Talk but not walk?

But out of the many thousands of recording I have on vinyl. tape, cd etc there is likely only a double handfull that I consider to be truly terrible. Lets say 0.1% total?

Now maybe I am missing something here but WHY should I try to "fix" my system to get this 0.1% to sound acceptable? I am more than likely going to end up just making it worse for a whole bunch more recordings before I MIGHT get it right and at what cost in time, effort and $?

I want to touch on the car, but first let me give you guys a little insight into my job of "doing" (the walk). About every day I get a call or email asking me to do some testing. This morning for example I was asked to test the sound of different materials used by the state of Illinois in building residential properties. In particular the 3M product called "fire-block" vs the other brands.

What I will be doing is making a testing jig so I can hear the results when using 12-2 and 14-2 Romex. I will be testing literally dozens of different competitors and then make my recommendations.

You might say "so what". And that would be cool, unless your one of the hundreds of thousands of listeners who want to go further. For every guy out there saying their system is just fine there are 40 saying "I wish I could....". They come up on this and other audio forums every day reading to see if they can find an answer to their questions. Why don’t they post? One of the major reasons is they know that many folks posting probably are offering their opinions on topics they have never, or with limited experience, researched more than reading what someone else thinks. How do I know this first hand? I have a list of emails from this very forum to get to almost every day since I have started visiting. Am I the answer? Nope, I’m the messenger. You’re the answer and I’m here to give the encouragement to try. If your not interested, then my question is, why did you post? And what are you going to say to those folks who do start to walk, or have been walking?

The starting points I have been talking about cost you the listener zero dollars, or very little. The most interesting part to this is, this is the future of the hobby for the music adventurist, and it has been happening for a very very long time.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

Now on the car topic. The reason they sound the way they do is because of the pressure they are able to create because of the small space. Simple Q & A that can be tackled by any auto audio guy. If folks want to put their spin on it, that's up to them but it will end back at the same place. Your listening to materials, vibration and pressure.

So lets get to the Talk & Walk on this topic briefly. When talking about car stereos and the way they work, how many of you have stripped the car down to the frame and then built it back up again for sound reasons? Some of you probably have, but if not you'd be surprised about what you can learn about car sound from taking it all the way down to the frame and building it back up.

To answer the suspension question, we tested our cars by listening and testing them while sitting on their wheels and also jacking them up off the wheels. Having them resting on their wheels sounds mushy (rubbery) as compared to coupling them to the floor and lifts. Raising them also made them far more tunable.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

Hi Jafant, thanks!! Good to see you as well.

My Vegas Strip location (where I’ve set up my writing room) has two suites. One upstairs apartment and one down stairs. There’s a system in the writing room and than the main listening area. The downstairs apartment has my wood curing area and a listening room. There’s also a gaming room in yet another space. Last year I had everything in one space with 6 listening rooms, but I felt too far away from the strip and airport. You can see everything on TuneLand but to give a breakdown of this space. The main listening area has a SAM wall behind the chair. On the back side of the wall is where I keep a big part of my equipment stored. That area has several tuning platform/shelves. On those shelves is Audio Note, Audolici, Music Hall, Creek, Magnavox, Pioneer, Sherwood, Kenwood, Superphon, Marantz, Jolida, Luxman, Rotel and more. I tune lots of equipment during the year so it comes and goes. Last year for example I had in Bricasti, Accuphase, Audio Research, Krell and again a few other brands to work on. Speakers, of course I have the Rev6, Rev60, Rev SW-15. And than my other speakers (less talked about) Viola, LOW, the 8" full range and others of mine. I also have the Reference Tonian, JBL and 4 or so other brands. I have a few other DACs, decks and tuners.

I have my cables Picasso and Bare Essence. I also have Transparent Audio, Esoteric and a couple others floating around somewhere. Oh and can’t forget the Bare Essence "White". I have all of my other goodies as well.

