And here is the dishonesty I was talking about earlier. First, you claimed that vinyl is better than other recording media. When called on that, you retreat back to this. Dishonest. Your attempt to sneer down the opposition, to try to make people too embarrassed to take you on by equating the people who disagree with you with children in an ageist fashion, is both a ham-handed attempt at distraction and utterly par for the course for audiophiles.
The fact you use “audiophile” as anything other than a laugh line is similarly discrediting.
In other news, a huge Thank You to Francis Vaughn for risking carpal tunnel in going more in-depth as to how digital recording is done and the math behind it. I’ve been wading through some of those links and am grateful for the information.
Gosh, some things never change. The golden eared versus the engineer. I have seen these same arguments, almost exactly reproduced, for decades. However I will say that the rearguard of the the golden eared audiophile is waning. Slowly.
A few comments.
I know a lot of professional musicians. It is an interesting thing that many musicians have terrible home sound systems, and don’t care. They listen for aspects of playing, many of which are quite apparent on both scratchy tin boxes and top end high fidelity systems. They really really just don’t care. More to the point, nothing you can buy, at any price point, can match the real thing. And they are used to the real thing. For many any recorded sound is already not the same as the real thing. One class of musician I have noted often has a high end sound system is conductors. Now they do listen for a more hi-fi result. They are the live mixing engineer of the total orchestral sound. They will be listening to recordings explicitly for things high end systems do well.
This brings to mind a favourite Frank Zappa quote. Talking of a time conducting the LSO trying to record some of his work. “It sound so good up there, that if you listen to it, you will fuck up.”
Many older recordings - particularly when you get back before the invention of the multi-track tape recorder have an immediacy and intensity of performance that seems to vanish in modern studio recordings. The performers were under pressure to perform, not just to play. Modern recordings have developed a rather strange ethos. Too often the conductor or performer wants to make a definitive statement of their performance. And enormous emphasis goes into a flawless end-result. Often meaning many recordings, and much editing - all the way down to punching in single notes. Whereas older recordings were much more vital, and they caught the playing at a much more real level. This modern ethos has come in for some (valid IMHO) criticism. I have no trouble at all believing musicians would be captivated by many older, simpler, recordings, compared to much modern output.
Getting a really good reproduced audio sound is a mess of competing issues. However the dominant one is the one that is always forgotten. The room. Even a modest sound system set up properly in a really good room can sound utterly fantastic. Creating a good room isn’t all that difficult, but it requires dedication that few people are prepared to make. But it makes a good start. First of course, you need a good recording. Once you have those two you can worry about the bit in the middle.
For getting a room right, Floyde Toole: Sound Reproduction, Loudspeakers and Rooms, is a very accessible and comprehensive start from one of the industry gurus.
Gosh thanks :o Hope you got some value. As you would guess, I get a bit enthused about this stuff. Not just for audio, but there is the basis of a massive slab of really important physics and mathematics here that supports a wide range of modern technology.
This isn’t the first time Cartooniverse has made an argument from authority by citing his ex-brothers-in-law. Apparently they’re also experts on the work of John Cage.
“They spend all that money trying to get the exact effect of an orchestra actually playing in their sitting room. Personally I can’t think of anything I should hate more than to have an orchestra actually playing in my sitting room.”
There is a core group of audiophiles that prize a particular illusion - that of a sort of virtual reality of present musicians. Where it gets undone is in the fundamental technical issues of reproducing an entire sound field recorded in one venue in another, much smaller one, using only two channels. Simple answer is that it can’t be done.
But it is possible to get partly there if you are trying to reproduce a small jazz ensemble. There are not enough instruments to get you into real trouble, and the acoustic spaces are not wildly mismatched. So you get setups and recordings where, so long as you are prepared to sit in the one sweet spot, you get a pretty strong illusion of pinpoint sources for the various instruments. The reality is however that those particular audiophiles really need to get out more and listen to live music more. Because real bands in real venues don’t actually sound like that. But it is a neat illusion, and one some enthusiasts strive for.
The problem of managing the diffuse sound field is essentially impossible, and you simply have to acknowledge that the reproduction of recorded sound cannot match the sound field of the real thing. Once you get to orchestral sized subjects the recording is aiming for something quite different than reproducing the live event. The locations of the microphones, size of the venue, impossibility of controlling the reproduction environment, and mismatch between the studio and home environments make are just the start.
Something I do a bit - is attend symphony orchestra concerts which are being recorded for later broadcast. I then listen to, and record, the broadcast. I have a very good seat. The recordings do not sound the same at all. It isn’t that they are bad, but the nature of how they must mic the orchestra and mix down the recording make it impossible for the sound to be in any way the same. It isn’t better or worse, it is simply very different. And sounds like just about every other recording of an orchestra you will hear.
One way to get an approximation to the real sound of a live performance is to use a simple two channel recording that approximates the human head acoustically, and listen on headphones. The fidelity of the approximation can be as simple as a Jecklin Disk or Schneider Disk (although these are intended to also create a useful stereo image with loudspeakers) right up to a full binaural setup with a dummy head (which isn’t so good on loudspeakers, but is still reasonable.) The Minnesota Symhony Orchestra has a couple of quite nice binaural recordings available (and for download). Their rendition of Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony is really nice.
Once you get to the modern technology for popular music you can throw any idea of an illusion of presence of musicians away. Musicians don’t have to be in the same space, or even the same time, to make a recording. The recording is the end musical artefact. It isn’t a recording of the performance, it is simply the thing in and of itself.
The other illusion audiophiles operate under is the insistence that they can hear things which can’t be measured or otherwise quantified. Usually accompanied with a generous helping of smugness and sneering derision.
Ironically, I’m seeing the benefit at work as well (I’m a radar field technician), and it never ceases to amuse me how my interest in audio, acoustics, electronics and RF all dovetail.
FWIW, SACD does have a major thing going for it in that quite a few of them were mastered in 5.1 and listening to DSOTM in stereo and 5.1 are very different experiences.
As to reproducing live performances I have an ATMOS/DTS:X setup and concerts, even those “modified” using Neural:X from either DTS or 5.1 seem more immersive to me.