I would like to deviate in this post from music reproduction and stay juts with sound reproduction.

Over the years I’m getting incredibly bored when I hear the typical foolishness that audiophiles love to indulge themselves:

“I feel that the musicians are right in here”

or

“I feel that the I’m right there where the musicians are placing”

Although there is some minor merit in those perceptions (connected with convenient self-explanations of unknown) but both “They are here” and “I am there” are fundamentally faulty, those perceptions away corrupt the  “proper” listening culture.

The goals of sound reproduction are not to reproduce sonic events as “event” but rather to reinstate the sonic disturbance of sonic environment where the event was an “indentation of recreated Space”. (Read further “My Playback” Section, the “Objectives” paragraph) So, do not listen reproduced sound but rather the sound projected to the coordinate system of recreated realty. When you develop those listening techniques and if you payback will be able to furnish this ability then you will be laughing about that ridicules “They are here” and “I am there” with the same disgust as I do.

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

Guy,

the problem is that the audio knowledge recognizes sound as a deviation of amplitude above the noise floor. In reality everything is more complicated. The departure of amplitude above noise is  “popular” among the audio scientist ONLY because this deviation is measurable, quantifiable and acknowledgeable but the currently existing methods of what they call objective controls.  They learned to measure the very specific and very primitive type of the waves and then they force any meaning in Reality be compatible with what is achievable for them to manage.  If you ask an audio-scientist or an audiophile what manifest for them an audio-event then looking at my graph below they certainly would say that the “A Zone” descries an audio occurrence. They will be absolutely correct, as their audio awareness is an 'awareness' of an oscilloscope or an 'awareness' of a voltmeter.

We humans are way more complicated and our awareness is spread infinitely.  Our sensory mechanisms, our ability to make the instantaneous cross-time and cross-space associations and out ability to recognize and to accept (!) REALTY AS OUR PERCEPTION makes any boundaries, or any coordinates systems completely conditional and completely superfluous, not to mention completely restrictive. We do not recognize beginning of Sound and end of Sound. We only recognize it when we describe Sound on convert the recognizable into any other format, even the stream of thoughts. For our alertness Sound is an event that shoves itself into our Total Awareness ™. Our Total Awareness ™ is the  “B Zone” on the graph above and Sound is juts a pin prick within the body of our Total Awareness ™….

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

PS: BTW, I have written about it quite long time ago, including the “Objectives” paragraph of  “My Playback” section of my site.

clarkjohnsen wrote:

What's being missed here is this: The parameters of location are fixed by the recording engineer/producer. Your typical Telarc has such a distant sound, one's only choice is the "you are there" reproduction. Your typical traditional piano recording is so up close, one's only choice is the "he is here" reproduction. So the question arises: Regardless which you prefer, can your system respond to both? Corollary: Need it do so?

It’s like you stay at the edge of the Grand Canyon and you feel the size. You might feel the size of the Grand Canyon even if you look at a very bad photograph of the Canyon but you would hardly feel the “greatness” and the “Space” if you experience a large trench next to your packing lot.

This all boils down to the fact that the performances that have ambitions to be spared across the entire “Space” of our awareness might essay OVERWRITE any, even the most barbarian, reproductive techniques. If, for instance, today’s conductor performs Mahler IX is a perfect recording studio with the super-super-super quality of audio recording (and we have many of them available) then it is not sufficient enough to “push” the “Space”. Quite contrary, when we listen the Bruno Kittel’s Choir in Furtwängler’s Bethhoven IX, 1942 or Golovanov’s Choir at the opening of “Gogunov” in 1949 then the force of the “Space” that is capable to be transmited from there is so high that it can easily to push itself through any imperfections of the recording media.

So, the question that was arisen: how system should respond has a “strange” answer. A system should discriminate bad performance from good one by destroying sound at bad performance and at the same time it should let better performance to be transmitted “as is”. How the system might do it? There are many mechanisms but the collapsing and narrowing the “Space Communication Bridge” is one of them. Do not forget that we do not really listens to Sound but rather we listen the reinstated “Space” with the Sound imbedded into it….

Rgs,
Romy the caT