard, and what the mastering engineer heard, and can re-create the sound environment in which the music was created, we can never achieve the truth - we can only achieve what we prefer.
That's where I would beg to differ. Here I am with Tim in that the "truth" is whatever has been captured in the recording, every last ounce of it. Whether it is an accurate represention of what was heard in the studio, how much the engineers manipulated it, how much colouration was added by mic's, etc, I believe is not the issue. For the system to be true it needs to reproduce what has been captured on the media, ready to be played in your system.

Then you came to the tonality issue. If you personally believe that your system's reproduction of that truth is not "up to scratch", is not the best representation of what was intended by the musicians, etc, is it or is it not a reasonable thing to do to further process your system's representation of the truth, that which is on the media, to more closely approximate your interpretation of how the musical event sounded, or how you would like it to sound?

Frank
 

microstrip

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Would someone please list some components and speakers that are neutral and as accurate to the recording as possible? Or, at least please list one virtual system that would meet this goal.

Thirty years ago there was an easy answer to this question in Europe - a Quad system , using a Quad 34 or 44 preamplifier, a 405 amplifier and a pair of Quad ESL63 .

"Quad equipment is not designed primarily for audiophiles, but for serious-music listeners who play records more for musical enjoyment than for the sound and want just unadulterated sound. " This type of sentence, often used in reviews and advertisement defined the goal of this UK manufacturer.

Even today, some reviewers highly praise their current products, such as the 909 amplifier.
 

garylkoh

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That's where I would beg to differ. Here I am with Tim in that the "truth" is whatever has been captured in the recording, every last ounce of it. Whether it is an accurate represention of what was heard in the studio, how much the engineers manipulated it, how much colouration was added by mic's, etc, I believe is not the issue. For the system to be true it needs to reproduce what has been captured on the media, ready to be played in your system.

Frank, I agree with you and with Tim. The system should accurately reproduce whatever's captured on the recording mic coloration, studio coloration and all, with no embellishment of its own, and with no filtering, masking. What I am trying to say that none of us who sit there in front of our system and listens can tell whether it is the truth without having been in the studio during the recording and listening with the recording and mastering engineer's ears.

Then you came to the tonality issue. If you personally believe that your system's reproduction of that truth is not "up to scratch", is not the best representation of what was intended by the musicians, etc, is it or is it not a reasonable thing to do to further process your system's representation of the truth, that which is on the media, to more closely approximate your interpretation of how the musical event sounded, or how you would like it to sound?
Frank

My point is that I don't know for sure that it is up to scratch because I don't know what was represented by the musicians. I can only say that I think this is how it should sound based on my recollection of how live instruments and voices sounds, and how I have heard instruments and voices sound very different inside a studio.

I think that this is sometimes the argument thrown at the "just listen" crowd by the "just measure" crowd - you cannot know that what you are listening is the truth because there is no way that you can know what the truth is. You can trust your ears to tell you what you prefer, but unless you are the recording engineer, you cannot tell me that is what the truth is.
 

Robert

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Nov 10, 2010
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Are you serious? I feel lilke I am watching Animal House and someone just yelled "Food fight!"

I'm serious.

If someone cannot mention a component or speaker that is accurate and neutral, then can someone name a transitor, tube, cone, or piece of wire that has no color?
 

Ron Party

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Apr 30, 2010
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We probably cannot know the *truth* in the context of what those in the studio heard. As Amir has pointed out, there is no reference in that there are no standards. Dr. Olive also has pointed this out many months ago in his section of the forum: anyone recall the "circle of confusion"?

Now can we know the *truth* in the context of what is on that vinyl your spinning or that disc your playing? Perhaps is my answer. We can ascertain the fidelity of some, if not all, parts of the play back chain.

It is at this point that I have to quote my friend Ken, here, because IMO it is the preferred way to go.

...I do take pains to start from a measured flat response, adjusted for room gain, and then to make deliberate, measured changes which sound subjectively good to me. After all, my ultimate goal is enjoyment, not FR accuracy in and of itself.
 

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