Any BARF Audiophiles?

[tzrider]

That is true, we cannot know what the mastering engineer heard. The task of an audio engineer though is not to second-guess the mastering engineer, but to reproduce as faithfully as possible what is on the recorded medium, which is always going to serve as the reference against which all subsequent steps are measured. In other words, the only known fact is what is contained in the recording, and the engineering buck should stop there.

Your assertion though that we cannot measure imaging is wrong. Imaging is a temporal delay in signals arriving at your ears, either because of unequal distances between two sources, or due to reflections in a domestic environment. Its effects can be precisely measured in an anechoic chamber, so we can easily characterise the imaging information inherent in a recording.

Though I have not been in every recording control room on earth, in the ones a have been in (I helped build one) the alignment process did not address imaging.

Some of the loudspeakers in this discussion have very different imaging characteristics from more conventional designs and some consider their sound stage to be exaggerated. Still, they are highly regarded. Are they reference quality?

In my experience audiophiles place much more emphasis on faithful reproduction than audio engineers do in the original recording. It doesn't make the pursuit of reference quality production meaningless but does say that there is a point of diminishing return when discussing "accuracy."

 

[DReg350]

Well... I guess maybe I'm not a true audiophile after reading through all this. My OCD only goes so far. I enjoy being able to tease out detail instead of listening to mud. But, that's about it. I don't know what the audio engineer had in mind. I wasn't there. Did the engineer even discuss it with the artist? Did the artist care? I dunno. I'm not gonna create a dedicated room. Not gonna go nuts trying to eliminate every minute source of vibration and noise. I'll leave all that to guys with bigger paychecks and more severe OCD than mine. :laughing

 

[russ69]

...We can characterise the quality of an audio device as accurately as we can the quality of any other electronic component, but this would ruin about 80% of the industry, so there is no incentive for anyone to undertake this task.

In my 45 years in the hobby, I have found measured results to be totally worthless in determining the characteristics or quality of sound. The ear is a pretty good instrument and can usually discriminate what it is hearing. The theory that everything that measures the same sounds the same just doesn't hold up when we compare products in the real world. The entire audiophile industry exists because different products sound different. There is no conspiracy at play, we will pay unbelievable prices to move our systems in the right direction and will continue to do so long after the measurement folks have declared that all electronic gear sounds the same. Oops, Julian Hirsch claimed that in the 70s, wasn't true then and isn't true now.

 

[GAJ]

You should give it a try if you still have it. I'll swear there is a difference, but it could just be my brain trying to rationalize a thousand dollar CD player. :laughing

it is too bad it seems to have not really caught on as evidenced by the lack of titles released.

Sadly I gave it to my daughter who killed it!

When I listen to Concert DVDs that are 5.1 I often listen in 2.1 as music sounds better to me that way.

 

[GAJ]

No offense, but those yamahas have a massive dropoff way above 28hz.

Not according to the test tones and spl meter I used.

But no, not nearly as good as my DD15+with an MSRP of $4499 and extension down to 15hz.:laughing

For that price you could buy 54 of the Yamahas!

 

[GAJ]

Well... I guess maybe I'm not a true audiophile after reading through all this. My OCD only goes so far. I enjoy being able to tease out detail instead of listening to mud. But, that's about it. I don't know what the audio engineer had in mind. I wasn't there. Did the engineer even discuss it with the artist? Did the artist care? I dunno. I'm not gonna create a dedicated room. Not gonna go nuts trying to eliminate every minute source of vibration and noise. I'll leave all that to guys with bigger paychecks and more severe OCD than mine. :laughing

You and me both.

What convinced me that my LX16s were superior to the still very goog B&Ws and Q Acoustics speakers I auditioned in my was the recordings of two artists I saw in concert in SF; Bell X1 and Ben Folds.

The LX16s reproduced the EXACT tonality of their voices I heard at those acoustic concerts while the other two speakers didn't.

I very much doubt the two venues I was at were using Martin Logan monitors but, nevertheless, they reproduced that tonality right on the button.

