Ron, this nothing to do with AAA versus AAD recordings on vinyl. You seem to be suggesting that your recordings of your system sound more like your system when it plays digital then when it plays analog. Are you telling us something different from that? And it’s not just me who is having the misunderstanding. Bonzo and Graham and Brad no not seem to agree either. Perhaps you should clarify your post to clear up the misunderstanding.
Videos of Acoustically-Coupled Audio Recordings
- Thread starter Ron Resnick
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Ron, this nothing to do with AAA versus AAD recordings on vinyl. You seem to be suggesting that your recordings of your system sound more like your system when it plays digital then when it plays analog. Are you telling us something different from that? And it’s not just me who is having the misunderstanding. Bonzo and Graham and Brad no not seem to agree either. Perhaps you should clarify your post to clear up the misunderstanding.
I do not disagree with that. That’s where I wrote “some”. You said that’s the wrong word and it should be “most“. It just doesn’t seem that way to me. That’s all, no big deal.
"... something I love with the ARC's is the natural sound of voices when properly recorded."
I posted it on June 18, 2012
But as far as I could see GaryKoh was the first in WBF - he posted this thread in 2011
Review: Speakers that provide a natural listening experience
these old references are great. Clearly people understand what is meant by a system sounding natural. I guess it is not a vague term, difficult to understand after all.
No, I have not described the new system as "natural." Before I can even consider that exalted potential appellation I have had bigger fish to fry from "hatching" a complicated system in one go, including break-in of literally every component (except the vintage Denon turntable), a 60Hz room boom (which turns out to be a 60Hz room boom and a 50Hz room boom) and an upper midrange brightness issue.
I'm still only seven weeks in from the Big Bang of this system. I am not making progress at quite the velocity of early primordial atomic particles traveling at close to the speed of light. But progress is being made, and I am optimistic that natural sound, to my ears, can be achieved in the near-term to medium-term future.
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Great response Ron. I’m curious about the context in which you made that comment in 2015.
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I don't know about "most" people. I'm not making any quantitative suggestion.
I do think that if you ask most audiophiles if their system sounds unnatural to them, "most" of them would say "no."
I wrote that to suggest that the use of the word "natural" to describe reproduced sound from an audio system is not novel, and is not a recent discovery.
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Ron,
If you have a natural sounding analog and a natural sounding digital, I would find a video of them equally removed from your actual system sound, as both sources are processed through a low-grade phone mic and a built-in one dollar phone ADC, and come out on the other end through the lossy AAC digital compression code employed by YouTube. I would expect each of them to undergo a similar transformation from natural sound to "digital sound".
Just like everyone else, I fail to see your point.
If you have a natural sounding analog and a natural sounding digital, I would find a video of them equally removed from your actual system sound, as both sources are processed through a low-grade phone mic and a built-in one dollar phone ADC, and come out on the other end through the lossy AAC digital compression code employed by YouTube. I would expect each of them to undergo a similar transformation from natural sound to "digital sound".
Just like everyone else, I fail to see your point.
That's a bit difficult to assess. I disassembled the Martin-Logan system in, I think, 2014. Back then I listened to literally zero jazz, and very occasionally only Mozart Jupiter Symphony 41 for classical.
When I moved away from the hybrid Martin-Logan Prodigy speakers I was consciously looking for a system which provided greater tonal density and power in the 100Hz to 300Hz or so frequency range without giving up the openness and transparency I hear from planar loudspeakers.
I think the system sounded fairly natural on multi-track vocals (to the extent natural can mean anything on multi-track rock and pop recordings), but I did not have the reference of live jazz music or live classical music to assess naturalness that I have developed over the ensuing nine years.
I definitely am aiming for a higher level of naturalness with the new system.
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I'm getting to them.
(I am not very good at collecting multiple prior post excerpt windows in a single reply post, and replying underneath each of the individual windows.)
