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Concert Hall sound


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21 hours ago, STC said:

We have seen many videos of audiophiles listening room. But the real sound recorded at you listening position in concert hall will sound like the video below. Ideally, our listening room too should sound like that when recorded at our sweet spot. Can this be done?

 

In short, not yet.

On current current techical level copying of original sound into listening is impossible. Because we still can't manage acoustical wave field enough: https://samplerateconverter.com/content/where-limit-audio-quality

 

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21 hours ago, STC said:

Exactly, most listening rooms are just too dry to bring out concert hall sound.

 

We can reduce carpets and give more surfaces. We can play with acoustical properties of room to achieve desirable sound.

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16 minutes ago, audiventory said:

On current current techical level copying of original sound into listening is impossible

 

One to one copy is possible with 100% perfection. The problem starts when the source is widely dispersed . Even then, various experiment proved human couldn't distinguish recorded and real sound. The last concert of Pavarotti was dubbed with prerecording due to his illness. The truth emerged after his death. Obama's inauguration orchestra was a prerecorded sound as it was too cold for the instruments to perform. Even animals whose survival depends on hearing acuity more than humans could be fooled with prerecorded sound. 

 

The OP meant to address concert hall acoustics vs our listening room. 

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48 minutes ago, audiventory said:

 

In short, not yet.

On current current techical level copying of original sound into listening is impossible. Because we still can't manage acoustical wave field enough: https://samplerateconverter.com/content/where-limit-audio-quality

 

 

I briefly looked at that link. And noted, as usual, that the human ability to "fill the gaps" has not been taken into account - unless one has experienced how 'impressive' the presentation of a conventional stereo replay system is when the level of key audible anomalies is low enough such that it becomes impossible to locate the speaker drivers aurally, no matter how close you are to one, then it's difficult to convey what is gained in every area of the listening.

 

If you can't play the following, from a quality source, at full tilt, and not be blown away by the experience, then there's work to be done ...

 

 

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2 hours ago, STC said:

One to one copy is possible with 100% perfection.

I meant copy of wave field (in meaning of wave theory of physics). Like hologramm in electromagnetic wave (field) sense.

 

 

2 hours ago, STC said:

 

We could but it will never reach 2 seconds RT and if it did it will be horrible.

What is RT?

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2 hours ago, fas42 said:

And noted, as usual, that the human ability to "fill the gaps" has not been taken into account

 

We can account the ability. This principle is used in lossy compression audio and video.

 

But in audiophile branch we moves in lossless direction. And in the article I considered ideal aim, to know target point.

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56 minutes ago, audiventory said:

I meant copy of wave field (in meaning of wave theory of physics). Like hologramm in electromagnetic wave (field) sense.

 

 

What is RT?

 

There are research which already determined which of the wavefield matters for musical enjoyment. In concert hall, it is impossible to be selective as the whole is responsible for the reverberation but reproduction you can isolate those of which is crucial for preferable sound. Google for concert hall and lateral reflection. 

 

RT is the reverberation time. A typical room is about 0.5second but in concert halls it is around 2 seconds. 

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46 minutes ago, STC said:

There are research which already determined which of the wavefield matters for musical enjoyment.

 

[Enjoyment] is equipment development direction, that is placed in art area. It is sound enchancers, not [high fidelity] as [fidelity].

 

"Fidelity" I understand as "bring to ears sound hall without altering".

 

51 minutes ago, STC said:

A typical room is about 0.5second but in concert halls it is around 2 seconds

 

I suppose, it is problematic (impossible?) to increase reverberation time in smaller geometry by mechanical way.

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14 minutes ago, audiventory said:

Fidelity" I understand as "bring to ears sound hall without altering".

 

I thought fidelity is capturing and reproducing as accurate as possible. That’s a good question. 

 

It it is possible to increase the reverbs by using actual concert hall impulse response. 

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6 hours ago, STC said:

 

I thought fidelity is capturing and reproducing as accurate as possible. That’s a good question. 

 

It it is possible to increase the reverbs by using actual concert hall impulse response. 

"Fidelity" means faithfulness and it can pertain to one's spouse, one's school, one's favorite football team, ones favorite musical group, or the degree with which an audio system approximates real, acoustic music playing in a real space. High Fidelity means a high degree of faithfulness in that approximation and that's the bottom line. High-fidelity sound is not an absolute, it is to a degree with absolute fidelity as an admittedly unreachable goal. However a paradox exists with the word fidelity as it pertains to real life, in that it is an absolute. One is faithful to one's spouse, or one isn't. One is faithful to one's school, or one isn't. One is a faithful fan of one's favorite football team or one isn't. The adjective "high" has no meaning when placed in front of fidelity in any usage other than to explain the degree of perfection in some technical approximation of reality. When used to indicate a human commitment to someone or some thing, it joins pregnant, unique, dead and several other words as stand alone absolutes incapable of modification. One would not properly say that their wife was "kind of pregnant", or that the planet Jupiter was "extremely unique" in the Solar system, or that your grandfather was "sort of dead". :)

George

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26 minutes ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:
Amar Bose famously measured direct and reflected sound decades ago in concert halls.  He came up with his 8:1 reflected/direct energy ratio, enshrined in his 901 speakers.  Though the speakers had their fans and he made $millions, it was a crude and ineffective way to replicate concert hall sound in stereo.  As @stc says, the listening room does not have nearly sufficient reverb time, and also the resulting angular dispersion of reflections from just the front wall was totally incorrect vs. the concert hall.  The listening room just cannot do it close to accurately from 2 speakers.
 

