[rklein]

I find that I am much more successful at re-creating chamber music than a full orchestra.  I believe that my room size has alot to do with this.  Unfortunately, my listening room is 14'x16'.  Try as I might, there just isn't enough cubic space available to do justice to the larger works.

Randy

[Ericus Rex]

I had the pleasure of hearing Zybar's system a few years ago.  Someone put on a hi-rez recording of a Slavonic dance (I think) and I felt like I was onstage again!  Haven't heard a system since get that close to the real thing.

[Freo-1]

It’s a pretty diverse crowd that attends symphonies.  Regardless of the venues I have been to over the last eight years or so (Perth, Sydney, Boston, Providence), the crowd demographics were very diverse indeed.  In fact, it made me very happy to see so many university students attending a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Providence. 
 
 
Good music is truly timeless, and why we enjoy this hobby so (regardless of the tools and toys used to get that emotional connection). 

[rklein]

Good music is truly timeless, and why we enjoy this hobby so (regardless of the tools and toys used to get that emotional connection). 

Well said!! 

Randy

[Rocket_Ronny]

We have a Yamaha U1 piano. A well respected upright that our piano tuners always enjoy working with. And when tuned just rings to life.

I find I get the same effect on well recorded piano on the system. Often it seems better than live in that the mics pick up everything and bring them into technicolor.

So when I hear a good piano piece on the rig I am captivated.

Rocket_Ronny

[Soundminded]

The basic problem is that the concepts used for recording and playback does not work sufficiently well to fool your ears and brain. Critical elements of the live sound are missing while some of those present are just plain wrong. So called accurate playback (I prefer to think of it as convincing since there are no two seats even in the same hall at the same performance where the sound is identical) was supposed to be the goal of high fidelity. With the disasterous technical failure of quadraphonic sound in the 1970s the industry gave up and redefined its goals so as not to have to admit defeat. The attempt of quadraphonic sound shows how naive and clueless the engineers were and still are.

What is realistic recording and playback? There are at least two equally valid answers. One is how this thread started off, the sound musical instruments would make as heard in your own room. Obviously this is only practical for a solo performer or a few instruments. This is already beyond the state of the art. The second is how musical performances would sound at a large public venue like a concert hall. In those spaces almost all of what you hear is due to the acoustics of the space, that is the reflections. Little of that gets into a recording, what little does is in a form that's nearly useless, and it isn't reproduced correctly at all. You cannot get the reflections of up to a million cubic foot room coming from every direction in rapid succession over two or more seconds out of two boxes or panels in a room of a few thousand cubic feet by simply playing any recording on any equipment you can buy.

To achieve results that sound the same will require far better understanding of sound, acoustics, and a complete rethinking of how to record and recreate it than we now have. So enjoy your recordings and equipment but recognize that compared to the real thing it's a poor second best. On the other hand, you can listen to what you want when you want and it can be portable. But clearly the technology is an abject failure no matter how much you spend or what absurd lengths manufacturers will go to in perfecting it.

[Douger]

A week ago today I was at Jim Smith's Atlanta residence doing his Room Play Reference program. In his book Get Better
Sound and on his DVD's he explains how to set your system up to maximum potential, and this lets you hear how his system does it. Truly stunning and worthwhile! I  have Tannoy Canterbury SE's and tubed amplification so I hoped to
be in the ballpark, and I am, but somewhere between 2nd and 3rd base... Jim's system is in the dugout relaxing after
a home run! That said, it is an illusion which evokes similar responses compared to live music... The communication
of the composer, producer and performer is convincingly conveyed, and I felt as if I was at the live performance, or the
performers were in front of me. I heartily recommend it!

GetBetterSound.com

[Soundminded]

To give you an idea of just one of the problems you're up against in reproducing the sound of live music at a concert hall in your home consider the problem of the perception of power as opposed to loudness. IMO there are at least five factors that contribute to the perceived power of a sound source that helps you immediately identify if it's a threat to run away from. This is the product of billions of years of evolution and exists in all higher animal. First of course is loudness, the louder the more powerful.Second is bass content. Low frequencies will scare animals. Thunder, a lion's roar (which they say can be heard as much as five miles away) and the infrasonic rumbling of the early warnings of an earthquake. These can be duplicated by sound systems. But there are at least 3 others that can't. First is the perceived distance to the source. At home you hear the sound from about 8 to 20 feet away. But in a concert hall you're at least 30 to as much as 100 feet or more from the source. The perceived power increases with the square of the perceived distance. Then there's the perceived size of the room. Your room is probably about 1000 to 5000 cubic feet (mine is 4000.) A concert hall is typically from about 500,000 to 1,000,000 million cubic feet. The early delays from such large rooms gives us a hint of how powerful the source must be to fill it up. Then there's the persistance, the reverberation of each note. In your room these reflections from directions other than your speakers last about 0.2 to 0.3 seconds. In a concert hall they last about 1.8 to 2.5 seconds at mid frequencies. Add it all up and a symphony orchestra has by my calculations about 43 db more perceived power than a recording played at home at the same loudness. That means a symphony orchestra is perceived to be about 20,000 times as powerful as a recording of one played at the same loudness. IMO this may explain why audiophiles play recordings at deafening levels even though they know it can damage their hearing. They are listening to a feeble source at close distance in a small room that has very little impact on their auditory center. And this is just one of the shortcomdings of it.

