Talk but not walk?

Hi Falconquest

When I first started my relationship with HEA (late 70’s early 80’s) I was hit with my first blast of "highendism". It’s a language and personality that is a mixer of Electrical Engineering, science, Webster, compulsive RTA & blind fold testing, Male ego, empirical testing, physics, neuroticism, myth making and marketing. I think I said earlier, my friends in the entertainment biz warned me to stay as far away from HEA as I could. It reminded me of the different types of studio engineers, techs, producers and artist. When you take something as cool, and young, as stereo and begin to "tech-no-fy" it I have found that the best way to approach it is, be careful to what you lay claim to (credit for), and be humorist in your private world, while trying not to engage with those who have learned enough to be dangerous but not necessarily accurate. And (and this is an important one) always keep in mind of the folks who aren’t speaking up.

For every one person that is speaking an opinion out in the open there are a 100 not saying anything. In todays info world that may even be more like 1 to 1000, who knows.

HEA has created it’s own paradigm that exist with it’s own unique set of words and rules, that outside of HEA, makes little sense to onlookers. I always say "guys it’s not that hard" but HEA hates that type of simplicity. For example, HEA has sold the myth that these over built, beautiful looking, heavy, expensive, complicated, discrete audio components & speakers are better at reproducing sound. Yet the reality is, they actually play less of the recorded signal than does something with lower mass and simpler build. The writing is now on the wall that HEA’s over built and over priced products are on their way to the dinosaur archives, but the transition is hard to go through for those of us who have bought into our big system comfort zone.

Along with the products themselves going through the transition, the HEA marketing starts to look suspicious. The sales tool of trying to make audio more difficult than it really is, is all part of the paradigm of trying to sell HEA as a more advanced hobby than it really is. The more the listener is mystified the longer he or she hangs on to the hope that one fixed sound is going to be the answer to playback, even though everything about music playing, recording and playback is a variable science. As I and others point out the transition should have taken place back in the 90’s when the reviewers were actually on this path to tuning, but the HEA revenue world didn’t want to let go of it’s new found wealth. It was a paradigm of guilt marketing, greed, incomplete science and eye candy.

Quantum, discrete, isolation, dampening, compression, NASA, EE, inert, first reflection point, transparency, revealing and many more that are a part of the selling of HEA aren’t necessarily being used in the truest sense but have been turned into tools of convincing a certain part of the public of HEA to defend the market. You take a forum like this and throw in a little internet trolling and limited experience and you can see why the transition is taking so long. But the more you have folks like Tjbhuler speaking out, the easier the pill is to swallow.

also I want to throw this in from Geoff

"There is much confusion over what quantum physics is, what audio devices employ quantum physics or operate via quantum mechanics or quantum physics. However, it might be a little bit of an overreaction to condemn all audiophile devices marketed as quantum devices as hoaxes or suggest deception or lack or integrity. For example, the CD laser itself operates quantum mechanically, or any laser; they are “two dimensional quantum wells.”

And one more thing that you guys should think about studying are the "fundamental forces". A lot of audio is easy to figure out if you have taken a course in, or even study on the internet, the interaction of the Earth's forces.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

Hi uberwaltz

"I totally understand it is likely my listening space that needs work rather than bad recordings per se.
However to some their listening space is not an area that can be subjected to various treatments, ynow wife dictates etc, so some of the changes required are just not practical for any number of reasons."

Do you know how many listeners out there would love to get to that 1% place? There is absolutely nothing like listening contentment. There must be a bell that goes off somewhere in heaven every time there is a happy listener. Being able to spend time on the music collection is very cool indeed.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

Hi rhg88

"Sometimes the "listenign comparison" mantra is pushed a bit too far. I was flabbergasted to see a 250+ thread in audiogon on whether or not someone can hear the difference in sound quality when interchanging two cat6-certified internet cables."

I’m paid to hear the differences, and they do exist, but I think folks need to relax sometimes and study sound from a more settled approach. Audio settling doesn’t happen in a few minutes, it can take weeks or even more to hear changes in a system take on their full meaning.

It’s like these blind fold tests and ABing. Those are all cool and fine to do but their not really more than a possible snap shot, just like any test.

I’ll also comment on the Dynamic Range Database thing. I started to explore these (again) after it was brought up on the Stereophile forum and found this to be very if-y at best. I even went as far as to contact some of the testers and it’s extremely unprofessional and there is no standard testing protocol at all. The results are all over the map on the same recordings and it’s simply amateurish. Plus not one of these tests, that I witnessed, were done where someone physically changed the conditions of the testing. It goes back to our findings in 2004 where we found the physical conditions of the testing changes the results more than the testing itself. So for myself, after testing (doing) this 3 different times (late 90’s, 2004, last year) I feel pretty confident putting this one to bed. Then again if it’s helpful for others, it’s all good.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

gulpson said

"Ok, I get some of the thinking behind these pressures, rooms, etc. I am not sure I am fully sold on it, but have never tried anything but a plain system made up of a few not-too-fancy components. I did notice that room made a major difference. I will leave it at that, being a bit suspicious and, at the same time, leaving door open that room pressure 360 and the rest is all really true.