Good enough for me.

 

[ScarySpikes]

Audiophiles bag on everything, that's what we do...

Ok...?


opinion on SMSL DAC/Amps and Fostex headphones?

 

[russ69]

Ok...? opinion on SMSL DAC/Amps and Fostex headphones?

Sorry can't help. I have not heard those particular products. I can recommend Grado in just about every price range and Stax if you like electrostatic headphones. Some of the better ones may exceed your budget limitations (we all have a budget but some budgets are higher than others).

 

[GiorgioFurioso]

Unlike the photo analogy, the truth is you don't really know if your system is reproducing what the mastering engineer heard.

What does it matter what the mastering engineer heard? The artist was almost certainly not present. The mastering engineer's job is to make the master sound as good as possible across a wide spectrum of consumer devices. They will have a selection of speakers to help them with this. And if/when the artist signs off on the mastered version, you have no idea what they were listening through at that time.

If your concern is to hear it how the original artist heard it as it was being mixed, you'd need to un-do the mastering, at which point your best bet would be to listen through a pair of Yamaha NS10's.

I say this half tongue-in-cheek. My point being, setting as a goal to hear what the artist heard when they signed off on a mix is about as futile a task as anything you could imagine.

 

[ScarySpikes]

Sorry can't help. I have not heard those particular products. I can recommend Grado in just about every price range and Stax if you like electrostatic headphones. Some of the better ones may exceed your budget limitations (we all have a budget but some budgets are higher than others).

I suppose i should mention product name not brand.

Fostex x Massdrop TH-X00 Purpleheart headphones and

SMSL SD793-II DAC/AMP

 

[johnkol]

Not gonna go nuts trying to eliminate every minute source of vibration and noise. I'll leave all that to guys with bigger paychecks and more severe OCD than mine.

Don't worry, that's what we all said when we started. Enjoy the journey!

 

[tzrider]

I say this half tongue-in-cheek. My point being, setting as a goal to hear what the artist heard when they signed off on a mix is about as futile a task as anything you could imagine.

Funny, that was my point too.

 

[GiorgioFurioso]

Funny, that was my point too.

:laughing :thumbup

 

[johnkol]

Though I have not been in every recording control room on earth, in the ones a have been in (I helped build one) the alignment process did not address imaging.

Some of the loudspeakers in this discussion have very different imaging characteristics from more conventional designs and some consider their sound stage to be exaggerated. Still, they are highly regarded. Are they reference quality?

Recordings that takes place in a studio certainly lack any natural imaging information, but mastering engineers do try to put some basic imaging cues so that not all instruments appear as though they are coming form the same direction -- and this can be as simple as doing L-R level imbalancing.

I definitely do not consider any dipolar/bipolar speaker (which includes all electrostatis/electrodynamic ones) as reference quality. A lot of them are highly regarded, but that should tell you something about the people that hold these opinions, rather than the quality of the loudspeakers themselves.

 

[russ69]

...I definitely do not consider any dipolar/bipolar speaker (which includes all electrostatis/electrodynamic ones) as reference quality. A lot of them are highly regarded, but that should tell you something about the people that hold these opinions, rather than the quality of the loudspeakers themselves.

That's odd because all of the most respected leaders in the industry do. J Gordon Holt comes to mind as one of the most respected. Have you never heard a Magnepan 20, Infinity Servo Static, Infinity IRS, Apogee, or King Sound King?

 

[tzrider]

John, it seems to me that there is a thriving culture of audio enthusiast (who identify as audiophiles) who are passionate about hearing all the detail, etc., but who may not prefer the reference quality sound.

This is where subjectivity comes in. It's the domain of tube amps, dipoles, etc. And of course as time marches on, the state of the art has changed. Once upon a time, the amps were as accurate as it got. Now, people talk of the "musicality" of them, meaning the pleasing distortion they introduce. :laughing

 

[johnkol]

My point being, setting as a goal to hear what the artist heard when they signed off on a mix is about as futile a task as anything you could imagine.