The main listening system has the Rev6 Combo setup with Picasso Type2 ICs and Type4 Bare Essence "White". I have a full display of my hand voiced Platforms & Rails using Brazilian Pine and Low Tone Redwood, LTR Tuning Blocks, MGA Sub amp & SW-15 sub, BP Cable Grounds. SAM and PZC acoustics, and a couple of RoomTune Squares. I’m also using my Mini Wall Tuning Blocks (Pretty cool little guys), Space Cones, MTD’s. So as you can tell my system is mainly a variable musical instrument.

what about the equipment?

Well because my system is a tuning tool I can put in an amplifier, my trusty Magnavox players and I’m off to the races. For the sake of the other thread I’m doing here, I’ve bought several amps so I can do the tune from scratch using basic electronics. 3 days ago I got in another Pioneer sx-3400 and popped it into the system. BTW for my reference tube gear I use Audolici from Portugal. The A25M is the MG Version. I also have the AVP-01 and AP-01 preamps.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

"No, the fact is there is a sameness that a stock car audio system impacts on all recordings so they all sound decent. "

folks are talking theory and there is absolutely no doubt to any of us who have actually done the testing needed, that the guy talking has never done the actual empirical testing themselves.

Hi glupson and Guys

Thanks for the post. Btw the folks that are wanting to argue on this thread or any other have a different agenda than the OP. With that, we can skip over those posts and move on, try to come to an understanding, jump in and ask them to stop or wait till they give us space to discuss the OP. Anyone’s guess is as good as anyone else’s to know how to deal with trolling. Every time I get trolled on here, I thank my lucky stars I have TuneLand.

There’s a huge importance to exploring and not just taking guesses about music, audio, recording and playback. I can bring up literally tons of topics to use as a discussion tool, and with those based on the answers or comments made you can tell whether a person has done something or not. Keep in mind that everyone on the planet has their own taste, so there is no right or wrong way to listen, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t more to be heard. It only means we have chosen to go to a certain level of listening. How do you know?

Recordings have a real space and real size to them. For example, lets say we setup a microphone in the isle of the concert hall while recording so we can add the hall sound to the close up and direct mics. In my case I usually did the direct miking, an over head miking, a mid hall miking and a couple of mics way in the back. Sometimes I would do 3 halos and other times 4, very common no brains miking. During the mix I can then choose how much depth and girth I wanted to give to the piece. If you’ve "done" this a few hundred times you instinctively learn how the halos were shaped by other engineers. Now the recording console, pre effect, doesn’t know anything but a 360 view of what is going on. That’s why when you are listening to headphones the sound is all around you when wearing non-directional cans. Now your going to notice something with these cans (unless they’ve been tweaked a certain way). There are no blacks holes in the soundstage. The sound covers the entire stage 360, that’s what a recording is. When we start using stereo in a room with the speakers in front of us instead of directly at the ear on either side we create that frontal image. It is the recording, but it is the recording reacting to the room and speakers. In other words, you are actually hearing the pressure in the room being stimulated by the speakers and not the speakers themselves (their just the origin). When you hear folks say "there is a black space between the instruments" that’s not what the recording is doing, that’s what the system is doing to the recording. The system is not connecting the dots, it’s not giving you the whole recording, it’s giving you parts and pieces. If the speakers and system is working with the room there is an easy way to tell. Any recording you put on will do this if you are hearing the recording itself. Put on a recording, hit play, and you will instantly hear and feel pressure behind you as if you were outside walking into a room and feeling the rooms pressure all around you. If you only see the stage in front of you and don’t sense the recording pressure around you (it has a sound too), your not playing the whole recording, or even close.

Any of you guys, put on a recording you like where you can feel the sound all around you as if the speakers weren’t even there. Now play what you think is a sub par recording. First thing you will notice is the "so so" recording is not giving you that presence. It’s not the recording. All recordings have that 360 element to them. There’s no way to remove it. Even a very compressed recording will still give you that 360 effect. As has been mentioned earlier some folks can play that music in the car and it sounds acceptable, and put it on their home system and not as good. Folks, it’s not the recording. Recordings don’t dumb themselves down to play in a car or headphones and not in your home. It’s also not that your system is more "revealing". The fact is if your car can play it and your headphones can play it, your home stereo should be able to play it. If your in room system is more revealing than your car and your headphones you will hear more not less.