However, I am wondering how, for the purpose of this thread, we define poor recordings. Not "poor", but "recordings". Maybe the word "recordings" is used incorrectly."

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This is a biggie and HEA should have early on made things more clear. Introducing the term "recorded code" or equivalent should have been in play a long time ago when describing the actual recording. Here’s why. All recordings are different from each other and all playback systems are also different in the source/pre/recording interaction. There’s a couple of things that never really got passed on to the next generation (digital music) like what was tried to be done between the Eqing of tape and vinyl when the attempt was made to go from single source systems to multiple source. Adding a source selector into the mix created an un-equaling of performance that even till now has never been adequately implemented. HEA in particular moved way too fast into "discrete" componentry, not thinking about what they were doing.

If you go back to the generation before HEA discrete you will see that components had a volume control, balance, tone controls and inputs. The reason this was done is because it gave you an opportunity to find the center position of each recording, adjust the EQ differences between recordings, and so you would have separate inputs to add your effects to. In other words the pre-amp stage was so you could play several sources through one unit, kind of like an in home mixer. When HEA got rid of all those choices, they also were only able to give you a "one sound" choice at a time. No longer were you able to do the things mentioned above. That was the beginning of discrete listening. But here’s the problem, recording playback doesn’t work that way. Not only is every recorded code different, but so is the same with your playback input and output selectors. Let’s say you’ve hooked up your Tape deck, TT, CD’s, FM and Files to your one system. When you selected and dialed that system in to your preferred source, all the other sources are then not dialed in as well. If you’ve dialed in your setup to play a particular vinyl well, it will not sound the same with any other of your sources. There’s nothing in your system that automatically switches the sound of the audio chain (after changing sources), and HEA got rid of all the adjustments you use to have. That’s a big problem and unfortunately HEA was not knowledgeable enough to take you into that next chapter needed. For the last twenty to thirty years you have been sold systems that are incomplete and the answer the market has thrown at you is upgrade your system to another discrete system, instead of giving you real solutions. And even worse, they have turned you into skeptical hobbyist. Everyone has an opinion that only leads you back to the same place "audio is variable". You can spend 100years in this hobby listing our favorite components that had a particular sound when playing a particular recording on a particular source in a particular room, and that’s all good, but that’s a different hobby from playing back recordings correctly and with consistency.

the solutions are

A different type of play back system electronically, a different system for every source and recording, a method of tuning or bring back the options that were taken away. To get to the answers it brings us back to the OP "Talk but not walk?" If you guys did a simple exploration of the hobby you would find out, that you didn’t need these over built components. You would discover your hearing your room and if your speakers were more like musical instruments you could tune them to the room/system/ears/recordings. Some of you have already made the switch to electronic room correction. And some of you that are more purist you are going to have one source systems that are mechanically, electrically and acoustically tunable.

It also brings us back to the question of HEA itself and why it is on the decline. No matter my opinion or anyone else’s HEA of the past is on the decline. It’s not going to have a sustainable future without correcting some of the missteps. They’re not hard to identify missteps and any one of you can challenge the facts by doing yourself. It was asked earlier how do I know these things? Because I have done them, and so have others.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

Speaking of tuning, and that of a drum in particular: To proport that a drum that has been "tuned" (the reason for the use of the quotation marks to follow) in one room, and then moved to another where it is now "out of tune", is to unwittingly reveal something about oneself. Except for "tuned percussion" (tympani, vibes, etc.), drums are not tuned, they are tensioned. The threaded rods which pass through the holes in the hoop that holds a drum head in place on a drum shell are called tension rods, not tuners (as on guitars and basses). A drum is not tuned to a note, so can not be out of tune.

A drum produces many fundamental tones, with many, many harmonics and overtones---some related to the fundamentals, some not. Those that are not are referred to as "partials"---tones in between the dominant fundamentals and their harmonics. A drummers adjusts the tension rods until the drum produces the mix of fundamentals/harmonics/partials he prefers (as well as the tightness of the head, which affects drumstick rebound). A drum does NOT produce one, single, dominant note, it produces a vast mix of related and unrelated tones. If that were not true, a snare drum would need to be tensioned so as to match the key each song is played in.

What DOES happen when a drum is moved between rooms, is the balance between all the tones the drum produces is affected by the acoustic properties of the two rooms---the decay times of the rooms at various frequencies, the tones reinforced or diminished according to the resonant characteristics of the room, a result of it’s dimensions. And by the absorptive and reflective nature of the material used to construct the room, which varies at different frequencies, of course. The rooms affect the timbre of the drum(s), not their pitch. The most extreme change occurs when a drum is played outside; their IS no room, so no room-related decay times or resonances. I hate to play outside---drums always sound thin and flat there.