I have to admit that the live Zander’s Bruckner Fifth from the end of 2007 made me to re-think how I would like Macondo to sound. It is not that I recognized new Macondo’s “Hi-Fi problems”, whatever it has I am very comfortable with it, but I rather would like to have Macondo be able some “tricks” that Benjamin Zander did with Boston Philharmonic during his Bruckner Fifth.

It is hard to explain but it is a magic of a very different caliber. It has in a way something to do with state when sound exist and do not exist and at the same time it has something do with ability to look into sound, to look cognitive but at the same time exercise intellectuality at very different primordial and wild fashion.

Mind you that this “effect” that I am talking about is very seldom, if ever, a subject of live listening. Live listening works differently. If a performance is of a noble caliber then it introduces a large amplitude of listening experience. I do not know how with you but with me a VERY high level of live performance kind of blocks me out. It turns the lights off and fills me with some cathartic but not interpretable feelings. I might go home after a very high level of live performance and easily sleep for 24 hours or subconsciousnessly and pointlessly to walk around city for hours and hours, being able just to breathe but not to think. Here is where Audio come to picture….

Audio allows reinstating that rush of musical adrenalin but in manageable format, suitable for consumption at different levels.  In a way audio is like reading those books that many of us have.  I mean not any books but THOSE – the few selected book that we read for many years, knowing pages from them by hart but still discovering each 6 month a new and new layer or a new perception of the old layers. Audio is exactly like this - it captures the performing event, it might release the listening devils but it also (and here is where I adore Audio) it can slow down the “consumption ceremony” and convert the played performance from a 200 mg shot of vodka to a very surgical pealing a layer after layer from performing event, allowing actually to learn something semi-intellectually about the World and ourselfs in context of the given musically expressed sensations.

I always liked the way in which Macondo allow, if I wish, to peal music. It can take a layer after a layer, still holding the whole shape of musical onion untouched. Also Macondo always knows where is too dangers to go further in some cases - Macondo kind of warns where the pealing shell stop. I learned this trick from ML2.0 but ML2.0 had a fixed externally set point or as I called it “managed depth of the pealing field”.  Melquiades absolutely removed that “managed” limitation and let Macondo to fly free about it’s pealing judgment… That is in a way a diabolical fan to play a given powerful performance, reinterpreting it by the dynamic striping the demonstrated expressivity off and dressing up the play with own layers of understanding. Then the Benjamin Zander’s Bruckner Fifth with Boston Philharmonic came…

The Zander’s Bruckner 5 demonstrated a slightly different level of relationship between listening awareness, the core and the layers of perception. The “slow” essence of the Bruckner musicality certainly helped but also Zander’s demonstrated something absolutely unique in my view.  That performance has some kind of intellectual pocket within itself where mind can rest to be “cooked” for the coming events.  Zander’s in a way teases mind shaking it right and left and then holding it nowhere, letting it to marinade in own juice and…. he does it while playing the symphony!!! That is absolutely amazing feeling but Macondo does not handle it. It at this point I do not know why Macondo  slips on and I keep thinking about it for the last month.

When Zander stops  and the Bruckner whole sound collapses into a single point of absolute nothingness, into some kind proverbial vacuum, the vacuum that has only inner-reference to future but not to the past, when it happens  the  Macondo  (or my playback generally) continues to read some stupid and unnecessary Miranda Rights. That makes me absolutely annoyed. The inability of Macondo to care the “Zander’s bubble of vacuum” I think has something to do with specific harmonics at very- very low dynamic level. Macondo is driven by SET, the topology that order of magnitude more sophisticated in very low dynamic levels then anything else out there. Still, what Macondo/Melquiades do now is absolutely perfect in my view for sounds at low dynamic levels but apparently not for the absent of sounds. I do not know if it has anything to do with harmonics of noise or with the way in which Melquiades “process” the proverbial DC but am very much look forward to look into this.

I most likely do not talk about decays or noise. It might be some kind harmonic inflictions in ultra low frequencies that have longer reverberation time, I do not know. What I do know that when playback enters a state of sonic audio silence some playbacks might not extinct events.

It is very difficult to target-listen for audio silence as properly auditable audio silence might be observed only in context of a given chain of musical events.  If to take under account that we listen properly-performed music by a conductor who knows how to managed tempos for given acoustic environment and the performing “beat” for a given musical intend then how a playback shows itself at this picture?