That’s going to make some of you mad and for some even go into denial, but that’s reality.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

PS: don’t shoot me I’m only telling you guys the reality, ok

Quantum is the Latin word for amount and, in modern understanding, means the smallest possible discrete unit of any physical property, such as energy or matter. Quantum came into the latter usage in 1900, when the physicist Max Planck used it in a presentation to the German Physical Society. Planck had sought to discover the reason that radiation from a glowing body changes in color from red, to orange, and, finally, to blue as its temperature rises. He found that by making the assumption that radiation existed in discrete units in the same way that matter does, rather than just as a constant electromagnetic wave, as had been formerly assumed, and was therefore quantifiable, he could find the answer to his question.

Planck wrote a mathematical equation involving a figure to represent individual units of energy. He called the units quanta . Planck assumed there was a theory yet to emerge from the discovery of quanta, but in fact, their very existence defined a completely new and fundamental law of nature. Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum theory together explain the nature and behavior of all matter and energy on earth and form the basis for modern physics. However, conflicts remain between the two. For much of his life, Einstein sought what he called a unified field theory -- one would reconcile the theories' incompatibilities. Subsequently, Superstring Theory and M-theory have been proposed as candidates to fill that role.

A more succinct definition is here...

  A discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents. 

I have written to at least one company asking how they employ "quantum theory" in their product with no response. We must be vigilant when accepting these terms and their possible implications.

Hi Guys & Gals (got an email from one of the gals who asked to be included). So just wanted to say "hello ladies". I’ll be using "Guys" or "folks" or whatever as general terms for saying "hey gang". Thanks for the emails too. I’ll do my best to be here, facebook, TuneLand and by email, but if I fall behind please be patient with me, as soon as I’m caught up with clients and my own listening I’ll be back at it.

You guys have been very kind with your private emails, thank you! It’s a lot of fun for me.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

Hi Falconquest

When I first started my relationship with HEA (late 70’s early 80’s) I was hit with my first blast of "highendism". It’s a language and personality that is a mixer of Electrical Engineering, science, Webster, compulsive RTA & blind fold testing, Male ego, empirical testing, physics, neuroticism, myth making and marketing. I think I said earlier, my friends in the entertainment biz warned me to stay as far away from HEA as I could. It reminded me of the different types of studio engineers, techs, producers and artist. When you take something as cool, and young, as stereo and begin to "tech-no-fy" it I have found that the best way to approach it is, be careful to what you lay claim to (credit for), and be humorist in your private world, while trying not to engage with those who have learned enough to be dangerous but not necessarily accurate. And (and this is an important one) always keep in mind of the folks who aren’t speaking up.

For every one person that is speaking an opinion out in the open there are a 100 not saying anything. In todays info world that may even be more like 1 to 1000, who knows.

HEA has created it’s own paradigm that exist with it’s own unique set of words and rules, that outside of HEA, makes little sense to onlookers. I always say "guys it’s not that hard" but HEA hates that type of simplicity. For example, HEA has sold the myth that these over built, beautiful looking, heavy, expensive, complicated, discrete audio components & speakers are better at reproducing sound. Yet the reality is, they actually play less of the recorded signal than does something with lower mass and simpler build. The writing is now on the wall that HEA’s over built and over priced products are on their way to the dinosaur archives, but the transition is hard to go through for those of us who have bought into our big system comfort zone.

Along with the products themselves going through the transition, the HEA marketing starts to look suspicious. The sales tool of trying to make audio more difficult than it really is, is all part of the paradigm of trying to sell HEA as a more advanced hobby than it really is. The more the listener is mystified the longer he or she hangs on to the hope that one fixed sound is going to be the answer to playback, even though everything about music playing, recording and playback is a variable science. As I and others point out the transition should have taken place back in the 90’s when the reviewers were actually on this path to tuning, but the HEA revenue world didn’t want to let go of it’s new found wealth. It was a paradigm of guilt marketing, greed, incomplete science and eye candy.

