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In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: Macondo's Axioms: Horn-loaded acoustic systems
Post Subject: My favorite seatPosted by drdna on: 10/9/2021
 rowuk wrote:
This is one of the aspects of being a "conductor". Very immediate sound, little early reflections or concert hall - everything is "overly" dynamic. When we compare this to being in the audience, each instrument group behaves in different ways - but the horns only have one way - reproduce what was recorded where everything is distorted in perspective by close microphones.

While I took "being the conductor" to mean the mindset of the one who is in charge of adjusting the sound, rather than listening where the conductor is positioned, nevertheless this is interesting, if only to bring up that most of the troubles are in using a single set-up of speakers at home to reproduce what in most cases is a blending of many different point sound-sources in the recording.
In reality, when the precision of the speakers is sufficient, we hear weird three-dimensional things on many recordings: the piano floats slightly above the floor, the vocalist is a giant set of lips and somehow is sitting in the lap of the cellist, the percussionist seems to be running madly across the stage to get to different parts of his kit. It creates cognitive dissonance that can feel a bit tense.
Shall we eschew our favorite pieces? Restrict ourselves to only recordings where the microphones match our speaker set-up? And then, what about how the ever-important but often-neglected room interacts with our speakers?

 rowuk wrote:
I wrote row 15 as this is my favorite seat in the Frankfurt Alte Oper and other excellent halls. ... My goal for playback is to make row 15 the plausible entity.

Yes, we all have a place we like to sit for live music, where the resonances and interactions with the space and walls of the hall to give us an effect we find most pleasing.
We readily accept this for live music, without much thought; yet for our home stereo we seem ashamed of resonance, colorations, and admitting a taste for a particular flavor of sounds, kowtowing to THD, waterfall plots and so-called neutrality.
Not to say these things have no importance, because of course they. It is only that I think we sometimes forget all this, as we make small changes in our audio system, making it so easy to make incremental "improvements" which lead us astray from our original objectives.
For me, I want nothing more than to be able to simply put on whatever record on the turntable and get whatever emotional connection to the musicians and the original event may have survived the recording process, as I have described before the original Sound.

Adrian

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