Actually, one doesn't want one's listening room to have any set reverb times or angular dispersion modes. The ideal listening room is acoustically dead. All of the ambience cues should, ideally, be provided by the recording and reproduced by the playback system. That way when listening to a recording made in England's Watford Town Hall, or The Royal Albert Hall, those would be the acoustic environments that the listener is transferred to while listening. If, on the other hand, one is listening to a recording made in a night club (like Jazz At The Pawnshop), the  dead acoustic signature of the listening room should facilitate the accurate recreation of that acoustic space as well. 

George

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19 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Well, you should. If the recording was made in a large space then that's what you should hear, while the choir is singing - the cues are in the recording

 

The acoustics of the room you're in don't matter - 

 

Whether or not the acoustics are in the recording depends on how close the mics were from the vocalists.

 

And you're wrong about the room.

 

"Science draws the wave, poetry fills it with water" Teixeira de Pascoaes

 

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13 minutes ago, Kal Rubinson said:

True but that will only work with multichannel recordings. 

It will sound very dead with stereo, as it would in an anechoic chamber as stereo recordings are mastered with the presumption of playback in a typical listening room.

Of course, you're right, Kal, but I was talking about an ideal situation. IOW, if our high-fidelity systems were perfect, and if recordings were made for those perfect systems, then, of course, they would be multichannel and designed to be played in an optimized listening room. If one wanted to listen to an older 2-channel recording in such an environment, one's system would need to include some sophisticated ambience synthesizing capability that can be switched on to give these 2-channel recordings the semblance of a proper multichannel recording, designed specifically to play in an optimized "dead" listening room. 

George

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1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

Actually, one doesn't want one's listening room to have any set reverb times or angular dispersion modes. The ideal listening room is acoustically dead. All of the ambience cues should, ideally, be provided by the recording and reproduced by the playback system. That way when listening to a recording made in England's Watford Town Hall, or The Royal Albert Hall, those would be the acoustic environments that the listener is transferred to while listening. If, on the other hand, one is listening to a recording made in a night club (like Jazz At The Pawnshop), the  dead acoustic signature of the listening room should facilitate the accurate recreation of that acoustic space as well. 

I see the apparent logic of what you are trying to say.  But, I don't think it squares with listening experiments.  People just don't prefer listening in dead, anechoic rooms, regardless of the recordings.  I personally have heard many rooms that were too dead to be enjoyable.  Toole talks about "listening through the room", where the brain compensates for the room's reverb and reflections, making the room "disappear".  But, there are obviously finite limits to that.  Some rooms are better than others.

 

There is also an excellent case to be made for speaker/room setups where, while the room is not dead in terms of reflections, the frequency response is smoothly downward sloping, with bass frequencies EQed to be flat or near flat to eliminate room modal variations, which are often huge.  Toole prefers EQing just the bass below about 500 Hz and using speakers with smooth directivity so that room reflections do not alter frequency response.  Others, like me, use full range DSP EQ to control frequency response at the listening position.  But, Toole is no fan of that approach.

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4 hours ago, semente said:

 

Whether or not the acoustics are in the recording depends on how close the mics were from the vocalists.

 

And you're wrong about the room.

 

 

As people have been pointing out, mics don't discriminate; they pick up all the sound energy that is impinging on their diaphragms ... we are the ones that separate the content, and choose to focus on what's important, to us ...

 

Mics being closer to the "instruments" doesn't stop the acoustics pickup, dead - it just means that the contribution of the latter is lower in level - and that requires a higher standard of replay for those acoustics to register, when listening. To appreciate this, one needs to have a rig working at a level where one can play a recording which is a studio mix of various instruments, all recorded separately - and one can turn one's focus on each of those sounds in turn, and "see" the acoustic where each one was located; a complex recording is a layering of acoustics, each of which still retains its identity within the whole.

 

Rule of thumb: poorer quality playback == listening room is everything; convincing standard playback == listening environment is irrelevant.

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2 hours ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

Toole talks about "listening through the room", where the brain compensates for the room's reverb and reflections, making the room "disappear".  But, there are obviously finite limits to that.  Some rooms are better than others.

 

Yes, the room "disappears" - but it's not a function of the room, it's a function of the integrity of the playback. When I start the tweaking process, the system is producing tiny, squawking sound, in a certain location in the room; if I fully succeed, the sound has become huge, and totally dominates the enviroment - the music event that was recorded is the universe, at that moment.

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46 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

As people have been pointing out, mics don't discriminate; they pick up all the sound energy that is impinging on their diaphragms ... we are the ones that separate the content, and choose to focus on what's important, to us ...

 

Mics being closer to the "instruments" doesn't stop the acoustics pickup, dead - it just means that the contribution of the latter is lower in level - and that requires a higher standard of replay for those acoustics to register, when listening. To appreciate this, one needs to have a rig working at a level where one can play a recording which is a studio mix of various instruments, all recorded separately - and one can turn one's focus on each of those sounds in turn, and "see" the acoustic where each one was located; a complex recording is a layering of acoustics, each of which still retains its identity within the whole.

 

Rule of thumb: poorer quality playback == listening room is everything; convincing standard playback == listening environment is irrelevant.

Nonsense, as usual, Frank.

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17 minutes ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

Nonsense, as usual, Frank.

 

Which makes it clear that you have never experienced this quality of replay - or if you have, dismissed it as being some sort of artifact of the rig's setup. Ummm, yes it is, an 'artifact' - it's being able to fully hear what's on the recording ...

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19 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

mics always discriminate; they never pick up all the sound energy that is impinging on their diaphragms

 

I presume this is meant in jest - otherwise, illogical. Of course, if you meant subsonic, and ultrasonic it's acceptable ...

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