Someone reading these pages might get the impression that I am opposed to new developments in technology and that I do not believe that we will be able to improve sound quality. This is not so. I am all in favour of new recording and sound reproduction techniques which will enable us to achieve improved Hi-Fi performance.
It is obvious that current Hi-Fi recording techniques and sound reproduction are unable to exactly duplicate the original performance whether that is in the studio or live. This is especially apparent when related to classical music. For many reasons including microphone placement, transducer performance and listening room acoustics a sound recording cannot exactly duplicate the original music. We are able to reproduce a flat frequency response. We are able to reproduce musical frequencies well beyond the bounds of human hearing. Likewise we can record and playback music which has a very wide dynamic range beyond even the loudest and softest notes that a full orchestra can manage. We can playback music at loudness levels which can easily damage human hearing.
We can do most of this with a humble LP and a CD can achieve this easily. There is no need for "High Resolution" digital music files which can push the parameters further than CD. It is absolutely pointless to reproduce frequencies above the ability of any human to hear i.e. above 20 KHz. It is equally pointless to enable the playback of music files which allow for a dynamic range of 140 db or more. To exploit this would damage reproduction equipment and worse of all would permanently damage the hearing of the listener in short order.
Manufacturers are leading us up a stereo dead end and playing a numbers game. They have the right to claim that their equipment is better but they have a moral duty not to mislead the public.
Manufacturers are being supported in this numbers game by Hi-Fi magazines whose reporters claim that they can hear sounds and quality differences which science says they cannot. I believe that they are being disingenuous. Add to this the comments and exaggerated claims which are made on some Hi-Fi forums for turntables, cables, "Hi-Res" versus Cd etc. and we are in a sorry mess.
There is room for improvement in sound technology but based on scientific and engineering research which can identify genuine improvements which can be made to inter alia:
microphones and their placement,
loudspeakers,
room acoustics
and computer generated surround sound systems.
We will never progress while false and unverifiable claims are made for 24/192, DSD sound reproduction. No improvement will be made whilst some "audiophiles" believe that electrons somehow follow the arrows printed on expensive cables - they do not. Electrons flow from negative to positive polarity.
How can we progress when people believe that hanging little rocks from line input connexions can improve sonic performance.
The time has come to stop all the myths and apply some genuine science and sound engineering to solve Hi-Fi problems.
It is a pity that Hi-Fi magazines feel that they cannot support science and that most reporters are only interested in playing the numbers game.
Hi Trevor. You say that it is impossible to reproduce exactly a classical performance in our living rooms. This has got to be true, and yet I think that our current techniques are capable of creating an experience that is as good as, if not better, than a live concert. With the recording we will have 'the best seats in the house', and hopefully we will be listening to a great performance by great musicians. If our
ReplyDeletesystem is good enough (I won't bore you with my idea of this, but it can't be flea-powered, and I think that any system can be hamstrung by a weak link even if the rest of it is perfect), we can absolutely reproduce the necessary dynamic range (as you say in your post) and a thrilling illusion of a concert hall, even with plain stereo. By far the biggest deficiency in such an experience, I would say, is not the sound, but the lack of the other aspects of the concert hall experience. Television, such as the BBC's coverage of the Proms (or Glastonbury) can help to fill in even these missing details and create an immersive experience that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Short of a 'holodeck' type of thing, I think we're just about there, technology-wise.
There's a fascinating concept in a product called 'the Realiser' that tracks your head movements to synthesise exactly what you might really hear in a real acoustic space but this requires the use of headphones. This might be an amazing idea (that I would love to try), but it would be something of a purist's device, I think. The multi-mic, multi-camera, fixed stereo-speakers-in-a-reverberant-room arrangement that we use now is not a facsimile of the original performance, but compensates for some deficiencies by hyper-realising other aspects. Somehow we accept the frequent camera switches that whisk us around the venue faster than the speed of light, without the sound changing at all.
Points accepted. BBC Proms sounds great especially on their "HD" internet radio site. I recently bought a CD from Deutsche Grammophon made from a 1960 analogue master of Dvorak New World Symphony. The CD used original image bit processing which is supposed to re-time the signals at each microphone to improve the ambiance of the recording. It sounded quite good to me although in places it sounded a bit artificial. This sort of technology needs improvement but it sounds promising to make concert recordings sound more realistic.
DeletePoints accepted. BBC Proms sounds great especially on their "HD" internet radio site. I recently bought a CD from Deutsche Grammophon made from a 1960 analogue master of Dvorak New World Symphony. The CD used original image bit processing which is supposed to re-time the signals at each microphone to improve the ambiance of the recording. It sounded quite good to me although in places it sounded a bit artificial. This sort of technology needs improvement but it sounds promising to make concert recordings sound more realistic.
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