AudioNervosa
Group Therapy => Audio Syndrome NY => Topic started by: Lizard_king on November 09, 2009, 04:58:55 PM
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Hey Gang,
The time has come to make a CD(s) that we can use as a reference for our meetings. Let's put our thought together so I can make these for us to use.
Paul - President Audio Syndrome
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Paul,
First of all there are some people who might take umberage to using any CD as a reference.......
I would prefer to refer to it a benchmark CD. Analog vs digital arguemen ts aside I think we have all heard the generational loss on digital copies , so it would be hard to call this disc a sonic reference source. But that aside I think having a club benchmark disc would be a valuable tool. Too many times we hear different music or even a different pressing of a favorite recording at somebody else's house and it is hard to know what differences are due to the system vs what differences arecaused by the differences in the input software. By having a discs that we know will be used at meetings we can all get intimately familiar with the recordings, which can only make us more productive listeners and evaluators at our get to gethers.
Why don't we work on this over the next couple of meetings. I think we should have folks bring down and recording they think should be included on the disc and we can play them for the group and come to a consensus as to whether we want to include it.
I also think it is important to duplicate this disc in enough numbers that every on in the club can have an identical copy, burned on the same equipment, using the same software and even the same brand of blanks. This way we can take all the extra variables out of the equation and everyone can listen to the exact same disc on their own system and get a good benchmark with which to compare the sound of another system.
Let me know what you think.
Tom
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If i can throw my two cents in or two tunes in this case
Red Right Hand Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds The Best of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
I Got It Bad Dayna Kurtz Beautiful Yesterday
These are the two tracks i use the most they are not what you would think of As a reference track till you sit down and evaluate them they have a lot going for them and you don't hear them every day
ED
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Its a members only club Ed. You and I are not members, we paid no dues...we can only sing the blues. :thumb:
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Visiting dignitaries are always welcome, whether online or in person :)
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Why don't you just burn a copy of one of the NY Audio Rave demo disks and call it a day? We have about 6-7 of them to date. :rofl:
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Its a members only club Ed. You and I are not members, we paid no dues...we can only sing the blues. :thumb:
Not at all. feel free to offer coments and opinions. Post away.
charles
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Why don't you just burn a copy of one of the NY Audio Rave demo disks and call it a day? We have about 6-7 of them to date. :rofl:
We have some thanks to Chris. The VMPS show disc as well. However not transferred that well. there aresome killer tracks on those discs.
However we believe a more varied selection with unamplified music such as chamber and Choral must be included. A bit more straight up Jazz and vocals, cymbals, violin and piano as well. Most of the selections are Hi Fi wonders not music IMO.
Thanks for the offer. Appreciated. Can you rip them for us to consider. Thanks.
charles
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The Rave discs I haved heard have generation loss and that means poorer sound quality. When out first master is complete, I can make perfect duplicated without generation loss.
I feel we should use music and not speeches or presentations.
Paul
Why don't you just burn a copy of one of the NY Audio Rave demo disks and call it a day? We have about 6-7 of them to date. :rofl:
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I have to say Paul . The Cd's you create from your Porter are the best copies I have heard to date hands down. Now that you guided me to the correct set up with ripping and burning The burnt Cd's are really excellent. actually hard to tell the original from the copy. You are the King.
How about we take one selection from everyone and create the disc ? This way familiar music will enhance the reference. Or we could make a series one classical , one jazz and one rock/blues.
Maybe committee's for each genere might be a good idea. Any opinions boys ?
charles
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Compiling multiple reference cds may be a bit ambitious to start. I think one reference is enough for now. I know that I usually play only 3 or 4 test tracks whenever I go to a show or club meeting, and that gives me a good idea of how the system sounds. I also know those 3 or 4 tracks intimately, and listen for sonic cues on those tracks whenever I listen. If it works out, we could expand the selections annually or bi-annually like the NY Audio Rave cds.
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From what I remember most of the members of this club fall into the "I only play classical or jazz" vein. If someone puts on a rockin' tune the room empties out. OK, Pink Floyd and Steely Dan are probably exceptions, as are soft female vocals.