[jimdgoulding]

We have to be sure we're comparing apples to apples.  For example, if the piano is closely miked a small system in a small room can't reproduce the dimensions of the instrument being played UNLESS it's miked from a distance.  Play around with your volume control to reduce or enlarge the piano's size to what you feel is a reasonable facsimile of the instrument and of the setting.  Everything about the happening should improve perceptually when you get in step with the recording.

[Soundminded]

I find that I am much more successful at re-creating chamber music than a full orchestra.  I believe that my room size has alot to do with this.  Unfortunately, my listening room is 14'x16'.  Try as I might, there just isn't enough cubic space available to do justice to the larger works.

Randy

The larger the room the live performance would normally be heard in, the greater the difference between the acoustics of that room and yours and therefore the greater the difference in sound. However, in my house live chamber music is performed by anywhere from 4 to 12 players usually at least once every week. The room is roughly 6500 cubic feet. Even in a room that small, the difference between what comes out of those instruments and what comes out of an excellent stereo system is considerable.

Listen to the account of a live versus recorded attempt that starts 29:00 into this interview and you will see that the editor of this famous hobbyist magazine not only didn't get it, he didn't even hear it himself. He didn't understand it when other listeners pointed out to him what they heard. Both he and the interviewer are clueless as to the reason why.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mEsuKqj5wA&feature=relmfu

[Soundminded]

We have to be sure we're comparing apples to apples.  For example, if the piano is closely miked a small system in a small room can't reproduce the dimensions of the instrument being played UNLESS it's miked from a distance.  Play around with your volume control to reduce or enlarge the piano's size to what you feel is a reasonable facsimily of the instrument and of the setting.  Everything about the recording should improve perceptually if you do this.

The basic problem is that not only is the source of sound an 8'-9" wide piano, it radiates most of its sound away from the listener. In fact unless you are in direct line of sight of the sounding board, strings, harp or the lid is propped open ALL of the sound from the piano you hear is reflected. By contrast your speakers unless they are panels or large surface arrays are point sources. But even if they are large they aim most of their sound at you and as frequencies get higher they beam all of their sound directly at you. The way in which the reflected sound reaches your ears, its relative loudness, direction of arrival, timing, spectral content are entirely different. There's no way to overlook this because if you have normal hearing you will notice it immediately....unless you are an audiophile like the magazine editor and interviewer in my previous posting is. In that case it will take somone who listens to music as opposed to electronic equipment to tell you about it 

[Chromisdesigns]

Question for those of you discussing concert hall effects, "perceived power", and suchlike --

Why, then, wouldn't the "ideal" recording and reproduction system consist of the best-available mastering gear set up with a binaural mike system (located in the "best" seat in the house, of course), and played back with whatever you consider the ultimate electronics and headphones?  Perhaps augmented by an external woofer/sub-woofer to produce the "body" effects of the bass frequencies?

I have heard a few startlingly "real" binaural recordings over the years.

[Soundminded]

Question for those of you discussing concert hall effects, "perceived power", and suchlike --

Why, then, wouldn't the "ideal" recording and reproduction system consist of the best-available mastering gear set up with a binaural mike system (located in the "best" seat in the house, of course), and played back with whatever you consider the ultimate electronics and headphones?  Perhaps augmented by an external woofer/sub-woofer to produce the "body" effects of the bass frequencies?

I have heard a few startlingly "real" binaural recordings over the years.

The binaural recording/playback system has been known for well over 50 years, perhaps much longer than that. There's only one flaw in the system and it is a fatal flaw. When you turn your head even slightly the sound turns with it. For that reason you brain immediately concludes that the sound is coming from inside your head. The perception of a large space is missing. A lot of people have tried various schemes to overcome this flaw...and all of them failed. Knowing precisely why it failed would teach you something about sound and hearing that is beyond the current state of the art of both acoustics and psychoacoustics. It would also show you why in all probability this idea can never be made to work.  Certainly not with any technology we could devise out of it today. Back to the drawing  board.

