How close to the real thing?

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

Atmasphere,

The problem here is that while theorem is supposed, there are real-world phenomena that do not care about the theorem.

I'm sorry, I don't quite follow. Yes, if you use Spice, say, to examine behaviour just based on straightforward theory, it will most certainly not match what really happens. However, if you add in ALL the actual parasitic behaviours of the components, the "real-world phenomena" you mention, into the Spice model then there should be very good agreement between the model (theory) and reality. After all, one of the classic nonsenses of a typical Spice circuit are the perfect voltage sources stuck where needed -- that alone guarantees that the match can be very poor.

In volume three, page 26 Crowhurst ...

Sorry, had a quick look, as far as I can see he is just saying, be careful with negative feedback, otherwise it becomes positive feedback and you have an oscillator -- straightforward stuff.

Frank

Fredseas2,

You banged the one note on my kids' upright piano and then compared it to a recording of a concert grand, as I remember. I agree with you that that one note did not sound identical to any one of the many notes in the recording. It wasn't even really close. But the recording certainly resembled the sound of a piano, and it wasn't a particularly good recording and it certainly was not one of the "best" systems available.

At this past RMAF I heard a live piano recital in the hotel lobby and then heard Ray Kimber's incredible four channel system play one of his IsoMic? recordings of a piano. Not identical, but boy were they similar to my ears.