So I agree that there may be a need for multiple disks, but probably no need for a rock 'n roll version.
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From what I remember most of the members of this club fall into the "I only play classical or jazz" vein. If someone puts on a rockin' tune the room empties out. OK, Pink Floyd and Steely Dan are probably exceptions, as are soft female vocals.
So I agree that there may be a need for multiple disks, but probably no need for a rock 'n roll version.
You have not been around for a while. Things have changed a bit. As a matter of fact our new President is a rocker. We perfer well recorded music no matter what it is.
With most of the senior members not attending many meetings the music venue has changed. Yes I guess we still favor unamplfied music for demos. Call us crazy but unamplfied live music is still our reference.
charles
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Call us crazy but unamplfied live music is still our reference.
Ummm...so how is the music played back? :-k
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If you are looking to evaluate how a system is performing in terms on timbre, imaging etc., recordings of live unamplified music are the only way to go, not because that type of music is in any way "better" that other types, but simply because it provides a fixed standard to judge from. An oboe needs to sound like an oboe and a cello like cello. And a symphony orchestra has a standard seating plan that can be used to evaluate accuracy of the sonic picture that a system presents. However, in the rock world so much electronic processing is done to the instruments that there is no standard from which we can judge the sound. In a modern studio rock recording the guitar sounds like whatever the artist or producer wanted it so sound like on that particular night. With no fix standard with which to compare the sound, we have a hard time knowing whether the system is doing a good or bad job in reproducing it. This doesn't make rock bad music, just a bad benchmark to do sonic evaluations from.
But while we can't really use rock to evaluate most of individual sonic characteristics of a system (I can be used effectively to listen for dynamics and system speed (slew rate)), I will not go so far as to say it shouldn't be in your kit of evaluation tools. We may not be able to use it to determine if a system sound "right" , but since many of us listen to a significant amount of rock music on our systems we should at least listen to make sure rock "sounds good" on them (of course "correct" and "good" don't necessarily go hand in hand). One thing that rock music is good for is judging the "goose bump/toe-tapping" effect. A good system should have the ability to draw you into the music and make you forget you are listening to a recording. It is always a good sign when you get so involved that you stop listening to the equipment and start listening to the music.A well done (from both a musical and a technical perspective)piece of rock played back on a good system will do this every time. I don't think rock could or should ever replace unamplified music as an evaluation benchmark, I think it can easily be used along side it.
A good craftsman's tool box contains many different tools, hammers, saws, screwdrivers wrenches, etc.. And while they can't be used interchangeably, each is very valuable within its give function.
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Nicely said tmazz. I also use classical music as a tonal reference. But I, and maybe you too, have the advantage of knowing what a live oboe sounds like, so we can use that memory as a reference to compare a recorded oboe.
What can people use for reference if they just don't like classical music, or if they don't know whether the oboe sounds right or not? They "know" the tone of John Lennon's guitar after 40 years of listening to it on dozens of systems. Can that be good enough as an absolute tonal reference?
When I auditioned my current speakers I used a familiar trumpet recording because I am trumpeter. I had listened to it for 35 years on all kinds of (relatively inferior) speakers. It passed the test from my perspective at the time, so I bought the speakers. Now a couple years later, I can hear some of the flaws that I didn't recognize before, subtle things like phase and high Q dips that are hard to hear unless you know what they are and what they sound like. I didn't know how to listen for those back then, nor did I understand the potential weaknesses in crossover design that could cause them. So absolute tonal reference is still dependent on the brain knowing what to listen for and being able to discern extremely minute aberrations. Listening like that is a learned skill, to get out of the music and listen to the sound. It is counterintuitive to the romantic music lover who is easily sucked into the music. It can sound like an oboe but still have minor problems that are easily missed because of the poignancy of the music. The degree of accuracy desired is the question, and that gets into the true accuracy of the recording. Most oboe recordings will be somewhat colored by room acoustics and microphone choice. Like a violin, the recordist will deliberately choose a mic to dumb down this potent sound for mass consumption. But the basic harmonic structure remains intact, it's a fine line. In the end the classical recordings are not perfect tonal references either, unless they are solo instruments in a benign acoustic. In some ways, a singer in a silent recording booth, even with mild reverb effects added is an even better reference than an acoustically recorded instrument.
