How do you want your treble roll-off served?

[STC]

17 hours ago, Le Concombre Masqué said:

Ok... has anyone tried to reproduce actual concert halls FR ? 

 

Yes, with real 360 degrees of a real concert hall’s impulse response. 

[pkane2001]

17 hours ago, Le Concombre Masqué said:

Ok... has anyone tried to reproduce actual concert halls FR ? To summarise :

 

feed a flat signal in a concert hall and you'll get a downward slope (#1db/octave slope is preferred) at Listening Position (quoted Finnish studies). That opens this thread and means DON T BE AFRAID, there's solid ground to eQ.

 

Play a bunch of listeners a bunch of samples of actual CDs on loudspeakers and they will prefer when those loudspeakers are tuned to yield a 1dB/octave downward  slope (albeit without the brisk attenuation above 5K displayed by all measured large concert halls) at LP when fed a flat signal. (quoted Harman studies)

 

Other industry leaders such as B&K have produced recommendations in the same line for years so you have good chances your favorite music has been mastered with something resembling a 1dB/octave downward  slope although I can't rule out that some morons eQ flat their monitors or with any kind of tortuous curves.

 

Here is computeraudiophile : trying is donation free with REW and RePhase + I think some free players are capable of convolution.

 

I invite those who haven't to try and report if they're happier when listening to music and how that cheap solution fares vs cables etc etc

 

 

 

 

Not a concert hall, but my own listening room. Did this to try to reproduce the effect of room and speakers through headphones, see the latter part of this post for details:

 

[fas42]

Okay, George has laid down the gauntlet - get that Finlandia recording by Ormandy to become a 'magic' experience, in the listening. I don't happen to have that piece of music, but I'll track down a decent copy of it, get a rig running to a reasonable standard, and record the speaker output at various distances from the speakers, and listening room.

 

A little bit of common sense needs to come into this ... if this recording was always so obviously terrible, how on earth was it ever released in the first place - surely a few musically inclined people in the game of recording and reviewing, back then, would have noticed, and given it a big thumbs down?

[fas42]

BTW, here is a far more "reasonable" variant ...

 

 

[kumakuma]

20 minutes ago, fas42 said:

A little bit of common sense needs to come into this ... if this recording was always so obviously terrible, how on earth was it ever released in the first place - surely a few musically inclined people in the game of recording and reviewing, back then, would have noticed, and given it a big thumbs down?

Probably for the same reason that these cars were sold to the Australian driving public:

 

https://www.racv.com.au/membership/member-benefits/royalauto/motoring/information-and-advice/australias-worst-cars.html

[Ralf11]

Ha!  Car analogies are inescapable...

[tmtomh]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

Okay, George has laid down the gauntlet - get that Finlandia recording by Ormandy to become a 'magic' experience, in the listening. I don't happen to have that piece of music, but I'll track down a decent copy of it, get a rig running to a reasonable standard, and record the speaker output at various distances from the speakers, and listening room.

 

A little bit of common sense needs to come into this ... if this recording was always so obviously terrible, how on earth was it ever released in the first place - surely a few musically inclined people in the game of recording and reviewing, back then, would have noticed, and given it a big thumbs down?

 

Yes, a little bit of common sense does need to come into this. I will side with you on that front, in the sense that I think that Finlandia recording, though flawed in the ways George says, still can be an immersive and quite pleasant experience.

 

But common sense also has to be brought to bear on your arguments, Frank - and if you think you can record the output of your speakers, in your room, with whatever mic you have on hand, and that that recording of the in-room playback of the original recording on your rig, will be experienced as "magical" by anyone (except you of course), you're severely mistaken, to say the least.

 

The tragicomedy of your view, Frank, is that it's so unnecessary in its extremism. George has given you a clear rhetorical opening - I think he's overstepped by calling the Finlandia recording "unlistenable." But since you insist on claiming that pretty much any recording (within reason I suppose) can be made not only listenable or pleasant but "magical," simply by tweaking one's playback rig to "overcome" the inherent flaws of the recording - and claiming further that you can reproduce this "magical overcoming of problems" sound via a live-mic recording of in-room playback, you are setting yourself up to fail to convince many (I would guess most, in fact) people here.

 

And I'd guess that much of the "heat" behind George's and other's arguments with you, lies in their frustration that, when faced with this failure to convince folks, instead of examining the flaws in your own chain of argument, you instead fall back on shaking your head at the alleged close-mindedness, poor listening skills, and low sonic aspirations of everyone else here.

[gmgraves]

3 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

Yes, I well remember the sound of a 741 vs. a decompensated 748 etc. where with the sound of air conditioning the 741 made it sound like a dull roar, and how crappy your typical 6V6GT output stage with 10% distortion in many radios sounded .

