"They are here" vs. "You are there"

I do not think of resolution this way, and I don’t think most audiophiles do either. The term ‘resolution’ is used by audiophiles to describe both a characteristic of an individual COMPONENT and a characteristic of a whole SYSTEM. Hence the term ‘resolution’ says something about how a system sounds. I am not claiming ownership of the term ‘resolution.’ I am expressing what I believe to be the prevailing use of the term among audiophiles. For the purposes of this discussion, I will stipulate a definition of ‘resolution’: The absolute limit of information about the music that a format, component, or system can present.

You kind of make my point while simultaneously avoid addressing it. If resolution is determined by audible metrics, then "perceived detail" is likely one of them. And ambience cues live in the detail.

If you take an information theoretic approach to resolution -- as you seem to imply with your definition -- then I think you will be unhappy. The overwhelming majority of the information is in the high frequencies. Given the way human hearing works, you would get vastly more information by dumping the low frequencies entirely in favor of enhancing the highs -- you'd maximize the information about the music, but the result wouldn't be music. So I think some other definition is in order.

Which gets us back to my earlier point: the experience (you are there) is subjective. For some people a brighter system might provide it better than a more neutral system. And for those people, the realism obtained might outweigh the realism lost.

You kind of make my point while simultaneously avoid addressing it.

I must confess, I do not get your point. What is it?

Hi Bryon - you have once again started a very interesting thread indeed, and while I have not yet been able to read all of it yet (which I will do as soon as I get a better chance), I do have one immediate comment on the recording aspect, something I don't think anyone has brought up yet.

The very biggest effect on the sound of the recording, even one where very few mikes were used, is the mixing, particularly in today's world of digital recording. Two different engineers (or the same one, for that matter!) can and will create a completely different sound from the exact same mike placement in the same hall from the same live session. I cannot emphasize this enough - most people, even audiophiles, have absolutely no idea how much the mixing has to do with the final sound, and how different it is from what the mikes are picking up. This is where the engineers love to get very creative, putting their own personal stamp on the recordings. There are times when this is a good thing, but unfortunately they are very few - most engineers nowadays create digital mixes that often sound nothing like the sound in the hall they recorded in. Sometimes the conductor will have a big input into the sound of the mix, sometimes not, and even if he/she does, there is still the limitation of the initial set-up in the first place, which usually the conductor doesn't get involved with, leaving it to the engineer. Which is almost never a good thing, IMO.

I am looking forward to reading the rest of this thread, looks like there are alot of interesting comments so far!

Hi Learsfool. Your initial comments about the role of mixing are well taken. Onhwy61 brought up something similar when he pointed out that many recordings have no real ambient cues, but only "synthetic" ambient cues added during mixing. Al and I both posted some thoughts about that regrettable fact, which you may find relevant, when you get a chance to look.

Glad that you are joining the discussion.

I wonder whether, as a generalization, speaker designs that emphasize time-alignment are better at presenting ambient cues, all other things being equal. Do you think so?

I'm not certain, but my suspicion is "no." I would guess that lack of time alignment would not obscure ambient cues, it would just change their sonic character, in a manner comparable to its effects on the sonic character of the initial note.

I say that because of the different time scales that are involved. Given that sound propagates through air at roughly one foot per millisecond, the arrival times at the listener's ears of wavefronts that are launched from non-aligned speaker drivers would most likely differ by less than a millisecond. While reflected sound in a hall typically arrives at the microphones many milliseconds after the direct sound.

Lack of time alignment would change the timing or phase relationships between the "fundamental frequency" of a note and its overtones/harmonics, thereby affecting its sonic character, but I believe that effect would apply similarly to both directly captured and reflected sound (although of course the frequency balance of the reflected sound may differ from that of the directly captured sound).

It's interesting to note in these Wikipedia writeups on the Haas Effect and the Precedence Effect that our hearing mechanisms have thresholds demarcating different kinds of responses when similar sounds arrive at our ears with timing differences of approximately 1, 2, 5, 10, 30, 50, and 80 milliseconds.

Best regards,
-- Al