I use Beatles' "I feel fine" as a reference track both for the unique harmonically rich sound of the guitar intro, and for the crappy old pop song character, which his a challenge for a high end system that is on the knife edge. It is a good test for system smoothness, just like I use a good David Sanborn recording to see just how bad class AB zero crossing distortion is at high volumes.
I think that a relative tonal reference like a distorted guitar can be adopted for accurate system tuning and comparison, if the listener has heard it enough to know what it is supposed to sound like, as an average of systems he has heard it played on in the past, or if he is a guitarist that knows what the subtle tone cues mean, or other special insight to the recording. What do you think?
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I am unfamiliar with what generation losses sound like when listening to copied CDs could someone explain what to listen for and how the losses occur during the copying process ?
Scotty
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CD copies tend to have a loss of high frequencies and inner details when compared with the originals. The also pretty consistently shrink the image size from a width depth and height perspective. Not sure if I understand all of the reasons, but I believe it has something to do with the burning process itself since there is a pretty noticeable difference in sound between discs burned at high speeds (32x, 48x etc.) and discs burned at speeds closer to realtime (1x). I also hear much less generational loss in CDs that are copied to DATs, which would also point towards the CD burning process as the culprit.
Tom
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Rich,
I want to explore something you said in your last post on this thread. You say that you use a familiar trumpet recording as a reference because you play the trumpet. I have never payed a musical instrument so this question is coming purely from an informational perspective. As someone who is usually standing behind the trumpet, do you have the same perspective of what sounds "right" as someone sitting in the audience. I do not not this for a fact, but I would think that the sound of a symphony orchestra would be very different when sitting in the middle of the musicians as opposed to the middle of the hall. I would think this would be similar for the trumpet since its output is very directional in nature. Although I never played, I have spent many years working as an audio engineer in radio, TV, multi-track studio and live concert situations. So my experience is more on presenting music rather than making it. I know whenever I set up for a concert, I tried as much as possible to set up my control board in a place that would let me hear what the audience heard (and never mixed through headphones.) When I did have to set up on the stage I would always take the opportunity early in the show to walk out into the audience to make sure I was happy with what they were hearing since it often differed considerably from what I was hearing on the stage. Could it be that as a trumpeter you had the opportunity to listen to many other trumpeters playing and that is what you use as the basis of your standard. I am not trying in any way to be critical, I am just curious what the musicians perspective is.
Tom
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So far I haven't run into the loss problems you have encountered. My procedure for making a compilation or a duplicate CD has been to securely rip the file to to the harddrive using dBpoweramp CD Grab and then use dBpoweramp CD Writer to burn the cd on to a blank Memorex black data cd. I limit the rip rate to no more than 10X and the burn speed to no more than 10X. I think that the cd resulting from this copying process sounds superior to the original cd with lower grain,less congestion in the soundstage with better separation and it is a little easier to hear the low level details in the recording. However within the context of my system cd replay does not compare favorably with the results that I get from playback from the harddrive. Playing the wavefile from the hardrive or even better from flash memory and decoding via an external dac is my benchmark.
Scotty
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Interesting posts on this thread.
Microphones do not provide flat response, and a combination of close mic and far field mics are commonly used. All these are combined during mixing and EQd to the engineer's taste.
its also not surprising that dynamic range of almost all recordings are compressed, and that this is a huge reason why so few recordings sound like the real thing. I'm not sure I've ever heard a realistic reproduction of a drum kit, even played softly.
where does this leave us re reference recordings?
Its a matter of taste and testing technique. When I listen critically to a sound system, I want to hear all the frequencies on the recording, in the octave to octave balance that I believe is proper. I want to experience all the dynamics present on the recording. I want to hear timbres as put into the recording, as well as room ambience or soundstaging.