Before I leave this subject however there is one thing to be said for binaural recording because it can do something no other system can. It can capture the tonality of musical instruments as they are heard live (not the spatial aspects though.) With microphones located near the instruments as they are normally recorded, failure to record the reverberation as it is heard by the audience fails to capture the fact that as the sound dies out, the high frequencies die out much faster than the middle and low frequencies. So at 8 khz, the time it takes for sound to decay by a factor of 1 million also called the RT60, RT, or reverberation time is usually about 1 second while at 1 khz it's about 2 seconds. In other words the higher overtones die out faster than the fundimental and lower tones making the sound mellower without it losing clarity of the initial attack transient. So whatever the frequency response of your sound reproducing system is....it's wrong!   

[Chromisdesigns]

The binaural recording/playback system has been known for well over 50 years, perhaps much longer than that. There's only one flaw in the system and it is a fatal flaw. When you turn your head even slightly the sound turns with it. For that reason you brain immediately concludes that the sound is coming from inside your head. The perception of a large space is missing.

Technology of sensing motion and real-time signal processing have come a long way in recent years.  Theoretically, it would seem that you could use a motion sensor to detect head motion, and correct for it with signal processing.  For this to work in practice, though, it might involve multiple channels on each side, to capture the directional information to enable processing movement effects.  However, it mightbe able to improve the situation even with two-channel music.

To your knowledge, has anyone tried this approach?

[Chromisdesigns]

Before I leave this subject however there is one thing to be said for binaural recording because it can do something no other system can. It can capture the tonality of musical instruments as they are heard live (not the spatial aspects though.)

I don't understand why the spatial aspects are not captured, as well (leaving aside the other issue about head movement).  Would they not HAVE to be, almost by definition?  "Spatial effects", after all, are already encoded in the sound waves arriving at your ears (and the binaural mike setup), are they not?  If not, where else could that information be?

[django11]

...

[jimdgoulding]

The basic problem is that not only is the source of sound an 8'-9" wide piano, it radiates most of its sound away from the listener. In fact unless you are in direct line of sight of the sounding board, strings, harp or the lid is propped open ALL of the sound from the piano you hear is reflected. By contrast your speakers unless they are panels or large surface arrays are point sources. But even if they are large they aim most of their sound at you and as frequencies get higher they beam all of their sound directly at you. The way in which the reflected sound reaches your ears, its relative loudness, direction of arrival, timing, spectral content are entirely different. There's no way to overlook this because if you have normal hearing you will notice it immediately....unless you are an audiophile like the magazine editor and interviewer in my previous posting is. In that case it will take somone who listens to music as opposed to electronic equipment to tell you about it 

Slight disagreement here.  A person sitting in the audience of a typical concert hall as I know them, wouldn't perceive that a piano is 9' wide.  And as the sound is directional and omdi directional there, attack and decay, seems to me that my speaker placement renders that nicely coherent here in my medium size room.  Using classical piano recordings as my reference for this opinion, if the microphoning is decent, it sounds generally like a piano on stage at a hall from a seat in the audience.  What row is controlled by my volume control and the piano obliges.  Have I missed your point?  Am I seated or is the microphone(s) too far away?

Ah, wait, perhaps you are saying that drivers that beam are compressing the volume and ambience of the instrument's sound, that it sounds very different live and in a good hall.  I don't believe I could argue against that.  As I type I am reminded of having seen Segovia in a large theater once* from the top balcony, last row and hadn't believed I would be able to hear very much.  I was shocked at what I heard.  His string tone and small changes in his dynamic shading, the hollowness and warmth of his guitar, and sound that filled the entire place.  My speakers do not give me that kind of volume or warmth.

*I was around 18.

[jimdgoulding]

Uno mas tiempo.  I hadn't read all of Soundmind's post until just now.  And I did view the video linked to by the man.  I don't suppose that a microphone placed nearer an instrument than where you would be sitting live in concert can ever sound the same in our rooms.  Not to mention that whatever was recorded is being played back mechanically.  I have some records from aways back that do manage it pretty convincingly that are blumien miked live on location and from a respectable distance.  They are miniaturized comparatively but they sound sublime to me.  In particular is a choral recording from Mark Levinson and another is an instrumental ensemble on the BIS label, made in the 70's.

[jimdgoulding]

Mark (Soundminded), hi.   I regret that you haven't seen fit to reply to me or the Audio Circle community.  Remember that I told you that I had some exceptional recordings from the 70's.  First up, I don't know how you feel about digital but on my rig*, it sounds so mechanical compared to my vinyl rig which has a notably high quality and natural sound to me.  Anyway, from the liner notes on an album that I flat out love, it says "a matched pair of single diaphram bidirectional (pressure gradiant) condenser microphones are used in a coincident arrangement with the membranes at an angle of 90 degrees to the other".  The album is on the Sound Storage Recording Company label.  It is a harp, flute, and viola trio that sounds completely unrecorded to me in my room. 

Recommend a recording or two that pleases you.  And, most certainly, if there is a recording using your patented technology, give me a title or two of those.   

Thank you.  Jim

*most likely blown away by today's availabilities.