Quantum, discrete, isolation, dampening, compression, NASA, EE, inert, first reflection point, transparency, revealing and many more that are a part of the selling of HEA aren’t necessarily being used in the truest sense but have been turned into tools of convincing a certain part of the public of HEA to defend the market. You take a forum like this and throw in a little internet trolling and limited experience and you can see why the transition is taking so long. But the more you have folks like Tjbhuler speaking out, the easier the pill is to swallow.

also I want to throw this in from Geoff

"There is much confusion over what quantum physics is, what audio devices employ quantum physics or operate via quantum mechanics or quantum physics. However, it might be a little bit of an overreaction to condemn all audiophile devices marketed as quantum devices as hoaxes or suggest deception or lack or integrity. For example, the CD laser itself operates quantum mechanically, or any laser; they are “two dimensional quantum wells.”

And one more thing that you guys should think about studying are the "fundamental forces". A lot of audio is easy to figure out if you have taken a course in, or even study on the internet, the interaction of the Earth's forces.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

Hi uberwaltz

"I totally understand it is likely my listening space that needs work rather than bad recordings per se.
However to some their listening space is not an area that can be subjected to various treatments, ynow wife dictates etc, so some of the changes required are just not practical for any number of reasons."

Do you know how many listeners out there would love to get to that 1% place? There is absolutely nothing like listening contentment. There must be a bell that goes off somewhere in heaven every time there is a happy listener. Being able to spend time on the music collection is very cool indeed.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

Hi rhg88

"Sometimes the "listenign comparison" mantra is pushed a bit too far. I was flabbergasted to see a 250+ thread in audiogon on whether or not someone can hear the difference in sound quality when interchanging two cat6-certified internet cables."

I’m paid to hear the differences, and they do exist, but I think folks need to relax sometimes and study sound from a more settled approach. Audio settling doesn’t happen in a few minutes, it can take weeks or even more to hear changes in a system take on their full meaning.

It’s like these blind fold tests and ABing. Those are all cool and fine to do but their not really more than a possible snap shot, just like any test.

I’ll also comment on the Dynamic Range Database thing. I started to explore these (again) after it was brought up on the Stereophile forum and found this to be very if-y at best. I even went as far as to contact some of the testers and it’s extremely unprofessional and there is no standard testing protocol at all. The results are all over the map on the same recordings and it’s simply amateurish. Plus not one of these tests, that I witnessed, were done where someone physically changed the conditions of the testing. It goes back to our findings in 2004 where we found the physical conditions of the testing changes the results more than the testing itself. So for myself, after testing (doing) this 3 different times (late 90’s, 2004, last year) I feel pretty confident putting this one to bed. Then again if it’s helpful for others, it’s all good.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

gulpson said

"Ok, I get some of the thinking behind these pressures, rooms, etc. I am not sure I am fully sold on it, but have never tried anything but a plain system made up of a few not-too-fancy components. I did notice that room made a major difference. I will leave it at that, being a bit suspicious and, at the same time, leaving door open that room pressure 360 and the rest is all really true.

However, I am wondering how, for the purpose of this thread, we define poor recordings. Not "poor", but "recordings". Maybe the word "recordings" is used incorrectly."

_______________________________________________________

This is a biggie and HEA should have early on made things more clear. Introducing the term "recorded code" or equivalent should have been in play a long time ago when describing the actual recording. Here’s why. All recordings are different from each other and all playback systems are also different in the source/pre/recording interaction. There’s a couple of things that never really got passed on to the next generation (digital music) like what was tried to be done between the Eqing of tape and vinyl when the attempt was made to go from single source systems to multiple source. Adding a source selector into the mix created an un-equaling of performance that even till now has never been adequately implemented. HEA in particular moved way too fast into "discrete" componentry, not thinking about what they were doing.