A reference recording must have the following to qualify for predictive use in critical listening:
1. Full frequency representation: If all you listen to is string quartet and small chorus, you will never hear any shortcoming in a Quad speaker and you will undoubtedly hear the absolute sound, but will have no idea how to predict results with more demanding music.
2. Full dynamic range: Loud to soft. System set to loudest volume for realistic listening should not compress the loud parts or become congested, while the soft parts should be very soft.
3. Slam: This is a deal breaker for many demo recordings. Big bass drum whacks, coupled with a Fender bass or an orchestra, separate the big boys from the wimps.
4. Some acoustic instruments. This provides a handle for our brain. In the most electric mix, a cello or a saxophone provide clues to proper timbre. Vocals dont usually count, because I hardly ever hear a singer without amplification in real life.
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Compressed dynamic range in most recordings is a function of a few things. First realize that dynamic range is a balancing act for the recording engineer. If he records too hot he gets distortion. however if he lowers the gain to leave headroom for the peaks he risks having much of the recoding living down at the low level end of the dynamic range where noise, both from the recording process and less than stellar playback equipment can become a problem. To balance the two requirements enough gain to keep the majority of the recording out of the mud and enough headroom to present a reasonable sense of dynamics is a daunting challenge for the recording engineer. Since most recordings are made to the masses, who do not have access to high end audio systems, superior sound quality is not always high on the engineers priority list and all to often he turns to electronic compressors to make is life easier. These devices allow him to ride the gain high for the most part and allow the compressor make sure that peaks to not overdrive his recording chain.
Secondly record & CD sales are highly dependent on radio airplay. And unfortunately what makes a recording good for the radio does not necessarily make it good for a high end system. Broad dynamic range is not the friend of a radio station for two reasons. One for technical reasons that I will not go into hear radio transmitters operate better with a tighter dynamic range. And while we might cringe at that thought it is not really ab bad thing for a radio station of its customers. Most radio listening is done on some sort of portable device, most of which by there nature have limited dynamic headroom and low level resolution. And when a device does a poor job at resolving low level details, one of the easiest and most common things to do is to pump up the volume. So not only is it better for the station from an RF transmitting point of view, for most of the devices used to tune into the radio stations it sounds better to pump up the low levels and compress the peaks (sad, but true.)
Lastly there also seems to be a trend in the recording industry to limit the dynamic range of newer recordings so that they compress more efficiently into mp3 files. Take a look an a spectrum analyzer at some new releases compared to some older release by the same or a similar artist. The results may scare you. Unfortunately there are many orders of magnitude more people running around with ipod in there ear that there are people who even know what high end audio is, never ind own a system of their own. The standards of the masses, no matter how low or bad they are will always become the driving force in the market.
I had a professor in engineering school who used to tell us that an engineers job is not to design the best possible product, anyone can make something better or quicker by simply throwing money at the problem. An engineer's job is to design a product that meets the lowest acceptable quality standard for the lowest possible cost. Nobody will pay for higher quality than they think they need (which explains the small production runs of most high end products even though the are obviously better than their mass market counterparts.Of the few non-audiophile people who can even recognize differences in sound quality most of them would not be willing to reach into their pockets and part with cold cash to own a piece of high end gear. This is kind of a long winded way of saying that most people don't care about sound quality so id they are happy with a compressed file MP3 player then that is the direction that the industry will move in. Sucks, for us, but it is the reality of the world we live in.
Tom
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Playing an instrument gives you an unique perspective on the sound of it. There is no substitute for hours of practice time, performing and recording, and as a jazz musician, listening to other recorded trumpet performances from the entire canon of the art. As a trumpeter I don't play alone. Other trumpeters around me, and inside a larger band of various instruments. It has been said before that playing a musical instrument is the best thing you can do to improve your audiophile listening skills.
