Perception

I grew up playing in orchestras, so I was around the sounds of instruments for years - nearby and all around me.  Judging the sound of an audio system is easy for me:  How much does that sax sound like the real thing?  Is it sitting there off to the right 8 feet away, or is a facsimile spread all over the sound stage?  When all the instruments play together in a crescendo, can I still clearly identify each one and where it is?

This is much the same theory that spawned the magazine title "The Absolute Sound."  Forget the personalities involved at the mag.  It was the concept - that we should strive for our systems (and recordings) to recreate the live performance as best they can.

My suggestion is to get out and listen to live music as much as you can.  The more you do, the more confident (or disappointed) you'll be in your system.

As a former classical musician myself, I do know what real instruments and voices sound like. What I’m referring to are external factors that affect our perception of recorded music. No recording can equal the sound of real music.
And every recording is different, and is going to contain some differing form of distortion from the live event.  We can’t hope to build a system that is going to account for the vagaries of every different recording. So, we can accept the limitations of each recording or choose to concentrate on that distortion which annoys us.  We have to convince ourselves to accept some form of compromise or drive ourselves crazy.

nonoise:
"Think how bad it would be if I had 4 stomachs and a cud to chew."


Hello nonoise,

     Geoffkait's been telling everyone you have all those things, are a methane machine and you get milked once a day.  My sympathies, it must be udderly awful.

Tim

The external factor in the above example is the workings of our mind.

Yes, I know. Specifically, it’s the working of our subconscious mind. It’s how external factors affect the subconscious mind, which I would call internal, not external, in terms of how sound is perceived/heard. In other words, It’s something we can’t control. It’s how our hearing influenced by our local environment. But maybe you have something else in mind, so to speak.