Yet there were many very good recordings that rival those of today, many of which have severe limiting and compression etc.

 I seriously doubt that too many studios raced in and replaced their mixers with crappy 741 stages ! 

There are many very good sounding albums from artists such as Julie London from those early days.

Have a good  look at the attached photo of a Julie London album. Many of Julie's recordings were from the 1956-1957 era and later remastered in 2006.

Incidentally, the original recording of Peggy Lee- Fever from May 19, 1958 sounds fabulous, or at least it did BEFORE the additional mixing.

(I have a copy of this track from before the additional mixing )

 

 

Well, tubed recording electronics only brought a bit of thermal noise to the party, and a number of recording companies didn't go multi-channeled until the mid 1970's and a lot of them kept with tubed electronics (like Mercury, Everest, Vanguard,, etc. RCA Victor when solid state and so did Columbia and the EMI cables such as Capitol, Angel and Liberty., and I'm not talking 741 or 709 op amps either!, I'm talking discrete early silicon transistors. 

[fas42]

43 minutes ago, tmtomh said:

The tragicomedy of your view, Frank, is that it's so unnecessary in its extremism. George has given you a clear rhetorical opening - I think he's overstepped by calling the Finlandia recording "unlistenable." But since you insist on claiming that pretty much any recording (within reason I suppose) can be made not only listenable or pleasant but "magical," simply by tweaking one's playback rig to "overcome" the inherent flaws of the recording - and claiming further that you can reproduce this "magical overcoming of problems" sound via a live-mic recording of in-room playback, you are setting yourself up to fail to convince many (I would guess most, in fact) people here.

 

And I'd guess that much of the "heat" behind George's and other's arguments with you, lies in their frustration that, when faced with this failure to convince folks, instead of examining the flaws in your own chain of argument, you instead fall back on shaking your head at the alleged close-mindedness, poor listening skills, and low sonic aspirations of everyone else here.

 

From my POV, the tragicomedy is listening to ambitious rigs which are quite awful, yet the owners are so certain that they must be good, because they're the 'right' brands, and they've paid so much money for them - they seem incapable of assessing their true performance - and any recording which sounds "awful", well, it must be proving the GIGO principle ... .

 

Of course people who listen to captures of audio systems, who can't hear the problems with the playback, will find nothing of value in something I present in that fashion. Some, however, might pick up some clues ... .

 

Yes, the issue is that there is no direct way of demonstrating. A little first step is when you first hear an ambitious rig, and it's so obviously not the "real thing", is to try and pick, with analytical skills, why it's failing.

[tmtomh]

4 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

From my POV, the tragicomedy is listening to ambitious rigs which are quite awful, yet the owners are so certain that they must be good, because they're the 'right' brands, and they've paid so much money for them - they seem incapable of assessing their true performance - and any recording which sounds "awful", well, it must be proving the GIGO principle ... .

 

Of course people who listen to captures of audio systems, who can't hear the problems with the playback, will find nothing of value in something I present in that fashion. Some, however, might pick up some clues ... .

 

Yes, the issue is that there is no direct way of demonstrating. A little first step is when you first hear an ambitious rig, and it's so obviously not the "real thing", is to try and pick, with analytical skills, why it's failing.

 

I agree that one can see it as tragicomic when people have expensive rigs that don't sound good - I think we've all heard tragically bad-sounding, high-dollar/audiophile-brand setups in both audio stores and people's homes.

 

But that's not George, and that's not the issue you and he are disagreeing about - and you know it.

 

As for your second, "Of course people..." paragraph, that's exactly what I was talking about. Anyone who questions your claim that you can magically tell which colorations are from the speakers and which colorations are from the capturing microphone - and that sonic interactions between the two are of no consequence - simply becomes categorized by you as "people... who can't hear" whatever it is you're claiming to hear. It's a neatly tautological, and therefore bogus, argument.

 

Let me be clear - if you capture two different systems with the same mic, then I would indeed agree with you that we can start to come to some partial and provisional conclusions about how those systems (in interaction with the rooms they're in) sound compared to each other. But that's a far more limited and modest claim than you're insisting upon.

 

As for your final paragraph, I actually agree with you there 100%. Anyone interested in this hobby should aspire to be able to analyze (that is, discern) what exactly is wrong with an underperforming expensive/high-end setup. And I would venture that almost everyone who regularly disagrees with you here can do that, though you seem to have a deep emotional investment in insisting that they can't.

[kumakuma]

9 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

From my POV, the tragicomedy is listening to ambitious rigs which are quite awful, yet the owners are so certain that they must be good, because they're the 'right' brands, and they've paid so much money for them - they seem incapable of assessing their true performance - and any recording which sounds "awful", well, it must be proving the GIGO principle ... .

 

 

Please point out a single person on this forum that has demonstrated this attitude.

