Paul's Posts — 30 June 2012
By Paul McGowan
I’ve written before that in the long run I find that we are very far away from reproducing live sound in our homes. We stress over cleaning and polishing the fine details of our systems when, in reality, they are very far away from live sound reproduced in our home. We can fool our senses by closing our eyes and imagining we’re in a concert hall but we always know we are not.
I believe that the biggest hurdles to achieving live sound in our homes are to be found not in digital vs. analog recording and playback but in the transducers themselves: the microphones and loudspeakers. These are archaic contraptions that will hold us back from reaching audio nirvana for as long as we insist on using them. Not that I have anything better to offer.
But can we get a piece of it right? Is it possible to reproduce some of the live qualities of music in our homes? I think the answer is yes and I would like to touch on the qualities of some of what we have right over the next few days.
My purpose in writing this isn’t to be a naysayer but rather to poke the box as my friend Seth is fond of saying. Poking the box means to me that I bring to light that which some of us may find uncomfortable. That which challenges our cherished beliefs.
Tomorrow I start with the middle of the chain.
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Soundminded
One thing I like about this site is that it doesn’t pretend that there wasn’t once a definite goal, a promise of what was to come for high fidelity, even what it means.Nor does it pretend that it’s achieved that goal or that goal didn’t matter and what it can do instead is good enough.
As Oliver T. Finch pointed out yesterday “a lot of sound heard at live performances is reflected sound.” In fact that’s almost all of what you hear at a live performance. Much of what you hear at home is also reflected but those reflections are very different. Understanding exactly how all these reflections work, how to characterize them, and most importantly how to duplicate them is the key to solving most of the problem. It is a very hard thing to do adequately. Strangely though, when you can do it sufficiently well for a home entertainment sound system, the hardware isn’t particularly expensive by audiophile standards. And when you do it well, it matters far more than all the other money thrown at everything else combined.
hahax
But the best recordings of live music already have a good semblance of the reflected sound of the recording venue on them. It almost says they should be replayed in an anechoic chamber to not add the distortions of the room reflections. Or maybe the best realistic situation is a system with strong direct sound so the ear/brain can seperate the recording from the listening room and ‘hear’ what’s on the recording.
For manufactured recordings like typical over produced rock music, I don’t know if it matters so long as the room doesn’t screw up the information on the software. By the way I’m not advocating crap systems for any recording. I want to hear what is on them good or bad. Just that the definition of good on manufactured sound is defined differently and is probably harder to define. There may even be multiple valid definitions.
Anyway this is an ongoing process and so long as there is progress of some sort, it makes for a fun hobby with the parallel benefit of the music.
Soundminded
I’m afraid it doesn’t work very well. Whetever reverberation is on the recording coming from the front speakers isn’t the same as hearing it all around you. Attempts to extract it and reproduce it, the goal of quadraphonic sound in the 1970s didn’t work very well either no matter which system was tried. So the industry reverted back to 2 channel sound and thar she stayed up ’til this very day.
hahax
I think I agree with you about having sound from multiple directions. But I don’t like the idea of synthesizing it(although I heard some good sound done that way at Gordon Holt’s over 3 decades ago). And the only software I can think available now are the Isotek SACDs and there aren’t many of them. I suppose there are others but they are still a miniscule percentage of the software I’d like to listen to. Of course that’s true of good stereo software also.
And then there’s the cost of doing more than 2 channels well, electronically and speaker wise. I can’t really afford that the way I’d like to as it is. And dumbing down the reproductive chain to get more channels is not a good trade off.