Hey bdp24
What did we listen to, do you remember? Was it during hours or after hours?
wasn't that a blast, had so much fun at those shows back then. everyone was so cool
Soundstaging and Imaging: Not an Illusion
A recent topic Soundstaging and Imaging: The Delusion about The Illusion
https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/soundstaging-and-imaging-the-delusion-about-the-illusion asked
"Yet, is a recording’s soundstage and imaging of individual participants, whether musicians or vocalists, things that one can truly perceive or are they merely illusions that we all are imagining as some sort of delusion?"
It is no more an illusion than is playback in general.
An engineer may close mic, adding mix effects to simulate room acoustics. Or may use a microphone technique to capture the correct proportion of direct to reflected sound to accurately delineate the recording space on a capable playback system. Each has its advantages. The first allows control after the event enabling wart removal. The latter requires at least movement perfection. It is almost impossible to edit live performances seamlessly, albeit easier with today’s digital tools than with times past razor blade.
On a capable playback system there is no mistaking Carnegie, Albert, La Scala acoustic for digital wizardry. It is effortless to upscale the 3m x2m inter-speaker dimension to La Scala’s 16.15m d x 20.4m w x 26m h stage. It is similarly effortless for any acoustic space, artificial or otherwise. Badly done material is properly presented as a mish-mash of one-dimensional sources floating in conflicting spaces.
When upon first hearing a system, musicians and live acoustic music listeners are instantly beguiled and comment on the liveness, spaciousness, realism of the presentation, making comments like "It’s just like Joe Pass is sitting there" or "Who needs to go to concerts?" or "I can ’see’ the whole orchestra and every section in it!", it is unlikely they are all deluded.
It is my belief that those familiar with live, acoustic music, when presented with enough clues of the space acoustics have no problem fleshing it out and transporting them. On systems with poor or confused clue presentation, the brain gives up trying.
In a system which presents clues well, a component swap may alter the presentation, but is unlikely to destroy it unless the piece is egregiously awful. In an incapable system, either by design or setup, offhand changes may make a difference, but are not likely to effect a transformation. One has to start from first principles with components and setup < read ROOM > that can be proven to be capable of presenting a realistic soundstage from any source. Dimensionless material MUST be presented so. If it isn’t, there is zero chance of it presenting anything properly!
Too often, store demos present an expansive blur that properly should be presented as a cardboard cutout. The customer falsely equates $K with accuracy and thus the circle begins anew.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard Feynmann, 1974
https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/soundstaging-and-imaging-the-delusion-about-the-illusion asked
"Yet, is a recording’s soundstage and imaging of individual participants, whether musicians or vocalists, things that one can truly perceive or are they merely illusions that we all are imagining as some sort of delusion?"
It is no more an illusion than is playback in general.
An engineer may close mic, adding mix effects to simulate room acoustics. Or may use a microphone technique to capture the correct proportion of direct to reflected sound to accurately delineate the recording space on a capable playback system. Each has its advantages. The first allows control after the event enabling wart removal. The latter requires at least movement perfection. It is almost impossible to edit live performances seamlessly, albeit easier with today’s digital tools than with times past razor blade.
On a capable playback system there is no mistaking Carnegie, Albert, La Scala acoustic for digital wizardry. It is effortless to upscale the 3m x2m inter-speaker dimension to La Scala’s 16.15m d x 20.4m w x 26m h stage. It is similarly effortless for any acoustic space, artificial or otherwise. Badly done material is properly presented as a mish-mash of one-dimensional sources floating in conflicting spaces.
When upon first hearing a system, musicians and live acoustic music listeners are instantly beguiled and comment on the liveness, spaciousness, realism of the presentation, making comments like "It’s just like Joe Pass is sitting there" or "Who needs to go to concerts?" or "I can ’see’ the whole orchestra and every section in it!", it is unlikely they are all deluded.
It is my belief that those familiar with live, acoustic music, when presented with enough clues of the space acoustics have no problem fleshing it out and transporting them. On systems with poor or confused clue presentation, the brain gives up trying.
In a system which presents clues well, a component swap may alter the presentation, but is unlikely to destroy it unless the piece is egregiously awful. In an incapable system, either by design or setup, offhand changes may make a difference, but are not likely to effect a transformation. One has to start from first principles with components and setup < read ROOM > that can be proven to be capable of presenting a realistic soundstage from any source. Dimensionless material MUST be presented so. If it isn’t, there is zero chance of it presenting anything properly!
Too often, store demos present an expansive blur that properly should be presented as a cardboard cutout. The customer falsely equates $K with accuracy and thus the circle begins anew.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard Feynmann, 1974
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- 48 posts total
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I go to the concert hall with some regularity. I don’t hear the pinpoint imaging, and depth and the rest of it, even in the first row.Ditto on the concert hall, tonight in fact. Imaging is not pinpoint, but depth? Surely you don't mean the oboe is sonically sitting atop the tympani? telling a clarinet from an oboe is a hallmark of a fine systemAny system that doesn't distinguish between them is LoFi and not worthy of our time. Any system worth listening has no problem delineating Cor Anglais and Oboe or Clarinet and Basset Clarinet. A decent system can resolve the different between a Telefunken C12 and Neumann U47 on the same vocalist in the same studio. None of this has anything to do with imaging. It's all imaging to me.Of course it is. However, a great many very expensive systems have very little Y and no Z whatsoever. I could walk blindfolded and touch every driver in the box in those systems. "Imaging" is the complete disappearance of the transducers and the illusion that I could walk around the vocalist, back into the band and tweak the mic on the hi-hat to get just a tad less stick. In an orchestra there should be daylight between the tympani, bass drum and percussion and the 2nd violins or horns in front of them. They should probably be in a shallow arc at the back of the image and about 5-10m back behind my media room wall. They must not move when dynamics change from ppp to ffff. The image should scale appropriately from soloist through quartet, 30, 40 to Mahler's 8th. I found Harry Pearson’s ... obsession with it way out of proportion in terms of it’s musical significance and importanceTaken to its logical conclusion, nothing matters at all. The better a systems resolves, the easier it is to be transported. It is far less effort to listen when the imaging is correct. For multi-mono, artificial ambience pop, it's probably irrelevant. However, great pop engineers - Geoff Emerick, Roger Nichols, Alan Parsons, Ken Scott, - created sonic dioramas to compliment the music. |
kosst_amojan2,129 posts03-20-2019 11:36am@geoffkait If I can get the results I get without using the crap some people claim I need that crap to get without using that crap, then their claims about that crap are clearly fiction. There’s no logical fallacy there at all. It’s the exact opposite. It’s pure logic. >>>>It’s not only a logical fallacy. It’s also a Narcissus complex. I never met an audiophile yet who didn’t think his system was the greatest. But I’ll be the judge of that. |
- 48 posts total