Tubes are like a car I once owned. Before Ford involvement, Jaguar ownership was very much a love/hate relationship. Transistors are like a car I now own. The performance of my 13 year old Porsche is exciting in a different way. But it is very much more reliable. And I don't even have to carry a spare fuel pump with me. |
Tubegroover, You're correct. You're both right. De gustibus non est disputandum. I have found the truth. It's in the concert hall. |
Sedond: Glad we've found some agreement. But I've never considered myself one of the sheeple and I definately am no ewe. |
Khrys: Since you didn't write the above, I didn't write this. The issue of truth and accuracy in audio reproduction is the raison d'etre for this industry. For many of us, the ideal is to faithfully (high fidelity) replicate the aural experience of the original event. Since we can almost never know how that original event sounded, we must rely upon our own sensitivities and experiences to determine how closely what we are hearing comes to that imagined original. If you have spent a lot of time in the concert venue, both on stage and off, you should have a better sense of what that reality is than one who has not. It's sufficient to say that for me, several decades of critical listening has provided me with a good sense of how closely a reproduced sound comes to my remembered aural experience base. I have learned from years of interacting with and sharing this hobby with many others that there are legions of listeners who have little or no idea of what a real orchestra (for example) sounds like in the concert hall or anywhere else. The orchestra, or jazz ensemble is a good reference standard for the sound of an audio system. This type of musical group is, for the most part, comprised of unamplified acoustical instruments. And these instruments are, at least for now, still the predominate source of most of the music we hear. So ideally, according to this concept of accuracy, the less corrupted the source material, the better......... I have a 50 year old art book at home which is filled with photographs of many of the finest 17th-19th century masters. This book was printed in the early years of color photography. The color was originally not especially accurate and has faded considerably since. These photographs are indeed color representations of those masterworks. They are interesting and emotionally moving at times. But they are not ACCURATE. I know this because I have seen a few of those paintings in person and can see many more of them in recently printed art books. So for some, accuracy is a kind of truth. And truth has greater beauty when it is not corrupted or distorted. |
Khrys: You obviously are concerned above how your system sounds. You obviously have some sort of personal standard which drives or has driven you to discriminate in your selection of equipment. Ostensibly you have invested a fair amount of coinage in your system. And you are obviously intelligent enough not to have done that without any personal criteria. In these ways we are the same. Your personal experiences have, I would speculate, contributed largely to the decisions which you have made. I think that I was sufficiently clear in explaining my personal rationales. If your personal system were not capable of at least the degree of naturalness which you prefer, I don't believe that you would find it acceptable. I conclude that you do have standards and that you do demand a certain degree of accuracy for your personal enjoyment. The imagined original is explained in a previous post. You can read elsewhere here that I believe that personal taste is absolutely valid and that listening pleasure can be derived from even the most modest of playback systems(AM portable radio). I would also submit that the reason we are taking the time to construct comments and rejoinders is that this avocation is important to us and that it's in the details that we find the distinctions. Good listening to you. (double entendre intended) |
Sedon: The concert hall is part of the total live music system. Each hall is distinctive and as an indispensible part of any given particular concert experience is "accurate". That's not to say that the same hall would be considered good. Some are actually fairly bad (we could discuss "good" or "bad" at another time). Consider the design modifications which have been made to certain major concert halls over the years(at considerable expense). As part of the total sonic event sequence, a hall simply "is". A good recording of a bad concert hall should sound like a bad concert hall. |
Khrys: I'm reasonably confident that semantic differences are often responsible for misunderstandings in these and most other exchanges. But we continue because it stimulates and informs. Be assured that my priority is the emotional and intellectual enjoyment of music. In fact, I do have many "historic" recordings which I thoroughly enjoy since one of my interests is the western orchestral tradition and its development. And I would certainly agree that the most important component in a playback system is the source material. It definately is for me. If I were to place myself on either side of the obj./subj. discussion, it would be on the objective. Essentially because of consistency. Of course, the final decisions for most of us tend to be subjective. Personal predilections are absolutely valid for each of us. But may have little real meaning to others because of differeces in experience and physiological make-up. As to the search for the "absolute sound". I,m not preoccupied with that seach and I don't read that periodical since someone elses subjective descriptions are completely meaningless to me. I have excellent hardware, but some of it is not state of the art and will probably not be replaced. I don't use micro-dots, CD demagnetizers, green magic-markers, magic blocks, expensive wire, etc..Audio nirvana for me does not lie in some particular circuit topology or early 20th. century technology. The reference standard for me remains the remembered live sound and I subjectively measure audio playback against that standard. Basically, the characteristics I want in a preferred playback system can be simply stated; i.e., it should be quiet, clean, dynamic and most importantly, natural. Objective measurements (specs) do correlate well (but far from perfectly) with those desired characteristics. I'm not optimistic about personal absolution. |
Sedond: The concert hall, being the acoustical space within which the concert occurs, is an integral part of the aural experience and as such, is an accurate representation of itself (to be redundant). Which of these halls would you consider inaccurate? Symphony Hall in Boston, Carnegie Hall in N.Y., The Musicverien in Vienna, The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Severance Hall in Cleveland, etc., etc.. They each have unique acoustical signatures. None of which would be considered as being wrong or inaccurate. |
Bob: Meandering divergence from the matter-at-hand contributes to interesting conversation. However, due to the interelatedness of most things, it often returns to course. You have nailed one problem, i.e.,hyper-concern for resolution. Many modern system configurations are simply too microscopically detailed in their rendering. E.g., occasionally during concert performances there are instances of harshness, shrillness, glare etc. which are absorbed into the mass of the audience and hall during a performance, yet are picked up in excruciating detail by very sensitive microphones during the digital recording process. Additionally, even fairly recent digital recordings sometimes sound overloaded. And older analog recordings done with mildly distortive tube electronics... (you can hear it on many of the early Mercury recordings..it wasn't nearly as noticeable when we listened to those pressings in the '60s). All of the previous can be very unattractive when played back on a system which is too revealing.(Have you ever noticed how unappealing the hollywood beauty can be when you're in the first row and her pores are 2"wide and nostrils a foot?) Of course, there have always been plainly bad recordings. For some, the ameliorating effects of tube electronics serve to smooth out many of these distractions. And it's amazing how effective the discreet application of the heretical tone control can be in making a bad recording listenable. Pax |
Bob: It's interesting how respectable tone controls became when they appeared on a six grand Cello pre-amp which didn't even provide for switching them out of the loop. There are many good pre-amps from the past which incorporate tone controls which can be switched out. Since I often listen to older analog recordings, I find the careful application of some tonal modification beneficial at times. This also applies to certain sonically unattractive digital recordings. MacIntosh pre-amps from about c32 have included a 5 band equalizer (not narrow band grafic) from which the Cello pre-amp concept could easily have been derived. These pre-amps are readily available on the used market and are very durable. My approach to the utilization of such a pre-amp is as follows; Since I prefer no preamp, most of my digital listening is with source directly into amp. When I want the benefits of a pre-amp and/or tone controls I shunt the source through a simple switching box to the pre-amp. The pre-amp also of course, provides a means of listening to lps and analog tape. The second option is not exactly purist. But, I don't buy the purported superiority of that approach in every instance and it has worked very well for me. Adendum: Musical Fidelity has made a nice little add-on tone control box in the past. Perhaps it is still available. |
