A good friend of mine (famed musician, producer and audio engineer) had a favourite phrase - 'Sound is music and music is sound'
I suppose his reasoning was that both are inseparable and that without the medium of 'sound' we could not have the creative art form that is 'music' ?
Another abiding statement that has stayed with me from my student days, given to me by a well known Professor, was to always begin solving a problem by going back to 'first principles' or 'fundamentals' and take it from there.....
It seems quite obvious to me, from reading the posts and questions outlined on this forum, that the reproduction of recorded audio is a big problem for a lot of people here - am I correct in thinking that ?
So, I keep asking myself why and I keep coming to the same conclusion:
Sound is simple, it's just Amplitude and Time (the 'first principles' thing) and yet every audio manufacturer (with the exception of one) seems to ignore the aspect of Time distortion in their products.
Why ?
Recent studies and medical advances are now showing us, that more than ever, we are incredibly sensitive to information in the time domain - particularly in our hearing mechanism and psycho-acoustic processing.
Therefore, all I can conclude is that 'audiophiles' (as separate from musicians, music lovers, etc) are content to live with this lack of time coherence in their systems even though it is something that does not exist in 'real' sound..... listening to the world through 'rose tinted' receptacles.
Finally, just to clarify my point, in our natural world when a sound is produced, all of the frequencies present within that complex pressure wave reach our ear at the same time (there is no group delay between the low and high frequencies) and that's why we can tell instantly that this sound is real.
However, in all audio reproduction systems that I have heard (with the exception of one), there is an unnatural distortion of this time relationship (by filters, amplifier circuits, cables, crossovers, speaker cabinets....) and I can hear it instantly as being an 'unreal' sound, or just another 'hifi' system.
What I can't understand fully, is why are audio manufacturers and audiophiles only concerned with the Amplitude component of sound and not the Time aspect, when it seems to me that the time issue is the most important.
Is it because the Time component is more difficult to recreate and more expensive to do correctly ?
Please let me know your thoughts, people.
I suppose his reasoning was that both are inseparable and that without the medium of 'sound' we could not have the creative art form that is 'music' ?
Another abiding statement that has stayed with me from my student days, given to me by a well known Professor, was to always begin solving a problem by going back to 'first principles' or 'fundamentals' and take it from there.....
It seems quite obvious to me, from reading the posts and questions outlined on this forum, that the reproduction of recorded audio is a big problem for a lot of people here - am I correct in thinking that ?
So, I keep asking myself why and I keep coming to the same conclusion:
Sound is simple, it's just Amplitude and Time (the 'first principles' thing) and yet every audio manufacturer (with the exception of one) seems to ignore the aspect of Time distortion in their products.
Why ?
Recent studies and medical advances are now showing us, that more than ever, we are incredibly sensitive to information in the time domain - particularly in our hearing mechanism and psycho-acoustic processing.
Therefore, all I can conclude is that 'audiophiles' (as separate from musicians, music lovers, etc) are content to live with this lack of time coherence in their systems even though it is something that does not exist in 'real' sound..... listening to the world through 'rose tinted' receptacles.
Finally, just to clarify my point, in our natural world when a sound is produced, all of the frequencies present within that complex pressure wave reach our ear at the same time (there is no group delay between the low and high frequencies) and that's why we can tell instantly that this sound is real.
However, in all audio reproduction systems that I have heard (with the exception of one), there is an unnatural distortion of this time relationship (by filters, amplifier circuits, cables, crossovers, speaker cabinets....) and I can hear it instantly as being an 'unreal' sound, or just another 'hifi' system.
What I can't understand fully, is why are audio manufacturers and audiophiles only concerned with the Amplitude component of sound and not the Time aspect, when it seems to me that the time issue is the most important.
Is it because the Time component is more difficult to recreate and more expensive to do correctly ?
Please let me know your thoughts, people.