[Ralf11]

GUTB?

[kumakuma]

1 minute ago, Ralf11 said:

GUTB?

 

Should have said "credible member" instead of "person".

 

Whatever happened to him?

[fas42]

Incorrect post ...

 

[fas42]

1 hour ago, tmtomh said:

As for your second, "Of course people..." paragraph, that's exactly what I was talking about. Anyone who questions your claim that you can magically tell which colorations are from the speakers and which colorations are from the capturing microphone - and that sonic interactions between the two are of no consequence - simply becomes categorized by you as "people... who can't hear" whatever it is you're claiming to hear. It's a neatly tautological, and therefore bogus, argument.

 

 

How it works is, when the system is right you don't hear the speakers at all; when it's not, the speakers are easily identifiable, locatable. It's not my conscious mind doing this, it's an illusion generated by the lack of playback anomalies - it's been repeatable for 30 years, on many combos of gear. And then the SQ also registers as effortless, natural, organic, immersive - all the usual audiophile twaddle. The latter qualities remove every last ounce of tiresomeness from the listening, and hence to me make such a goal highly desirable.

[tmtomh]

3 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

How it works is, when the system is right you don't hear the speakers at all; when it's not, the speakers are easily identifiable, locatable. It's not my conscious mind doing this, it's an illusion generated by the lack of playback anomalies - it's been repeatable for 30 years, on many combos of gear. And then the SQ also registers as effortless, natural, organic, immersive - all the usual audiophile twaddle. The latter qualities remove every last ounce of tiresomeness from the listening, and hence to me make such a goal highly desirable.

 

This is indeed how it works, I agree 100%. 

 

But the "it" you're referring to here is not the "it" we were talking about before. To connect the topic of discussion to the correct but irrelevant comment you've just made: If you can locate or not locate the speakers in a YouTube video of a recording of those speakers playing music in a room, you have no reliable way of knowing how much of what your hearing was impacted by the microphone that did the recording. But you're so invested in your claimed power to hear through the colorations of all manner of unknown microphones, that you can't acknowledge this basic point, and instead repeat over and over that it's easy to hear through the mic colorations, and that you feel sorry for all the people here who can't,  or who won't bother to try.

[fas42]

54 minutes ago, tmtomh said:

 

This is indeed how it works, I agree 100%. 

 

But the "it" you're referring to here is not the "it" we were talking about before. To connect the topic of discussion to the correct but irrelevant comment you've just made: If you can locate or not locate the speakers in a YouTube video of a recording of those speakers playing music in a room, you have no reliable way of knowing how much of what your hearing was impacted by the microphone that did the recording. But you're so invested in your claimed power to hear through the colorations of all manner of unknown microphones, that you can't acknowledge this basic point, and instead repeat over and over that it's easy to hear through the mic colorations, and that you feel sorry for all the people here who can't,  or who won't bother to try.

 

The reliable method is, experience. The colourations of microphones are of a different order - how do I know this? Because I have heard recordings made via the most technically advanced, sophisticated studio efforts, right through the spectrum, to those at the other end - how about, the inbuilt mic of a cheap cassette recorder from the 1970's? And have been able to "hear through" those colourations - it required an extremely high order of optimising to achieve this, but it can happen.

 

Poorly performing playback rigs have a signature - and I find it easy to pick the signs. No-one is willing to comment on the fact that one often has a reference of incidental, 'real world' noises also on a clip; or that it's easy for non-audiophile people to recognise whether a YT clip is of a live performance, or just a hifi. I happen to know exactly what to look for - the telltales are in, say, how complex crescendos are handled, or transients - a high energy, solo piano piece reveals all.

[tmtomh]

5 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

The reliable method is, experience. The colourations of microphones are of a different order - how do I know this? Because I have heard recordings made via the most technically advanced, sophisticated studio efforts, right through the spectrum, to those at the other end - how about, the inbuilt mic of a cheap cassette recorder from the 1970's? And have been able to "hear through" those colourations - it required an extremely high order of optimising to achieve this, but it can happen.

 

Poorly performing playback rigs have a signature - and I find it easy to pick the signs. No-one is willing to comment on the fact that one often has a reference of incidental, 'real world' noises also on a clip; or that it's easy for non-audiophile people to recognise whether a YT clip is of a live performance, or just a hifi. I happen to know exactly what to look for - the telltales are in, say, how complex crescendos are handled, or transients - a high energy, solo piano piece reveals all.

 

I guess my point, Frank, is that you have a choice. You can continue to be stunned that no-one is willing (or per some of your other comments, able) to do what you recommend or detect what you detect. Or you can ask yourself if there is perhaps something about the way you're communicating, the overarching character of your arguments, the cheerful and polite but nevertheless incredibly condescending and dismissive way you hold your abilities above those of everyone else (with no evidence for such), that might be helping to generate the negative responses you're getting.

