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What is the standard for judging a systems sound?

It is often said in these threads that this hobby is all about the music. That live music is the only meaningful standard for comparison when determining the quality of a stereo system. While these words sound good, are they really true?

A violin should sound like a violin, a flute should sound like a flute, and a guitar should sound like a guitar. Many purists will immediately say that amplified/electronic music cannot be used as a standard since a listener can never really know what the intention of the musician was when he/she recorded it, and what that sound should be.

Even something as simple as an electric guitar has multiple settings from which to choose. Electronic keyboards have hundreds of possible voices, so how does the poor audiophile know how the tone was supposed to sound?

These are valid concerns. Back to the purists!
“That’s why only unamplified classical music can be used as a standard!!!” On face value that looks like an acceptable statement. Consider some facts though. In my immediate family we a have several musicians who play a few different instruments. We have an electric piano (due to a distinct lack of room for a baby grand), acoustic guitar, Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, a nickel plated closed hole flute, a silver plated open hole flute, a viola, and a cello.

I have a fairly good idea how each of these instruments sound. One comment I must make immediately is that they sound a little different in different rooms. Another comment, which demands attention: when I bought my first flute I knew nothing about flutes. I began fooling around with it and enjoyed the sound. I liked it so much a bought a better, as mentioned silver open-hole flute. This flute sounded much better than the first flute. The tone was richer (the only words I can think of to describe the difference).

The reason for that background information is to show that the same instruments in different room’s sound different, AND different models of the same instrument have a much different sound!

If we audiophiles are using live unamplified music as a standard there are still several important issues, which must be addressed. How do we really know what we are hearing? What instrument is the musician playing? Was that a Gemeinhardt or Armstrong Flute. What are the sonic characteristics of the specific instrument. Stradivarius violins sound different than other violins, if they didn’t people would not be willing to pursue them so aggressively. Better instruments (theoretically anyway) sound better than lesser instruments. The point here is that different versions of the same instrument sound different.

I have seen the same music reproduced in different settings. I have heard string quartets play in a garden in Vienna. I have heard the Pipe Organ in Stephan’s Dom. I have heard Rock and Roll in arenas and Performing Arts Centers. I have heard jazz played in small one room clubs, not to mention the above listed instruments played in the house.

Each one of these venues sounds different from the other.

When I am listening to a selection of music at home, how do I know how it is supposed to sound? None of the LPs sounds like any of the particular places I have heard live music, while none of those places sounded like any other either.

There is no standard by which to judge the quality of live music since no two venues sound alike. If everyone were to go to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and hear Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 would everyone hear the same thing? Even if they did, and that one concert became the standard by which all other recorded music was judged, would that be translatable to allow the judging of all other music?

I have never heard a cello reproduced as well as my sons playing in the living room. I have never heard better flute players sound better than my own terrible playing at home.

So what do we audiophiles really use as the standard by which recorded music can be judged?
128x128nrchy
zaikesman
3,017 posts
 
Above, I said I wasn't going to try to go into detail about *why* 'naturally'-recorded live acoustic music might make superior audition material. But it seems to me like one of the main reasons should be specifically addressed at this point. From the comments so far, I make the observation that most of what we're talking about seems to boil down to questions of tonal balance, and the timbral signature of any individual instrument's (or voice's) unique harmonic structure. All of this is valid, but let's not overlook the issues of phase and time.

Only in minimally-mic'ed live recordings do we get a good portion of the original phase and time relationship information preserved in the document. Despite our lack of familiarity with the actual instuments and venue used, our ears can still make use of the phase and time coherence captured. This translates - provided our systems can maintain and transmit the information mostly unscathed - into a better comprehension of spatial relationships and transient events.

In typically multi-mic'ed, multi-tracked studio recordings, where there might be no one original performance captured live, this information either doesn't exist in a relational sense (as in the case of purely electronic 'instruments'), or is distorted, or is in conflict between the various elements in the cut, or is artificially manipulated in the mix, or very likely is a combination of all of the above. The result is a playback performance containing no coherent spatial or transient unity to reproduce, which yields a muddled message no matter how we might try to configure our systems for convincing effect.

