[Arny Krueger]

"Dave Platt" wrote in message

In article ,
Richard Crowley wrote:

Vinyl *adds* realism to anything. Magic it
may be but how and why they don't care.

Nominated for r.a.t ridiculous statement of the year.

"Adds realism"? Do they read this stuff before posting
it? Or are they using a different definintion of "real"
than the rest of us?

I think that a valid distinction can be made between
"accuracy" (a term I use here to denote an objective
relationship between source and playback) and "realism"
(which term I use to indicate a _subjective_ perception).

It's well known, for example, that adding some amount of
delayed, out-of-phase signal components to a piece of
music can create a sense of "air" or "ambience" that
makes the playback seem more like listening to the music
as it might be when played in a live venue.

Yes, the well-known phasiness, which is actually not usually characteristic
of a high quality live venue such as a symphony hall.

Multi-channel
playback systems such as the venerable Dynaquad, or the
various digital-delay ambience-synthesis systems such as
Yamaha and a/d/s have made, have been used to good
advantage for this for decades.

Again, many listeners observe that many recordings give strong directional
cues that actually don't exist in a quality live venue.

In particular, multi-miked studio recordings are often
largely or completely free of realistic performance-room
ambience, and the injection of some (artificial) delayed
and phase-incoherent components into the music can "open
up" such recordings and make them sound more pleasant to
many listeners.

Counterpoint - multi-miced recordings can sound "phasey" due to leakage
between the mics, while coincident-mic minimla-miced recordings tend to
create sound fields that implement "intensity stereo" that have vastly
reduced phase differences between the channels.




Such modification of the signal is artifical. The
resulting signal is less accurate (in the objective
sense). It may, on the other hand, be more "realistic",
in the sense that the music sounds more like it might if
the musicians were actually present in the listening
room, performing the music in a real live venue.

I believe that a very similar phenomenon can and does
occur with LP playback. There are a couple of physical
mechanisms which can cause an LP playback to include
delayed, non-phase-coherent copies of the music signal
which were not present in the original recording (master
tape, direct-to-disk signal, or whatever). Acoustic
feedback to the LP, from the music playing from the
speakers, is one such... this will create delayed sound
on the order of tens of milliseconds. Direct "ringing"
of sound impulses in the vinyl LP itself is another...
sound waves radiate outwards in the platter from the
point of contact of the stylus (action/reaction) and ring
around the platter in various ways.

It's probably not a coincidence that those turntables
which had/have a reputation for "extracting" the most
"air" and "ambience" from an LP recording, are those
which tended to use hard mats, or discrete multi-point
support systems for the LP itself (and thus have a
minimal amount of physical damping of the platter). The
Linn turntable was perhaps the exemplar of this class.
Turntables which use soft, sticky, well-damped platter
mats (e.g. the original Oracle) had a reputation for
sounding more "dry".

These delayed-signal artifacts of the LP playback process
(created through purely mechanical mechanisms rather than
through digital delay) are, once again, inaccuracies
almost by definition. However, I believe that they can
make many recordings sound more subjectively pleasant and
"realistic" than otherwise.