How close to the real thing?

Phaelon,
I agree with you that the thread is going in an interesting direction. KIrkus and others have broadened my understanding of the topic tremendously. It was not my intent to peg a specific percentage to the question of how close are we to the real thing beyond that I think 5% is too low in the context of today's very "best" systems.

Has Edseas heard a really great recording on one of today's great systems? He told me he hadn't. Can we agree that we are at least getting closer to the real thing? From reading many of the posts, I think the answer for many of us is YES. Sorry for your head, Mapman.

Sitting here listening, as I type this, to Michel Camilo's Solo album (Telarc Jazz) at something like a realistic volume level... if this is 5% of live, I'll take it as-is and be happy for a long while.

Here's a thought and why my friend, the trained concert violist, said that 5%, nay1% is MUCH too high a percentage:

From the posts that claim that the music sounded real (albeit from memory as I will not be rereading all of the posts!) I recall that the listeners who claimed that their systems sounded real always said that it was an occasional note that sounded real, never an entire piece.

If we simply ask, what number of NOTES soun(ed) real (remember, NO-ONE said that an entire piece, song, etc. sounded real) then we quickly realize that of ALL THE NOTES PLAYED that many fewer than 1% sound (ed) real.

At the Chopin concert which I attended the conductor said that in the 20 years that they'd been playing that he calculated that they played over ONE billion notes!

Just a thought.

Ed

Actually, Ed, I don't think anyone said an occasional note sounded live, but only an occasional recording. Most of my recordings contain more than one note. ;)

FWIW, I don't think the Camilo sounds live on my system. Very nice, but not live. Too syrupy. Not enough edge. I think it's those Sennheiser mikes I bitched at Jack Renner about many years ago ('80s), when he started using them for Telarc classical recording. And they really don't work for Jazz, IMHO.

As for the one billion notes, well, maybe. Assuming 100 musicians playing 40 hours per week, all quarter notes :), for 20 years, that's about 1.1 billion notes or so. But that's 40 continuous hours per week, every second of every minute, of every hour. Maybe he rounded up.

Actually, I don't remember anyone saying that an entire recording sounded real and, if so, based on my own experience (and it has been a few years ((as Mr. Ayer points out)) since I worked in the loudspeaker shop that made the loudspeakers for Bob Katz, after all) I have never heard any system EVER that comes CLOSE to making an entire recording sound real and, when I posed this same question to a few members at the last BAS meeting they were in agreement with me that they didn't think that it was possible to fool someone in to believing that an entire piece was real with today's technology.

As to playing 1 billion notes I simply took the conductor at his word without bothering to check his math.

Ed

Ed