If you go back to the generation before HEA discrete you will see that components had a volume control, balance, tone controls and inputs. The reason this was done is because it gave you an opportunity to find the center position of each recording, adjust the EQ differences between recordings, and so you would have separate inputs to add your effects to. In other words the pre-amp stage was so you could play several sources through one unit, kind of like an in home mixer. When HEA got rid of all those choices, they also were only able to give you a "one sound" choice at a time. No longer were you able to do the things mentioned above. That was the beginning of discrete listening. But here’s the problem, recording playback doesn’t work that way. Not only is every recorded code different, but so is the same with your playback input and output selectors. Let’s say you’ve hooked up your Tape deck, TT, CD’s, FM and Files to your one system. When you selected and dialed that system in to your preferred source, all the other sources are then not dialed in as well. If you’ve dialed in your setup to play a particular vinyl well, it will not sound the same with any other of your sources. There’s nothing in your system that automatically switches the sound of the audio chain (after changing sources), and HEA got rid of all the adjustments you use to have. That’s a big problem and unfortunately HEA was not knowledgeable enough to take you into that next chapter needed. For the last twenty to thirty years you have been sold systems that are incomplete and the answer the market has thrown at you is upgrade your system to another discrete system, instead of giving you real solutions. And even worse, they have turned you into skeptical hobbyist. Everyone has an opinion that only leads you back to the same place "audio is variable". You can spend 100years in this hobby listing our favorite components that had a particular sound when playing a particular recording on a particular source in a particular room, and that’s all good, but that’s a different hobby from playing back recordings correctly and with consistency.

the solutions are

A different type of play back system electronically, a different system for every source and recording, a method of tuning or bring back the options that were taken away. To get to the answers it brings us back to the OP "Talk but not walk?" If you guys did a simple exploration of the hobby you would find out, that you didn’t need these over built components. You would discover your hearing your room and if your speakers were more like musical instruments you could tune them to the room/system/ears/recordings. Some of you have already made the switch to electronic room correction. And some of you that are more purist you are going to have one source systems that are mechanically, electrically and acoustically tunable.

It also brings us back to the question of HEA itself and why it is on the decline. No matter my opinion or anyone else’s HEA of the past is on the decline. It’s not going to have a sustainable future without correcting some of the missteps. They’re not hard to identify missteps and any one of you can challenge the facts by doing yourself. It was asked earlier how do I know these things? Because I have done them, and so have others.

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

Speaking of tuning, and that of a drum in particular: To proport that a drum that has been "tuned" (the reason for the use of the quotation marks to follow) in one room, and then moved to another where it is now "out of tune", is to unwittingly reveal something about oneself. Except for "tuned percussion" (tympani, vibes, etc.), drums are not tuned, they are tensioned. The threaded rods which pass through the holes in the hoop that holds a drum head in place on a drum shell are called tension rods, not tuners (as on guitars and basses). A drum is not tuned to a note, so can not be out of tune.

A drum produces many fundamental tones, with many, many harmonics and overtones---some related to the fundamentals, some not. Those that are not are referred to as "partials"---tones in between the dominant fundamentals and their harmonics. A drummers adjusts the tension rods until the drum produces the mix of fundamentals/harmonics/partials he prefers (as well as the tightness of the head, which affects drumstick rebound). A drum does NOT produce one, single, dominant note, it produces a vast mix of related and unrelated tones. If that were not true, a snare drum would need to be tensioned so as to match the key each song is played in.

What DOES happen when a drum is moved between rooms, is the balance between all the tones the drum produces is affected by the acoustic properties of the two rooms---the decay times of the rooms at various frequencies, the tones reinforced or diminished according to the resonant characteristics of the room, a result of it’s dimensions. And by the absorptive and reflective nature of the material used to construct the room, which varies at different frequencies, of course. The rooms affect the timbre of the drum(s), not their pitch. The most extreme change occurs when a drum is played outside; their IS no room, so no room-related decay times or resonances. I hate to play outside---drums always sound thin and flat there.

The biggest choice in HEA of course is whether to select a guru or be your own.