I think as much as we presume that our playback shall have a proper harmonics of our bass (very few or us do) as much we shall have proper harmonics of our ultra LF bass.  I do not know any other way to manage it besides my all school of delay channels (RT60 re-constructors) that is a phenomenal tool but incredibly difficult implement and to manage. So, would it be an answer? Well, not really as to my big surprise I hear the most proper events stopping effect in …. headphones, or in an environment  that has a lot of issuers with reverberation decays.

I do not know what it is. It might be a specific phase randomizing at LF that is possible ONLY within phase randomizing distances. OK, how about the headphones? It is not clear….

Hmmmm, no.

I would say that it is not about the “quality of silence” but rather the “eventfulness of silence”. I think also that the quality of silence’s eventfulness” could not be compared to live events. During live events in presented there are so many events that are transmitted outside of auditable that it is very difficult to discard them.

What I am taking is a phenomena that one playback staff proverbial silence with different intensify of silence. Think about imaging: not the primitive-geometrical imaging that Joe Robinsons learned from HP and the only imaging that that those level clowns are potent to understand but the real imaging.  Now pretend the results of the imaging that continue to work while orchestra plays silence. Now, one playback, playing the same silence-loaded music plays it as silence as some kind perceptional oblivion.  Another saturates the silence with perceptional events…

Observing this subject for the last week I think that it has to do with UPF and with the way in which… HF decays.

Romy the Cat wrote:

Actually it is not about the “3D quality of silent passages” but about the silence being the PROPER continuation of the non-silent passages. I think I have cracked this one and thinking about it more I believe I have an answer to this quandary. I am making now very interesting experiments a as soon I get results with conformation of my finding and I will post the final conclusions on the subject in a few days.

As I said above I think I have figures out what is going on. First of all let define what I am taking about.

A performance at a serious level that futures orchestral silence might or might not have silence that is synchronized with performing event.  In some instances I recognized that some playbacks moderate the drama and commutability of silence. The question is what would be the mechanism so this moderation?

I discard the potency of a playback’s LF and ULF – it important for sound but it is not that MODERATE the commutability of silence. The quality of ULF and the reverberation time of the room do set it up but it is a static parameter and it has no dynamic aptitude.  I said that it shell be something else and it look like I was right.

A few days back I was listening a recoding that I know very well and suddenly I realized that Macondo did something different.  The eventfulness of the silences that I reported before was not there. As I said before I have miserable habit to emphasize to the playback problem that have identified and named and therefore the bacteriologicaly-active silence was unit the scope of my side-attention lately. So, noticing that silence was “different” I was very surprised and I asked myself what happen. The electricity was the same (PP2000 regenerator for whole system), not of the elements were changed for a long time, so what was different? Then it come to me – I was listening at 2AM and it might not be the sound of playback but the noise of the room that overrides the harmonics of the delays at low dynamic levels, injecting instead of the long orchestral collapse (with reverberation of 4s-5s at 50Hz) some aliens noised the come from street and that interfere with low level signal.

It does make since. The silence might be viewed as Sound at let say 40dB.  I live in downtown and during a day I have ambient city noise that might be at 40dB or even higher, particularly at near 20Hz. So, the orchestral collapse becomes a hostage of modulations from ambient noise of my room. During nigh I have 6dB-8dB quieter and it certainly makes silence less vulnerable to none-musical influences. This most likely would explain why I found that headphones are able to deliver more naturalistic continuation of musical intend in silence – because my headphones are ambiance-isolating type headphones. This also explains one of the most wonderful experiences I had from playback’s decay. It was 7 years back, here in Boston, in a very seriously built dedicated room and the room was sound-isolated with sub 15dB of own noise.

I decided to test this idea and I asked myself if it possible to actively turn off the LF alien inflictions by randomizing it harmonic influence. I took a separate LF speaker, generated white noise, band- filter it with 4th order between 10Hz and 50 Hz and fed it to the speaker via a phase randomizing devise. This way I had a LF acoustic dither that saturate room with noise but remove harmonics from this noise. Then I re-listen how Macondo is submerging it is it’s acoustic darkness. It was very different this time, day or night – all the same and in the way in which I would like it to be.

So, it looks that the ambianic harmonics of the listening room itself was the key. It is very easy to test if you listen how playback decays and open and close the doors to another large room. The redaction of LF room noise is very much the key, so the best orchestral decay would be in a city with no alive thing around, let say Chernobyl for instance…