Holographic imaging

I take great pleasure in hearing and speaking about concepts and tweaks that cost only a few dollars and make more fundamental difference in sound quality than what a blowviating dealer may offer for thousands and is obsolete in weeks or months. Tom

Tbg,
Thank you for your detailed response. Seems, that you - like me -carry an idea, a "memory" if you like, in you what "real" music sounds like and use it as a benchmark in critical listening of your rig. The chance to get direct comparisons between a specific live event in a specific venue with a take of that very event through your rig at home is indeed very small.

I carry "memories" of live music, and still attend performances from time to time (but recently I hardly ever get the time) but I tend not to use live music as a benchmark except for some classical music - specifically chamber music. For me, there are very few times when I have been able to get the seat at the venue I would have needed to get in order to achieve the sound I can get at home. In addition, a lot of performances are amplified and the music sent out over speakers and the music competes with the girl next to me shouting to her boyfriend how TOOOOHHHHTALLY AWESOME the whole thing is, the guy in front puking his guts out, and the person behind me spilling beer he smuggled in. So much for rock concerts.

Jazz is OK, but jazz and classical concerts for me are so much more about appreciating an interpretation of music you already know. There are, as Detlof knows, umpteen versions of the Goldberg variations, and I'd swear I can hum along with the best of them and not get a note wrong, but I can still be surprised by little things when I hear a performance, and it is the interpretation, NOT the sound, that I seek when I go out of my way to listen to live music. And THAT benchmark is tough to emulate at home.

My personal 'benchmark' for my system is more an 'image' of what that particular performance SHOULD sound like. It may not be a memory per se; instead it may be an image created in my head, a mishmash (partly based on memory) of knowing what a given musician should be able to do with a given piece of music and a given group of people, along with the instruments, the temperature, whether it was the first take or the 5th, and trying to figure out whether the conductor or ensemble really was satisfied with what they did. Indeed, the chance to actually compare live with 'memorex' is indeed very small, but that doesn't bother me in the slightest - the live performances I appreciate the most are the ones which would lose their charm if repeated anyway.

Doppler effect??! I would think that if there is any doppler effect in the recording, you would certainly **not** want to compensate for it. Otherwise you would not be playing it back right :)

I get the feeling that a lot of these holography systems that have appeared over the years are aimed at those who have a lack of resolution in their systems- and can stand listening to an effect, rather than the music.

Sorry for the criticism, but I've always felt bad for people who've laid out the cash over the years for such things. IMO/IME the best performance in the audio system will be when there are as few processors/audio building blocks between the recording microphones and the playback speakers as possible.

I don't know for sure whether the H Cat does what it claims or not since I've never heard.

But my understanding from their web site is that they sold early models of a device that requires adjustment to work right without any way to perform the needed adjustment.

Oops????