Modern Reviewing Practices In Audio Rags Have Become Useless
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:
I realize that the magazines like 'Stereophile' et al have to
try to cater to todays equipment buyers in order to remain
"relevant" with their readers, but what is going on in audio
reviewing today is akin to somebody testing an asphalt paving
machine using using salt-water taffy instead of asphalt. The
results obtained from such a test have absolutely no bearing
on how the paving machine will perform when paving roads with
hot asphalt! Likewise a speaker review (for instance) using
studio recorded pop music bears little or no relation to how
that speaker system might perform with REAL, live acoustical
music and anybody who thinks that it does, is deluded.
So what? I've never seen any evidence that great-sounding
speakers don't sound great with all kinds of music. Also, it
makes sense to listen to speakers playing the kind of music you
know well.
That's incorrect for a start. I repeat. 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.
Those of us who have been listening to The Dark Side Of The Moon
for the last forty years continue to be delighted when a system
reveals some subtle detail we hadn't heard before. That's
priceless.
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".
All music is artificial, with the possible exception of birdsong.
Now you're being purposely obtuse as I'm more than reasonably sure that
you know exactly what I mean.
I do know what you mean, and I believe it's fundamentally incorrect.
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. 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.
I do know what real music sounds like and I do judge sound quality
using artificial musical performances such as Dark Side of the Moon.
It's an immaculate piece of work, with a great deal of attention paid
to superb sound. I also listen to purely acoustic music, to the
extent that recordings can be purely anything.
You seem to be the one using the term "artificial", not me.
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.
"There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind
.... the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply
that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it's successful; if it
doesn't it has failed."
I just don't think understand, possible on purpose. I say LISTEN to
what you like, but EVALUATE for publication using the best
acoustical source material you can find.
That doesn't make sense.
It makes perfect sense. use the program material that DOES THE JOB.
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.
However, such recordings are not often the
best tests of bass response. I've certainly heard well-regarded
speakers that fail miserably when pushed hard with bass-heavy
recordings.
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.
But, you are right. Multi-miked and multi-track (as in more than two) acoustic
instrument recordings are not ideal.
But people are going to listen to the *best music*, not the *best-
recorded music*. Of course.
Doesn't matter to me what they "listen" to, it's what they review components
for publication with that concerns me.
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.
The
era of hi-fi buffs listening to special "hi-fi" recordings that no-one
else ever bought is over, and not before time.
Too bad. it means that the whole hobby is now running open-loop with
no
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.
Once
we have that, we can replicate it in the home. He also talks about
the correlation between loudspeaker measurements and listener
preference. He points out that much about what makes loudspeakers and
rooms sound good is known, but is not much used by the industry:
"... much seems to have been proved beyond reasonable doubt. Most of
the evidence fits together in a logical pattern, and although not
simple, it is eminently comprehensible."
Agreed.
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