So, only if program material succeeds in capturing some of this original performance integrity which we would hear live (no matter what the venue, or where we were inside it), will a recording be able to illuminate much about what our systems might be doing to transmit or corrupt it. This is especially valuable for assessing transducer performance, and for investigating speaker/room set-up possibilities, but can be helpful for listening to the spatial and temporal linearity of any device in the playback chain. No, you still won't be able to know exactly what the original performance sounded like, but you'll still be able infer more about what your system is doing, because your ear/brain can detect and interpret a coherent signal, and therefore recognizes compromises to or absence of same.
uppermidfi
277 posts
 
Zaikesman it seems like your approach is a little different than a lot of people. People either pretend that their stereo sounds like a room full of musicians, or they say "it sounds good to me." You are trying to go from some kind of standard. What nrchy is saying is that real live music doesn't sound like what we get in the listening room. The group that stands out is the one that says "It sounds good to me." What does that mean? That is not fidelity, it sure isn't High Fidelity! The purpose of High Fidelity is to closely resemble the original event. If it doesn't resemble the real event it is not high fidelity.

...an dats da name a dat tune.
newbee
4,093 posts
 
Uppermidfi, You state "The purpose of High Fidelity is to closely resemble the original event". Please define for us what you mean by "closely resembles" and tell us who decides when something does or does not "closely resemble the original event". Keep in mind that the admirable standard (goal) of exactly replicating the original event is unobtainable. Pleaase give us a yardstick to measure by.
zaikesman
3,017 posts
 
As I suspect Newbee correctly infers, I'm not sure that Uppermidfi's (great username) interpretation of my take is exactly what I had in mind. Nrchy and Newbee are essentially on target to point out that in almost any instance of listening to recorded music at home, an audiophile is going to be making subjective, impressionistic, and to a large degree fundamentally uninformed judgements about the verisimilitude of what they hear.

I'm not trying to argue for a 'standard' as such - there *is* one in some senses, but we can't really know it for ourselves - rather, I'm just trying to point out why some recording techniques are going to yield source material where the degree of fidelity of our systems, especially in certain areas, is more critically brought into play than with other types of material. What it boils down to is that if we are listening to material which contains relatively less information that has a correlation to reality, then it matters less that our playback system be able to convey such information. This is why dance music will sound better played back in a disco than classical music will.

But of course Uppermidfi is correct (and speaks for many of us) when he posits that in the universe of playback systems, there *are* those which are literally 'higher fidelity' than others (and vice-versa), and I think we all take it for granted that, at least in a gross sense if not precisely in every detail, we will for the most part be able to tell - whether or not we are intimately familiar with the source material, as long as it is of high sonic quality - pretty easily just by auditioning where a system falls on this scale, depsite having no 'absolute' reference to work from. Which, when you think about it, is a fairly complete description of why there is even a high end to begin with. And a fairly good defense as to why, no matter what arguments you might be able to come up with in theory about why it should not be so, the degree of fidelity to *some kind* of real acoustic event captured in the source material must be significant for audition purposes, regardless of our not having been present at the original performance. You can hear it, so it must be the case - even though both the recording and the playback system are never going to reproduce reality, in order to even stand a chance of getting any idea how close you might be coming, both aspects of the chain have to first attempt the feat.
bomarc
501 posts
 
"High fidelity" does NOT mean "close to the original event." It means "close to what's on the recording." On a technical level, an audio playback system cannot do better than that.

It can do worse than that however, and still sound good. It's even possible that, by diverging from (i.e., distorting) what's on the recording, we can get a sound that we like better, or even get a sound that gives us a better illusion of a live musical event. But don't confuse "an illusion of a live musical event" with "a reproduction of a live musical event." The latter is impossible. The former is possible, but it might not be high fidelity!
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