'Digital-based' and 'analog-based' are limiting notions. A system can have a digital front-end, an analog-frontend, or, as in your case, both.
When you record a video of music coming through your streamer or your DAC and compare the replay of the video with what you heard in your room when you made the video, you are saying that video is more closely representative of the sound in your room than that scenario when the source is your record or tape player.
"More representative" suggests degrees of authenticity and dissimilarity. Do you have a sense of the degrees of representation that you describe?
You're telling us what is the case for yourself, for your own experience with your particular components and room. I know how you object to broad generalizations about others. Otherwise that puts you in the same position as famous video deniers such as Al M who probably have never made a video of their own systems and base their opinions on "philosophical and theoretical" considerations rather than experience.
Or, this is just more clickbait. Will you tell us if you believe what you wrote or you are just looking for responses?
Given the broad use you describe, doesn't it seem odd that so many people objected to the title of Peter's thread?
I am not surprised by this at all, poor recordings don't capture the analogness of good analog playback and make systems sound more similar than different.
This is misdirection. The discussion is about the relative representation of a recording to in-room listening.
Let's say I record on the iPhone the system playback of a digital recording of a Sarah McLachlan song versus the system playback of an analog recording of a Sarah McLachlan song. The former is suffering no initial analog to digital conversion when ADCed by the iPhone or DACed by Vimeo. It natively is in a digital format.
Recording the playback of an analog track occasions an initial analog to digital conversion.
I am suggesting that the sound of the digital playback via Vimeo of a digital track is more representative of the sound of the digital playback I am hearing in the room than is the digital playback via Vimeo of the analog track I am hearing in the room. Putting it simply and pejoratively the analog track is suffering its first digital conversion, which makes Vimeo playback less representative of the non-digital sound I hear in the room from that analog track.
This is disingenuous. No one objected to the title of Peter's thread.
Nah, If you ripped the analog recording and played it back alongside the original and recorded both with decent gear, you would not be able to tell them apart.
You should do your homework, Ron, before casting aspersions.
Go to Peter's thread Natural Sound. Search that thread for the word title.
Search results for query: title
www.whatsbestforum.com
Lot's of examples... here's a few:
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Ron, that is completely false. People posted in the thread suggesting different titles because they did not like it. Members who did not like it actually told me what to name my own thread. Imagine the audacity!
The title became quite contentious. They wanted something non-offensive like My Vinyl/SET/Horn System following Al M.'s system thread title, or My Micro/Lamm/Vitavox System. BORING and not my style. My other system thread was called "Sublime Sound". Just as arrogant and elitist, but that was a conventional industry standard type of system. I made plenty of videos of that system also, but times were different, and that gear and videos were not controversial then. It became so when I started talking about accessories, treatments, power cords, and speaker set up. The videos I think were fine.
Anyway, Tim was making a point to Fransisco that a common term like natural sound should not have upset people the way it did in my thread given the popularity of the term when describing the sound of gear.
@tima is correct and I thank him for providing just a few examples of the many that were posted.
****************
Here is a classic post discussing this:
@wil, now you're ordered to go along if you want to get along. Why this group of flunkies or anyone else thinks has the right to tell others what to say or else, not their forum! No reason for you to fear posting, it’s ridiculous.
@Al M., you're welcome to call your thread whatever the hell you want not your place to define boundaries for others because you don't measure up.
david
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so you accept that the Ron of 2014 would find it difficult to judge a natural system given limited classical and jazz experience/audition material?
I disagree.
"The title became quite contentious." (Emphasis added) This is true, and it kind of proves my point that there was nothing inherently contentious about "natural sound" from the title. Natural, as I and others have said, has been an audio sound descriptor since the beginning.
I just re-read the first 100 posts of that thread. There was not even any discussion of "natural sound," let alone objection to "natural sound," let alone objection to the title.
It wasn't until your subsequent redefinition and initial capitalization (which I acknowledge you retracted at some point) of "natural sound" that the fencing began.
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