Can digital get to vinyl sound and at what price?
- Thread starter ScottK
- Start date
That is not true and the entire moderation team knows it. Just stop. You will get no where fast with this one.
Tom
Tom
I don't mean to be so blunt, AG but you are forcing my hand. As I mentioned. I can only explain it to you. I can't understand it for you.
As I mentioned. This is not publicly debatable. Any further comments (unless on topic) will be deleted and administrative action will be taken. End of story. I hope I have made myself loud and clear on this.
Tom
As I mentioned. This is not publicly debatable. Any further comments (unless on topic) will be deleted and administrative action will be taken. End of story. I hope I have made myself loud and clear on this.
Tom
The immutable signal is the original sound, and once it has been captured by a microphone, the signal starts getting altered along the way until it comes out of your speakers. Since I have done enough recordings, I can tell how the sound has been altered when I hear it being replayed. I play the Chinese Erhu, which is a stringed instrument played with a bow like a cello. My teacher's instrument, which costs a magnitude more than mine, sounds warmer and has a more rounded tone. I record some of my playing from time to time for study purposes with just a pair of Telefunken M260 tube mikes, through the mic preamp in my Nagra IV-S into a DSD recorder. Through my system, the tone of the instrument sounds very accurate, when compared to what I hear when I play. However, if I substitute my push pull 300B amps with a pair of WE91a replicas, the tone of the instrument is recognisably different. It sounds more like my teacher's instrument. Is this an improvement ? Some would say so, since it made my instrument sound like something much more expensive ! Is it accurate ? No. If I record my teacher, she might actually prefer the more "accurate" version which sounds like what she normally hears when she plays.
Of course, I don't know how the music actually sounded live for all the commercial recordings. However, when a clarinet sounds like an oboe or vice versa, I know something is off.
Totally agree. And this is the aim when I make a recording. But it is not possible with commercial recordings, even though one should have a good idea how different instruments should sound.
It is because the sound might have been altered deliberately by the recording/mastering engineer. It is impossible to know whether tonal inaccuracies were already baked into the signal, or due to the playback equipment.
You're not engaging in a discussion; instead, you're presenting theories without any firsthand experience. Moreover, when you mention being too lazy or uninterested in trying, and even neglecting reading, it further emphasizes the lack of depth in your understanding.
It's akin to someone who has never engaged in intimacy trying to explain it to a seasoned actor, or, to put it more subtly, it's like someone who has merely passed a theory test attempting to lecture an F1 driver on racing techniques.
Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind.
That someone adopts "reproduce exactly what is on the master tape or digital file" as a goal doesn't make it a possibility. If it is not possible it is not a legitimate goal.
It's possible .
When a sound engineer heard the master in the studio and plays it back and says it sounds exactly the same .
Then it's possible .
Achieving an exact replication of audio from a master recording may be contested due to technical limitations, philosophical perspectives, variations in context, and the subjective nature of perception.
in any case, besides the sound engineer, no one would be able to restore the same, certainly not in our home audio systems.
in any case, besides the sound engineer, no one would be able to restore the same, certainly not in our home audio systems.
So he plays and hears the master once and then he plays and hears the master again. And then he claims those were identical experiences. (Something that cannot be independently verified, but we'll let that slip for the moment.)
That may establish identity between events - in a weak sense. But how does he know he's hearing exactly what is on the master?
This makes sense to me. I can understand designating the original sound as the immutable signal.
As you say the capture by the microphone itself is the first alteration -- the first opportunity for adulteration. So by the time the original sound reaches the end of the mastering process I think the original sound is no longer knowable.
@Gregm It is not a feasible thing because of the (now many times referenced on this thread) circle of confusion. There is no accessible, universally available and reproducible reference point to establish what is the 'truth' in a reproduced sound from a recording. Unless you are the person in the mastering booth, at the exact time he is mastering it, it's gone. And that person is also removed from the original acoustic event (if there was one), so it was gone before it was gone even. This might sound bad, but it's actually the justification for everything we do here. Until we are streamed music directly into our brains, we get to navigate these inconsistencies and have fun.
@AudioGod The answer is the same. It feels like talking to a bot at this point, given the circularity and shallowness of your posts. If you need to be the engineer to know what accurate is (and that would only be to his own work, not the underlying music...) you can't know what accurate is. The level of irony in these posts is reaching critical level.
This is specious logic. All we are saying your recordings don't sound similar. If they do, the system has too strong a signature of its own (e.g. the speakers always do a certain type of bass or stage), while if recordings sound different as you change records, guess what they sound like...the recording. You don't have to know what happened in the mastering booth - you just need to hear the EMI differently from the Decca from the Columbia etc.
For this you really need to use those for auditions, amplified female vocals, for example, won't tell you the difference.
Why do you guys then keep replying to him.
For someone who likes building a hypothesis, build one - there is a different signal on each recording. Then, check if each recording sounds different on some systems and not on some. Make it a think piece + listening factual piece.
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