System that sounds so real it is easy to mistaken it is not live
My current stereo system consists of Oracle turntable with SME IV tonearm, Dynavector XV cartridge feeding Manley Steelhead and two Snappers monoblocks running 15" Tannoy Super Gold Monitors. Half of vinyl records are 45 RMP and were purchased new from Blue Note, AP, MoFI, IMPEX and some others. While some records play better than others none of them make my system sound as good as a live band I happened to see yesterday right on a street. The musicians played at the front of outdoor restaurant. There was a bass guitar, a drummer, a keyboard and a singer. The electric bass guitar was connected to some portable floor speaker and drums were not amplified. The sound of this live music, the sharpness and punch of it, the sound of real drums, the cymbals, the deepness, thunder-like sound of bass guitar coming from probably $500 dollars speaker was simply mind blowing. There is a lot of audiophile gear out there. Some sound better than others. Have you ever listened to a stereo system that produced a sound that would make you believe it was a real live music or live band performance at front of you?
@bigkidz The guitar player in my band plays a Les Paul hollow body into a Marshall Major(!) on a single Marshall stack (he used to use two but geez...). If your speakers have sufficient efficiency (mine are 98dB so slightly more efficiency than the Marshall stack) you can reproduce such a thing very convincingly 😁 Best done with no-one home... |
I can't speak for anyone else, but IME if the stars align with the right recording and system setup, you're not dealing with a noisy audience! Plus the mics are placed optimally whereas at a live performance you deal with whatever location you got. |
So that takes us down a different road of inquiry. A never ending contentious one. We can all agree that sometimes the live experience is not so great, because of room acoustics, ambient noise, noisy audience, bad amplification, etc but live instruments don’t lose their dynamics, even then. I was more responding to Mijostyn’s post advocating digital intervention, to artificially flatten the frequency response in the listening room, and enormous woofers (the way I think of the dynamics of live music has little to do with thunderous bass). I do agree with him that crossovers are often the enemy of verisimilitude. |
Not yet. If you don’t go out and listen to live music for a while you can fool yourself into believing your system comes close until you go see a show. Then it’s back to reality unfortunately. Personally I am not sure if I would want that in my home as I find most concerts leave me with strained hearing. |
