You're doing it again, relating the quality of the sound to the nature of the room!

Until people grasp the concept that it all depends on the quality of the sound at the point where it exits the speaker driver the going round and round and round in circles will continue ...  , 

Frank

Of course, the other thing that is always blamed is the recording -- how many times when Status Quo did poorly in a showroom or elsewhere the host would sniff and effectively say, "Well, if you choose to use rubbish like that for testing systems what else could you expect ?!" ...  

A nice rundown, Peter ...

Frank

Joachim, what you say makes sense, if looked at at a simple physical level. However, what I've personally found is that the ear/brain is a very powerful processing engine, an ultra sophisticated DSP in its own right. And that it can adjust the sound so that it all makes sense, subjectively compensate for peculiarities, anomalies, even complete "wrongness" of the listening environment, such that it all comes together in your mind.

But, it can only do this if the sound image projected from the speakers is clean enough, low enough in distortion. All the detail in the recording has be extracted and reproduced, without too severe a film or veil then added on by the reproduction components. If the workload for the brain to decode the musical picture is too great, because these conditions are not met, then the soundstaging needs assistance - by, playing with the room acoustics as you suggest.

For most people this would probably need to be experienced for a decent period of time to really make sense: many years ago a keen audiophile came and listened to a just reasonable version of what I'm talking about. For the first hour or so he was quite fidgety, the sound didn't make sense to him, he was trying to judge it by the normal thinking. "Your room is completely wrong, you've got glass down one side, wood shelving on the other!" Finally, it clicked, and he relaxed, went with the flow and enjoyed himself ...

Frank

I will just note here, so not to offend anyone any more than necessary, that I'm 100% on Peter's side. He is not the "only" one that thinks that way, we may dispute who was first or the best ways to get the "good stuff", but that's another ball game ...

One way of looking at it, is that the sound when it emerges from the speaker drivers has to be "right". If it's not, then you need to start playing games with room acoustics, etc, etc, etc, to "improve" things  ...

Frank

Also known as the LIAR test: Listening In Another Room ...


This is getting scary!! At the moment I peruse the electronics bible, "The Art Of Electronics" when I am, ahem, otherwise engaged ... . My poor weary brain needs constant refreshing, what goes in one brain cell very quickly pops out on the other side ... 


There are simple ways to switch off the analytical side when right on the front line  , basically you do what we in Oz would call Clayton's listening: listening while not listening, doing it in a distracted way. An excellent test is to put on a "nasty" recording, wind up the volume and deliberately engage in conversation with the person next to you. If you start getting edgy, uncomfortable, start feeling that you must turn down the volume as soon as possible then the sound is not right ...

And, apologies to anyone who's getting bugged by this conversation, wants Peter to do important stuff, like fixing W8 ... 

Frank

Agreed. I do not close my eyes, or listen in the dark, or believe in the sweet spot, or worry about where I am when listening. When a system works correctly these are all aspects of the situation. I can listen to the system from the other end of the house, and it sounds "right". Conversely, if there is a problem I can also pick it immediately from the other end of the house ...

There's another very simple test: if you're not sure whether the sound is as good as it can be, then it most definitely isn't. If every fibre of your body tells you that there is no way anyone can convince you that there is any problem with the sound, then you're in pretty good shape ... 

Frank

This is good ... we are making progress in understanding each other ...

First of all, I don't use any "funny stuff". As an example, the cables I use are bog standard, straight from the electrical store; there are no expensive, "magical" things involved in getting my sound, it's all based on trying to understand what the influences on sound quality are, and mitigating them. I will admit I have done funny things at times because there was an impact on the sound, but there is always a progression to reaching an engineering understanding of what's going on. Just so you know, I am an EE, but this as a profession never happened for me, I ended up doing computing instead ...

Also, I feel you're misunderstanding my term "fooling" the hearing system. The intrinsic nature of us as physical creatures has meant that our ability to listen has been refined, has evolved to a very sophisticated level - we are able to perform remarkable feats of hearing if we are so inclined. Like listening to a musician busker on a busy city street, the signal to noise ratio could be atrocious, yet we can pick subtleties of the instrument's tone and playing technique with no trouble at all; the mind can switch to another gear where it can filter out all the irrelevant racket with little effort.

So, that's what I believe a system can be tweaked to do: lifted to a level where the mind easily separates what it wants to perceive, the musical performance, from the "racket", which are all the distortions of the recording process and the remaining ones of the playback setup. In that sense the hearing system is being "fooled", because there are no actual performers in the listening space, yet the brain wants to interpret what it hears as being the same as the real thing.

I misunderstood you, because I was forming the impression that you're manipulating the sound, using physical, as in electrical,  "tricks" to make the sound appear more realistic.

Yes, tricks will cause anomolies. But reduction of distortion is not a trick, it's an eminently sensible thing to do - and the brain appreciates what has been achieved by hearing everything more clearly, in a more satisfying way.

The illusion that I mentioned with mono occurs because the brain "wants" to believe what the soundstage messages are telling it; hence the effect. Another one is the completely invisible tweeter: running at normal volume you are able to go up to adjacent to the speaker, put your ear a few inches from the tweeter, and not be able to perceive the sound as coming from the driver. Caution: for advanced practioners only ...

Frank

This has been suggested many times, and I believe that "good sound" is beyond this. Take the example of a real piano in your listening room: if you were in a "foul" mood, and a brilliant practioner sat down to play on it, you might be offended about the choice of material, the creak of the foot pedal, his breathing, etc, and quickly walk out on the performance. But you would still have no trouble registering the quality of that sound; if asked by someone at that moment, you would never say that doesn't sound like a real piano, or it sounds "off" ...

