[Andrew Haley]

Audio_Empire wrote:
On Thursday, August 1, 2013 6:58:35 AM UTC-7, Andrew Haley wrote:
Audio_Empire wrote:

In article ,
Andrew Haley wrote:

Audio_Empire wrote:
In article ,
Andrew Haley wrote:

Audio_Empire wrote:

If you don't have a good idea what real music sounds like,
then you have no basis for judging whether a piece of
reproducing equipment is accurate or not.

That's your claim. You can repeat it as much as you like.

I find it remarkable that anybody would try to refute this claim,
especially since it's much more than that, it's actually not only
fact, but it should be self-evident fact!

I don't need to refute it because you've never provided any evidence
to support it.

If you knew anything about the subject, you would find my "claim" to
be self evident. I.E. It doesn't need "evidence" it just "is" like
the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

Haha, QED!

Your notion of "natural" versus "artificial" sound is nonsense. A
musical instrument is artifical, whether it is powered mechanically or
electrically. They all are acoustic; they all produce sound.

Who said anything about "artificial" sound.

You did:

Hopefully, you know what real music sounds like and don't judge
sound quality using solely artificial musical performances such as
"Dark Side of the Moon".

I said acoustic interments where the space they occupy is captured
as opposed to mostly electronic instruments where the instrument
itself is capture and then manipulated in a mixing console and
highly processed using various special effects devices. The sound is
hardly "artificial" in either case.

Of course it is. It's not natural, is it?

How can you judge things like soundstage and imaging from such
recordings that have have none?
If a recording has none, then you can't judge it.

And pop and rock, being multi-channel mono, has none. So using it to
judge playback performance gives the reviewer an incomplete picture
of the capabilities of the equipment at hand right off the
bat. Thanks for making my point for me.

No, I was simply replying to your tautology. If a recording has no
soundstage, then there is none to judge.

We're listening for pleasure, so we evaluate for pleasure. It
would be unwise not to listen to recordings of purely mechanical
instruments, particularly the voice, during loudspeaker evaluation.

On the contrary. I know a well respected reviewer whose wife is a
singer. He uses recordings of her voice as part of his loudspeaker
evaluation because he KNOWS the sound of his wife's voice so
well. Human voice can tell a lot about how a speaker performs,
especially if one knows the voice intimately.

Which is why it would be unwise not to use such recordings. You seem
to be agreeing, but then you say "On the contrary."

If magazine reviewers would follow that simple rule of thumb, they
would do their readers and the industry a great service.

There is no fundamental difference between recording the sound of a
band of musicians with electrical instruments and mechanical
instruments. Some engineers use spot mikes on every instrument of an
orchestra, then pan-pot the result. Some engineers make the most of
the room sound.

These are still preferable as an acoustic instrument has a known sound.

Not known to whom? This is the argument from ignorance, no more than
"I don't know what it sounds like, so no-one does."

And, of course, it makes sense to evaluate loudspeakers with the
recordings people will listen to.

I don't see why, especially if said recordings fail to exercise all aspects of
the reproduction, which, of course, is exactly where studio-bound recordings
fail.

All recordings fail to some extent: that's why you have to listen to
different recordings. The recordings are good for different things.
For example, if you want to know about clean, crisp bass response an
acoustic bass isn't going t do it; an electric bass is perfect.

As I've said here before, Floyd Toole's proposal for a standardized
evaluation of studio monitor loudspeakers and rooms makes sense.

That could well be. The danger there, of course, is standardization
often stagnates real development. And of course standardizing studio
monitor performance will do much more for pop and rock than it will
do for recording companies like Reference Recordings and Chesky.

Who, to a large extent, don't matter. What matters is the best music.

Andrew.