How close to the real thing?


Recently a friend of mine heard a Chopin concert in a Baptist church. I had told him that I had gone out to RMAF this year and heard some of the latest gear. His comment was that he thinks the best audio systems are only about 5% close to the real thing, especially the sound of a piano, though he admitted he hasn't heard the best of the latest equipment.

That got me thinking as I have been going to the BSO a lot this fall and comparing the sound of my system to live orchestral music. It's hard to put a hard percentage on this kind of thing, but I think the best systems capture a lot more than just 5% of the sound of live music.

What do you think? Are we making progress and how close are we?
peterayer
I would think high efficency speakers with powerful amps would make distortion and noise worse -- no?
Mapman ,

The ohm's will not come close to reproducing the size or power of a grand being played in your house. A very good hi-fi system can sound like a piano, but will never fool you into believing it is a real piano, the size and power would never be the same..
>I would think high efficency speakers with powerful amps >would make distortion and noise worse -- no?

No, systems typically either use powerful amps and low efficiency speakers, or low powered amps and high efficiency speakers. The outcome is roughly the same in each case, the setup runs out of puff at a certain point -- think of a small, light car with low capacity engine as compared with an SUV with a big V8, their maximum rate of acceleration would be roughly the same; any really decent performance vehicle is always about a light body propelled by a high powered engine. Of course, in this analogy, the combination has to be carefully matched and tuned to realise the potential performance and prevent problems, but this is just engineering!

The analogy follows into the audio world -- I once had fun in a large, noisy electicals store: hooked up a fairly mediocre but high wattage Japanese HT receiver to a good pair of Klipsch main speakers, wound up the volume, the sound was clean as a whistle and cut right through the store; a store bloke came running from the other side, yelling turn it down, not because it was distorting but because it was so dynamically loud ...

Frank
Recorded music through a sound system cannot approach live, "non amplified" musicianship. However, this is what we Audiogoners seek to achieve with our equipment purchases and room/system tweaks. I can easily get caught up into thinking how "live" my system sounds, and then I will go to a "live" venue. No mikes, no amps, no speakers. Just the musicians with their instruments, playing in the space. I then come back to reality. I do capture much greater than 5 % lol .
I would have to disagree frank ......

Both would take considerable power, of course it's academic the less efficient would require more, but both would require such to sound alive.

Please don't mistake ear splitting SPL to be what is being discussed here. To sound "alive" does require a certain size and power, effortless power, completely different to ear splitting SPL Din, the system has to "grow" exponentially from top to bottom with a lot of percussive energy...