 

My opinion is that the maintenance of your sense of yourself as above and apart from others in your audio experience and abilities is more important to you than your claimed desire to help or educate others here. But I'm just one person and I've never met you, so my opinion could be totally off-base. I can only go on the persona you present to us here through your written comments. And as I've repeatedly noted in prior comments, I actually do agree with some of what you say about high-end systems often sounding mediocre or bad, and about the importance of dissecting and diagnosing what might be contributing to that. 

 

At any rate, as I say, it's your choice, totally up to you, how you wish to proceed. No one can or should control what you write or how you write it. But what you say and how you say it will in large part determine the responses you get and don't get - and if you take the same tack over and over, you shouldn't be surprised if the responses you get don't change or improve.

[fas42]

3 hours ago, kumakuma said:

 

Please point out a single person on this forum that has demonstrated this attitude.

 

In the sense of the GIGO principle, just about everyone.

 

I take it that no-one has listened to the second YouTube clip of the Ormandy, which demonstrates what an intense listening experience that recording actually is - for me, this is demonstration quality, in the sense that it would be a solid test of a rig's ability to project Big Sound.

[fas42]

4 minutes ago, tmtomh said:

Or you can ask yourself if there is perhaps something about the way you're communicating, the overarching character of your arguments, the cheerful and polite but nevertheless incredibly condescending and dismissive way you hold your abilities above those of everyone else (with no evidence for such), that might be helping to generate the negative responses you're getting.

 

As I say, it's your choice, totally up to you. No one can or should control what you write or how you write it. But what you say and how you say it will in large part determine the responses you get and don't get.

 

You can ask yourself how you would react if you suggest things for people to try, and they a) completely ignore you; or b) scorn that you even suggested something "so dumb!" ; and c) belittle every aspect of how you think about things, because it doesn't match up with the current groupthink.

[kumakuma]

25 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

You can ask yourself how you would react if you suggest things for people to try, and they a) completely ignore you; or b) scorn that you even suggested something "so dumb!" ; and c) belittle every aspect of how you think about things, because it doesn't match up with the current groupthink.

 

If that's the reaction you've been getting, doing more of the same isn't going to improve the situation or change anyone's mind.

[Hugo9000]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

Incorrect post ...

 

Wow, short and to the point!  This may be your best post yet!  ?    

[Hugo9000]

7 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

Yes, I well remember the sound of a 741 vs. a decompensated 748 etc. where with the sound of air conditioning the 741 made it sound like a dull roar, and how crappy your typical 6V6GT output stage with 10% distortion in many radios sounded .

Yet there were many very good recordings that rival those of today, many of which have severe limiting and compression etc.

 I seriously doubt that too many studios raced in and replaced their mixers with crappy 741 stages ! 

There are many very good sounding albums from artists such as Julie London from those early days.

Have a good  look at the attached photo of a Julie London album. Many of Julie's recordings were from the 1956-1957 era and later remastered in 2006.

Incidentally, the original recording of Peggy Lee- Fever from May 19, 1958 sounds fabulous, or at least it did BEFORE the additional mixing.

(I have a copy of this track from before the additional mixing )

 

 

 

Wow!  Transistorized Spectra-Sonic Sound!  The ultimate in High Fidelity!  I'll have to check out that Julie London record, Liberty really knew what they were doing!  Now all we get is MQA and other lo-fi...

 

 

[fas42]

56 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

If that's the reaction you've been getting, doing more of the same isn't going to improve the situation or change anyone's mind.

 

For those who are not interested, true. However, it should be made clear in threads that there are alternatives to the two tribal views of audio, as it descends into the usual bickering - it is tragicomic that audio is mired in this mud currently, and with only very, very slow extricating of itself if this game is left to play out amongst the ol' folk it's worthwhile constantly nudging people to think a bit further ...

 

To lay the concepts out another way:

 

1) The supposed experts don't have the full story sorted of what is needed for subjectively exemplary playback

2) What is considered of very great importance by these "experts" is in fact of a much lower order of significance - frequency response is the most obvious example of such

3) Very high quality SQ is possible from very moderate cost equipment, provided all the poor decisions often made in implementation are no longer part of the system

4) Highly satisfying, immersive presentation of virtually all recordings made to date is possible, if enough efforts are made to refine the playback chain

 

 

 

[sandyk]

1 hour ago, Hugo9000 said:

Wow!  Transistorized Spectra-Sonic Sound!  The ultimate in High Fidelity!  I'll have to check out that Julie London record, Liberty really knew what they were doing!  Now all we get is MQA and other lo-fi...

 

 

YouTube doesn't do it any favours, but also remember that this recording was made almost 51 years ago !