2. misc-audio
  3. 1201575376

I get 70 of the Live Symphony Experience at home

I am starting this thread as an offshoot of another thread in which I was assured many experts insist that the best home systems can only reproduce about 10-15% of the live concert hall experience. This seems preposterous to me, and I wanted to explore it more, and hear how the experts make this claim. My take:
While it is clear that no system really reproduces the concert hall (or even tougher, the organ-in-a-cathedral)experience, a good system will let you follow the melody and rhythm of a piece, will let you identify and differentiate instruments from one another, will give you an idea of how many instruments are playing and where in the hall they are located, as well as some sense of the size of the hall. A powerful dynamic system will also let you feel some of the excitement created by a big symphonic crescendo. It will approximate, to a degree, the richness and silkiness of instruments so that if you know what they really sound like, you can, in your head, remember what that sound is. I think this is certainly more than 10% of the concert experience. What is missing? The sudden plop and decay of a pizzicato violin string? The barely audible but terrifying roll of a bass drum as it sneaks up behind other instruments? The silky sheen of bowed strings and the well-oiled burnished sound of brass? Yes, all of these things are important and missing, but do they make up 90% of the music? If so, WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO GIVE UP THE 10% YOU HAVE FOR THE 90% YOU'RE MISSING? Then what would you have? The sense of sitting in a big hall, with some cool ethereal sounds from instruments that you can't identify? The sound of musicians tuning up before the music starts? Would you really give up all other recorded music to hear John Cage's Silent Symphony perfectly reproduced in your living room? I certainly wouldn't.
Maybe I misunderstand. Is it that going from an ordinary system to a mega-buck high end system only gets you 10% closer? This I could accept.
It is senseless to quibble over small numerical differences (10%vs.15%), but any number in that range is saying we are missing a lot more music than we are getting, and this I can not agree with. Block out 90% of a photograph, and you probably won't be able to identify its subject.
I'm usually a pretty calm person, but this has just driven me crazy. Let me know what you think.
honest1

Showing 2 responses by honest1

honest1 OP
586 posts
 
If you strip away 90% of the timbral accuracy of an instrument, what are you left with? A fundamental frequency and some discordant buzzing? Every instrument would sound like a test tone or worse. We can easily hear 5% Harmonic distortion - what would a system with 90% harmonic distortion sound like? You would not be able to recognize a single instrument. Mathematically, if timbral accuracy is what's missing most, you would have even less than 10% timbral accuracy in order to average out to 10% overall musical content.
I agree with Shadorne - dynamic range is definitely lacking in just about every system and recording. Is this what people mean? I could perhaps believe that we are only getting 10% of the dynamic range of much music.
honest1 OP
586 posts
 
Onhwy61 - That is a different way of interpreting the percentage than I was thinking. If you mean how many songs do I hear that are perfectly reproduced, then I would say you are correct, 10% would be generous - I would say 0 would be closer to the truth. I was looking at it differently, though. If a perfect reproduction of a live concert was 100%, and something that didn't even sound like a live concert was 0% (say standing in the middle of a busy sheet metal shop), then something that more closely resembled the live concert would be a percentage between 0 and 100. For example, if you went to the live concert but were wearing earplugs and noise cancelling headphones, you might hear 60% of the sound of the concert. Another way of looking at it is if you were looking at a picture, then covered 90% of the picture with white paint, you would only see 10% of the picture, and probably wouldn't be able to recognize much. Using this approach, I don't see how anyone can say we are missing so much of the music.
More to discover