GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: The dynamic range of our playback

Post Subject: I think dynamics “as is” is a wrong quantification for audio.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 6/29/2014

That all interesting though but the problem is that they have no way to be absolute valid. Yes, we as a humans, have a lot of masking effect build in us that prevents up to get complexity and color of sound with dynamic range rises. Yes we do in many instances misguided about true dynamic range if sound is ornamented with colors. There are many other “yes” but they do not lead to anything. I think, in audio a definition of dynamic range is not the same as in live sound and all problems that we have with dealing with dynamic range in audio that we presume that they are the same. In life music there are no reasons why dynamic range different. I mean there are a lot of reasons for compressions in live sound and we see it all time but any change of dynamic range live sound happen become the only one reason – acoustic reasons. We as a human are tunes to this reasons and we perceive those dynamic range fluctuation as something natural. In audio however, the dynamic range fluctuation is not acoustical but have mechanical or electronic nature and those abnormal compressions have a lot of adverse impact to our psychic. Here is a good illustration where we have near live perception of dynamics in audio - the pre 1923 made 78s records – it is because they had one single mechanical description of reality with no transformations.

It is not to mention that live sound is reality but audio is depicture of reality. 80dB event in live sound is an event that have reference to everything in a world, literally. The 80dB event in audio is an isolated even in a value of reality that has only relation to acoustic pressure that was built upon ears of listener. It is ironic that in audio we perception of higher dynamic range when we add noise to sound.

Anyhow I can go endlessly describing paradoxes of dynamics but I think it would make sense if we in audio had some kind of new quantification of sound that would describe dynamic even but would factor in the method how this dynamic even was created and would not be applicable or available for comparing in dynamic event of other methods.

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