We are not trying to reproduce what the artist or the mastering engineer heard. As audio engineers, the only thing we care about is the recording itself; that's what we are trying to reproduce, the information on the recorded medium byte by byte. Whether that information is exactly what the artist had in mind is completely irrelevant: the creative process ended when the information was encoded on the medium. The decoding process is an engineering task, not an artistic one.

 

[johnkol]

In my 45 years in the hobby, I have found measured results to be totally worthless in determining the characteristics or quality of sound.

If by "measured results" you mean the measurements that Julian Hirsch or John Atkinson performed, then sure, these will not really tell you how a component might sound.

But what that really tells you is not that measurements cannot predict sound characteristics, but that you are simply not carrying out the proper measurements.

At some point in my professional career I had to measure devices in an anechoic chamber, and correlate these measurements to subjective results from case studies of customers using our products. We never had a problem extracting the parameters we needed in order to make the correct correlations and improve our products.

Our measuring instruments nowadays have atomic-level precision; you really think we cannot measure pedestrian devices like audio amplifiers?

The theory that everything that measures the same sounds the same just doesn't hold up when we compare products in the real world.

The people who proclaim this show their complete ignorance of how science works; it is not "if they measure the same they sound the same", it's the exact opposite: science tells you that if they sound different, then they *must* measure different -- and the task of the scientist is to find those measurements that reveal the audible differences.

Of course if you were to read Sterophile or TAS, you would be convinced that scientists are stumped by this mystical realm called "audio", and although we have the ability to manipulate individual atoms, or peer to the very beginning of the Universe, we cannot figure out how audio equipment work.

Has it ever occurred to you that this is what they want you to believe because they have a financial interest in you believing this?

The entire audiophile industry exists because different products sound different.

The entire audiophile industry exists because it is selling engineering devices to non-engineers, and unscrupulous/naive/ignorant people make it their point of obfuscating the field so that they have a place in it, and profit from it.

 

[cfives]

Our measuring instruments nowadays have atomic-level precision; you really think we cannot measure pedestrian devices like audio amplifiers?

The people who proclaim this show their complete ignorance of how science works; it is not "if they measure the same they sound the same", it's the exact opposite: science tells you that if they sound different, then they *must* measure different -- and the task of the scientist is to find those measurements that reveal the audible differences.

I'm not an audiophile, and hopefully not being a contrarian, just curious of a few things that you posted that seem odd to me.

The first is does your measuring equipment (of soundwaves I assume) somehow precisely measure and identify atoms?

The second question is do you believe that science dictates that every human on this planet receives and interprets audio stimuli/frequencies in exactly the same manner?

 

[russ69]

...Our measuring instruments nowadays have atomic-level precision; you really think we cannot measure pedestrian devices like audio amplifiers?

I've been reading spec sheets for 45 years. There is nothing in a spec sheet that tells me how a unit sounds...it only tells me how a unit measures.

...science tells you that if they sound different, then they *must* measure different -- and the task of the scientist is to find those measurements that reveal the audible differences.

We are waiting...when is this "science" going to be available? Or perhaps, the engineering compromises have complex interactions that are easily heard by the ear but get hidden by single parameter measurements?

...Of course if you were to read Stereophile or TAS, you would be convinced that scientists are stumped by this mystical realm called "audio"

John Atkinson provides extensive measurements with every amplifier tested. So far nobody has been able to correlate those measurements with sound quality, except in the case of grossly under performing equipment but then again, that is easily heard.

...The entire audiophile industry exists because it is selling engineering devices to non-engineers...

There are plenty of engineers in audio, both as consumers and designers. The industry exists because it is making superior products. In most cases a product that delivers a good value for the money spent. If the industry didn't deliver good value, it would not exist at all.

I'm not sure how you reach the conclusion that everybody in the hobby is just living an illusion driven by greedy industrialists but that has not been my experience. My experience is that designers and engineers that have an interest in music are working hard to advance the sound quality of the products they deliver. Often driven by the desire to make improvements to their own systems. The history of audio is littered with people that did exactly that.



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