As a music lover I frequently attend all kinds of live performances of all genres, especially classical. I have produced several commercial recordings and done a fair amount of mastering also. I think I have a good ear. But as a music lover I sometimes can't hear problems if they are benign because I am easily distracted from sound quality by the music content. I have learned from my local audiophile friends to better identify sound quality issues but that means ignoring the music so you can concentrate on the sound. It is a valuable learned skill for tuning a sound system, but it is not music listening. It's two different sports. That's why the masses don't care. They get the joy of music into their soul at the lowest cost and most convenience, that's all that matters. When the music is available in better quality for the same cost, they will choose it.
A reference track just has to be well known, not perfect recording of acoustic instrument. Processing is a legit part of popular music. Distortion effects are more difficult to use as reference than sythetic or electric instrument sounds. Their harmonic signature is just as valid as acoustic instrument, if it is recognized and unique enough to expose system differences.
Modern recording equipment doesn't have the dynamic limitations you describe Tom. Today, all compression is added deliberately.
The masses wisely choose music (as beat, lyrics and melody) over high end sound quality. They seek value. They are accustomed to the sound of compression and they want their mp3s and CDs to sound like the radio. The radio must be compressed to compete for loudness, so the record companies have no choice. Their engineers know the difference but they do their job as required in the current state of the biz. There are plenty of music recordings which are not squashed for pop radio. Music is not dynamically compressed to reduce encoded file size. But compression itself is a sound that has become part of the art in the popular genres.
Music for teens and pop radio is produced to appeal to them, compression, file size, social image, etc. Music that appeals to 30-40 something audiophile men is produced and marketed differently, like Patricia Barber and Diana Krall. :drool: We just listen to what they give us. Another reason to learn an instrument. ;)
(http://simplymarvelous.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/6-cow-drive.jpg)
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...The masses wisely choose music (as beat, lyrics and melody) over high end sound quality. They seek value. They are accustomed to the sound of compression and they want their mp3s and CDs to sound like the radio....
I question the "wisdom" assessment inherent in that remark. Its like saying someone who chooses the tanning bed is wiser than one who choose to be exposed to natural sunlight. [-X
:lol: I think I understand the point you were trying to make, but its a poor choice of word grouping.
The "masses" may choose the big MaC, for so called perceived value, really does not make them wise...well, maybe penny wise and pound foolish. :lol:
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Its like saying some who chooses the tanning bed is wiser than one who choose to be exposed to natural sunlight. [-X
Sorry, I don't see how it is like saying that.
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Rich I definitely agree with you especially the part about listening to sound being different than listening to music. I have a lot of friends that get so wrapped up in "perfecting" their hardware setups that I think they have forgotten why we got into this hobby in the first place. Music should be looked at as a goal onto itself, not just a test signal for system evaluation. Don't get me wrong., we all need to do evaluations from time to time and it is good to have "goto" recordings that you use for that purpose. However when one ends up spending more time fussing with the system than using it somehow the cart is before the horse. I was once told that an audiophile was a person who spent ungodly amounts of money on hardware foe the sole purpose of proving that all software sucks. (To which I replied "Hey, I know that guy!")
By the way, I in no way meant to imply that modern recording equipment in and of itself limits dynamic range, quite the opposite, I feel that the people who are using it are doing so in such a way that the dynamics of the original performances are not being captured to the extent that they could be. Ypu brought up some interesting additions to my ideas as to why this is so, but there is actually another one, and this is related to the market demand idea you put forth. One of the reasons that some of the newewr recordings have less dynamic range than we have seen in the past may be because so much of our modern music has very limited dynamic to start with. By definition dynamic range is the difference between the softest and loudest parts of a piece of music. Much of the Pop?Rock music being produced today has very little dynamic range simply because it is all loud by design. We can expect a recording to have more dynamic range that the piece would have live in the original performance.This is more of a marketing issue that anything else because the type of music that is being written is directly driven by the type of music that can be sold. Record companies don't care if the music is good as long as it sells (How else can one explain the Partridge Family winning gold records? :roll:)
Tom
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An interesting article on the mastering process for the recently released Beatles CDs (and now flash drives).
