[Audio Empire]

On Tue, 3 May 2011 05:54:34 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

Edmund wrote:

What is true of these claims I cannot judge from here but it seems
like a
valid point of view. And since we not have a perfect sound system
yet, claims like " we cannot hear that..." are less valid because
that depends mostly of the sound system used but as said even the
best sound system isn't perfect.... yet. AS long we don't have a
perfect sound system, it is OK to improve every link
in the audio chain. Having said this, I have a hard time believing a
speaker cable or a interlink could ever improve reproduced sound.

Edmund

This last statement is much more interesting than the topic under
discussion. What do you mean, Edmund, that we don't have a perfect audio
system yet? What part are we missing? What can't we do with sound
reproduction?

Gary Eickmeier




What can't we do with sound reproduction? The two avowed goals of
High-Fidelity ever since the concept was first described in the 1930's -
bring the real sound of live, unamplified music into the listening room,
and/or conversely, virtually transport the listener to the venue where a
performance of unamplified music is taking place. Neither of these has been
realized - nor is it likely to be for a myriad of reasons. Firstly, room
acoustics are always going to overlay the acoustics of the recording, and
while sound treatment and DSP can overcome SOME of that, it cannot eliminate
all of the room sound. One would need an anechoic chamber, or sort of an
audio "holodeck", to do that. Secondly, no speaker can move enough air to
simulate a full symphony orchestra, even in a smallish room. The closest I
ever heard was the Wilson Audio "Grand SLAMM" speaker system of the mid
1980's and while the amount of sound it produced and the visceral impact it
had on all present in the room was impressive, it had other problems which
kept it from completing the illusion. One problem that speakers have that
real instruments don't is that to move a great deal of air, they need to have
a great deal of surface area. That surface area has high mass because for a
true piston-like action, the moving mass must be stiff. But antithetically,
for proper and realistic propagation, the sound source must be infinitely
small, and should be designed like a totally modal and phase coherent
pulsating sphere. That's a tall order - an impossibly tall order. While some
of these characteristics can be imparted over certain parts of the audio
spectrum, what is needed is a solution that covers the entire audio gamut,
and that doesn't exist.

As far as amplification is concerned, I think we can do that, today. It is
apparently fairly trivial (according to some of the audio design specialists
who contribute to this forum) to design amplifiers that have aggregate noise
and distortion figures below the threshold of hearing. The expense would come
at building a transparent amp large enough to move enough air (in our
theoretical perfect speaker) to realistically load an anechoic chamber.
Certainly, high-resolution digital with 24 or 32-bits should be transparent
enough to hold a virtually perfect copy of a performance, so from that
standpoint a source shouldn't be a big technical problem - except for one
thing. On the other end of the chain is another transducer, the microphone.
They are at least as flawed as the speaker system and for many of the same
reasons, only in reverse. No microphone comes even close to perfection and
even if it were sonically perfect, microphones simply simply don't hear the
way humans hear and although we use them as surrogate ears, they really
aren't.

I record using DSD, and while I cannot speak to the accuracy of the
microphones except in the broadest sense; that is to say, they aren't
anywhere near as perfect as they need be to fulfill the goal of
high-fidelity, I can tell you that the recordings made with the DSD recorder
are EXACTLY like the microphone feed. There is NO difference. That tells me
that the recordings are perfect copies of what comes out of the mixer.
Whether what comes out of the mixer is a perfect copy of what the ensemble
being recorded sounds like is a different story.

So, as you can see, while we can do some of it right, there are many
obstacles to perfect reproduction, most of which are physically improbable to
be able to ever overcome.