Frank

Now things are getting interesting ... I am not sure I fully understand what you're saying here, but the implication is that you're micro manipulating the waveform envelope with the end result that phase effects are perceived, a type of subtle "pre-distortion" so to speak. Put it this way: if one were to monitor the digital input to the DAC, and use Diffmaker, say, to compare what, say foobar delivers, there would be a significant difference - correct?

I think at least we agree that the goal is achieving a subjectively high quality experience: you believe that physics is the key, I believe that "fooling" the ear/brain system is key. In one sense the process is the same; it's feeding the ear/brain with precisely the right information so that the mind registers the result as high quality sound. And my technique for generating the right information is different: I scrub the final sound as clean of certain types of underlying distortion generated by the playback system as I possibly can, which allows the ear/brain to dismiss the remaining audible distortion as irrelevant. So, I rely on the listener's mind to do the "physics", the untangling of the sound; in my experience this is highly effective.

I work with whole system tweaking, which means that it is not fragile in the face of the replay mechanism. The ideal is that the sound can go from barely audible to literally deafening, PA levels, peaking in the 120 to 130dB range, with no change in perceived tonality. The limitation in the loud end is obviously the capabilities of the combination of amplifier and speaker, but I see no inherent reason why a smooth gradation to that sound level is not possible. My current system is capable, as a good guesstimate, of about 106dB  peak at close listening distance, which is perfectly adequate so far, I have no trouble having my ears ringing after a couple of tracks with the "right" material.

Intrigued,
Frank

There's a certain peak quality level, as described by Peter in the first post here, where a whole lot of seemingly "magical" things happen. It's taken some time to more fully understand what's going on, but I believe the key thing is that the ear/brain mechanism in your head "gives in" to the illusion of the sound; it no longer processes the sound as something artificial, but accepts it for what it pretends to be: a recreation of a musical event. You can liken it to the holodeck in Star Trek; you are no longer watching a movie, you become part of the movie!

So, the mind says, "this is the real deal", and it interprets the sound accordingly. I've noted some aspects of this in Peter's comments: the subjective impression that the SPL is the same everywhere, the sound completely detaches from the speakers, and, some cute tricks with true mono recordings. I don't know whether Peter has mentioned this one, but a good marker is that the mono image remains perfectly in front of you as you move from side to side in front of the speakers, it never suddenly drops back to clearly coming from the speaker itself. At the extreme of this illusion, even when your head is in the plane of the speakers your mind still doesn't "realise" that the sound is actually coming from the speaker drivers.

Frank

Okay, sorry about being obscure ... in the first post of this thread you describe a system working "correctly", from my point of view. Everything less than this is not in the realm of the "good stuff", that's the sense, the meaning of the phrase I used in that post.

So, in simple terms, could you apply this description to the sound of your system at any time, is it always running at this level? And, likewise for others here on the forum ...

Edit: as an example, in spite of people insisting otherwise, that the room is 100% irrelevant to getting quality of sound
 
Frank

Which is why I apologised up front. I appreciate that the "battle" is to reconcile differences playing under Windows 7 and 8, but ultimately it's what happens in the DAC that counts. Unless, you are really are doing DSP on the sly ... 

I'll keep my big mouth shut from now on ...!  , 

Frank

Sorry to intrude, but this is a generic problem with much digital: many high end systems using CD players seem to have this weakness. I witnessed this on a friend's setup at one point, using an older, modified Quad player ... and very bizarre it was to hear!

Somehow, the DAC operation is being kneecapped by electrical interference, which has to be eliminated, one way or the other ....

Frank

Hmmm, not a good sign, no-one else putting up their hand ...

I can understand this, the battle to produce good sound on cue is not easy. My current setup would be laughed at by nearly all, it's an old, effectively worthless, Philips all-in-one HT setup, a throwaway by a family member. But, it has a decent, self powered woofer that can keep up, and in one sense I now have the best bass that I've ever had, . The idea was, to see how down market one can go and still generate good sound, and this have proven competent enough to get the job done ...

The downside is, that everything has to be thoroughly warmed up, conditioned for hours from cold, every day to get the best out of it. Something like a dose of Foo Fighters at deafening volumes is excellent at speeding up the process, the speaker suspensions are pretty ordinary, and must be hammered for a while to have them loosen up sufficiently ...

Frank

Got it in the first post, Peter! "Caroline" is perhaps the optimum track to use because the cymbals are close enough to be being continuous throughout, and allows one to play with things while monitoring the tone. I was using a Perreaux 2150B at the time, nominally a beast of an amp, and there was a clear point where the power supply started to collapse, way below maximum volume - a lot of my efforts have been with amplifiers, these of course are a major weak link ...

I went and saw the band in their heyday, uuhh, 35 years ago  , they did well! Would you believe, here in Australia, they are a "mouthpiece" for one of the major supermarket brands, doing "Down, down, prices are down ... ", and a video to boot !! Issued a double CD with this version, new material, and live concert disk. They haven't changed a bit, well worth getting!

Yes, you've been on the "right" journey,  ... . With the tweaking, that is. Those 5 albums are vital tools in your kitbag ...

One thing that is clear to me is that there are numerous ways of achieving this critical quality level, call it 100, which allows the ear/brain to bypass remaining weaknesses. Your current focus is minimising the electrical interference generated by the source reading process, mine over the last couple of years has been to tame interference entering via power supply weaknesses; both can do the job if the rest of the system is up to it. So, there is no "magic" way, but plenty of smart ways of getting there ...

Frank