http://www.audioprointernational.com/features/146/Remastering-The-Beatles
A different twist from what we have been discussing in this thread. We have been saying how many record companies and recording engineers do not put as much efforts into doing a superior sounding album because the "masses" don't really care about high fidelity. This article presents a unique twist. Since the Beatles albums were kind of hitting a saturation point, someone at Apple came up with the idea that one way to get us all to buy the Beatles catalog yet a fourth time (LPs, Cassettes, CD and now the new CDs) was to remaster that albums for better sound. Amazing how sound quality becomes important as soon as one of the marketing gurus thinks that they can use it as a sales driver. As always money talks, And no matter how much we spend on recordings as audiophiles, there just aren't enough of us to sway a record companies recording policies.
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Hey Gang,
So far only one meber has submitted music to me for this CD. We need to use music so please contribute.
Paul
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Hey Gang,
So far only one member has submitted music to me for this CD. We need to use music so please contribute.
Paul
News to me. Maybe if members post here more often we can all know and contribute to the disc. Why not send out an email to our members and ask them to post their selections for ALL to see and discuss.
My selection is Sonny Rollins "Plus Three" album track 1, Gladiator sound track track 3, Jacinta " Danny Boy" so far. Since you are into Rock why not just make a disc for us. Then we can complie a Jazz and Classical CD.
How many selections are we aiming for on each disc ? Lots of questions, lots of choices. If everyone just posted their selections this whole process would be much much easier. :duh
charles
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Just a few suggestions (in no particular order) and it's all listenable music vs. some audiophile quality recording of something that has no musical appeal to it, but it "sounds good".
- Larry Coryell: The Coryells - Track#4 - "Goodbye Porkpie Hat"
- Taj Majal: Senor Blues - Track#5 - "Senor Blues" (Title Track)
- Beatles: "Love" - Track#1 - "Because"
- Mark Knopfler: The Ragpicker's Dream - Track#10 - "The Ragpicker's Dream" (Title Track)
- Patricia Barber: Cafe Blue - Track#8 - "Ode to Billy Joe"
- Eric Clapton: Unplugged - Track#5 - "Lonely Stranger"
- Ian Anderson: Devinities - Track#6 - "In the Moneylender's Temple"
- Queen Latifah: The Dana Owens Album* - Track#1 - "Baby Get Lost" or Track#6 - "Close Your Eyes"
*This looks like a self titled (Queen Latifah) album, but it's actually marked as "The Dana Owens Album" in the left front side bar of the CD case.
Thanks for taking any of these into consideration.
SN
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Thanks for the suggestions SN. We need more input from other people to select which songs to use.
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this is in reference to tmazz comments on engineering to the cheapest effective solution.
my understanding is that each of us, at work, should strive for cost effective solutions that meet the needs of our customers and fit in the business model of the company.
no insults to recording engineers here. it is common knowledge that Clearchannel requires very narrow dynamic range for songs to be played on the radio- ie, so that all their stations sound loud all the time. OK, that about does it for commercial pop.
classical/jazz is another story- certainly k johnson's RR label shows what kind of dynamic range and naturalism can fit on a CD. Certain jazz releases follow that road, and Mapleshade demonstrates all the good and bad of a strict hifi approach.
recording equipment is quite good. engineers generally know what they are doing. it doesnt cost more to make a good sounding recording- it doesnt even take more effort, it just has to be the product goal.
The customers and business model for RR and Sony are different. The Sony customer wants the song to cut thru road noise in the car and wants to rip the song in mp3 to his i-pod. The RR customer wants to hear everything that happened during the recording, exactly as it sounded. Unfortunately for audiophiles, there are waaay more of the former than the latter.
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I definitely agree, recording engineers don't "dummy down" a recording because they want to, they do so because that is what is demanded by the markets they are trying to sell to. We as audiophiles are not the average bears so we can't expect the mass market companies to conform to our wants or needs. Lucky for us there are still companies out there like RR and Mapleshade who do.