[Matthew B. Tepper]

appears to have caused the following
letters to be typed in :

It strikes me that adding room characteristics to an old recording
carries with it a fundamental longterm flaw. That is, presumably it is
being done because technology has improved and so we are able now to add
some depth to the recording (for whatever reason). Well, wouldn't it
stand to reason that technology will continue to improve, and therefore
wouldn't it be wiser to simply provide the recording in its fullest,
original detail (i.e., flat), so that said improved future technology
wouldn't have to also wrestle with undoing the (then) inferior tamperings
that we did?

In this case, I think I'd rather have the cleanest, untampered recording
possible, and I could add my own processing during playback if I really
want to hear it that way.

Full agreement here, which is one of the reasons I buy recordings on the
Symposium label.

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" he http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
***** War is Peace **** Freedom is Slavery **** Fox is News *****
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

[Matthew B. Tepper]

rje appears to have caused the following letters to be
typed in news:36c1925a-f4c4-409d-815e-eb7183a6b632
@f26g2000vbm.googlegroups.com:

If you want to hear what the acoustic process was capable of capturing,
listen to "The Edison Trials" on Marston Records. These vocal test
recordings were blessed by never having been played until they were
transferred several years ago. There are recordings from 1912 that sound
like electrical recordings with lots of room sound ambience. Amazing stuff.

The Mapleson Cylinders did not have the benefit of being hidden away unplayed
for many years, but I certainly get a feel for what the ambience in the old
brick brewery must have been like.

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" he http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
***** War is Peace **** Freedom is Slavery **** Fox is News *****
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

[Matthew B. Tepper]

"William Sommerwerck" appears to have caused
the following letters to be typed in
:

The "catch" of course is that some of these differences might represent
/real/ differences in the sound of their voices, rather than recording-
process errors. The effect would be to make Caruso sound more like
Bjoerling. Or whoever's recording was being used as a reference.

Which reminds me -- has it ever been revealed just how John Culshaw and his
team made Wolfgang Windgassen sound like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in that one
scene in "Götterdämmerung"?

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" he http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
***** War is Peace **** Freedom is Slavery **** Fox is News *****
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

[William Sommerwerck]

The output of the hall synthesizer goes to separate speakers -- it
does not pass through the main speakers. You also have full control
of it. The reason you don't like such processing is that you've probably
never heard it used correctly. When it's set up and adjusted correctly,
you aren't aware of the enhancement -- until it's shut off. I wish I
could
give you a demo.

Are you saying there's a way to listen to Nimbus' vocal transfers
without having to hear all the reverb? Please tell me more.

No offense, but where did you get that? I was talking only about hall
synthesizers.

Oddly, the best way to minimize the effect of the reverb is to play the
Nimbus recordings through a proper Ambisonc setup. As I said in an earlier
post, this moves the ambience to where it's "supposed" to come from, which
reduces the sense of excessive ambience. The same is true of SQ recordings.

The same should be true, to a lesser extent, when using a hall synthesizer.
As odd as it might seem, adding synthesized ambiences actually makes just
about any recording sound /less/ reverberant.

[Scott Dorsey]

Matthew B. Tepper wrote:
"William Sommerwerck" appears to have caused

The output of the hall synthesizer goes to separate speakers -- it does
not pass through the main speakers. You also have full control of it.
The reason you don't like such processing is that you've probably never
heard it used correctly. When it's set up and adjusted correctly, you
aren't aware of the enhancement -- until it's shut off. I wish I could
give you a demo.

Are you saying there's a way to listen to Nimbus' vocal transfers without
having to hear all the reverb? Please tell me more.

No, he's using a box that _adds_ rear channel reverb to existing recordings.

The "reverb" you hear in the Nimbus transfers is just the natural result of
playing a recording back through a big horn.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Kimba W Lion[_2_]]

(Scott Dorsey) wrote:

The "reverb" you hear in the Nimbus transfers is just the natural result of
playing a recording back through a big horn.

....in a large, 'live' room, with a microphone setup designed for surround
sound recording.

[Scott Dorsey]

In article ,
Kimba W Lion wrote:
(Scott Dorsey) wrote:

The "reverb" you hear in the Nimbus transfers is just the natural result of
playing a recording back through a big horn.

...in a large, 'live' room, with a microphone setup designed for surround
sound recording.

I think the room has a lot less to do with it than that horn.... there
are some later echoes from the room but there's so much short-time-delay
reflection.....
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[William Sommerwerck]

I think the room has a lot less to do with it than that horn...
there are some later echoes from the room but there's so
much short-time-delay reflection...

Is there? I tend to think of the wavefront as simply marching down and out
of the horn, without reflections.

[Bob Lombard]

"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...
I think the room has a lot less to do with it than that horn...
there are some later echoes from the room but there's so
much short-time-delay reflection...

Is there? I tend to think of the wavefront as simply marching down and out
of the horn, without reflections.


Ouch! My mind (such as it is) zigged to remembering the sound of the Klipsch
horns I once owned. Is there a relationship?

bl

[Scott Dorsey]

William Sommerwerck wrote:
I think the room has a lot less to do with it than that horn...
there are some later echoes from the room but there's so
much short-time-delay reflection...

Is there? I tend to think of the wavefront as simply marching down and out
of the horn, without reflections.

Unfortunately not, there are enormous numbers of internal reflections.
That's why the response of a typical horn system looks like a hedgehog.

And the more broadband you try and make it, the worse it gets. Horn
systems work really well for narrow bandwidths, not so good for full
audio bandwidth.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Scott Dorsey]

Bob Lombard wrote:
"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...
I think the room has a lot less to do with it than that horn...
there are some later echoes from the room but there's so
much short-time-delay reflection...

Is there? I tend to think of the wavefront as simply marching down and out
of the horn, without reflections.

Ouch! My mind (such as it is) zigged to remembering the sound of the Klipsch
horns I once owned. Is there a relationship?

Yes, however, the Klipsch designs have the advantage of another 20 years of
engineering, and some careful mathematics. On top of this, they are
2-way or more designs, to the bandwidth in each horn is comparatively limited
and that helps a lot. But the frequency response _is_ spiky as hell, and
those spikes move around and you move around the room.

Paul Klipsch was obsessed with the notion of getting the highest possible
efficiency from loudspeakers, because he believed that doing so would give
the lowest possible system distortion and cost by reducing the amount of
amplifier power required. In 1945, this was a very reasonable and wise
design philosophy. In 1985, however, amplifiers were a lot better and
it was no longer a good idea at all.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Doug McDonald[_4_]]

On 9/30/2010 11:27 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:


Paul Klipsch was obsessed with the notion of getting the highest possible
efficiency from loudspeakers, because he believed that doing so would give
the lowest possible system distortion and cost by reducing the amount of
amplifier power required. In 1945, this was a very reasonable and wise
design philosophy. In 1985, however, amplifiers were a lot better and
it was no longer a good idea at all.
--scott


He also believed that if a speaker were 100% efficient it would
have a perfectly flat frequency response.

I think that that would in fact be true if the speaker also had
a perfectly flat resistive impedance to match to the amplifier output.
But getting a flat impedance would be hard!

But a perfectly flat power response need not imply a proper
spatial distribution of all frequencies.

Doug McDonald

[Scott Dorsey]

Doug McDonald wrote:
On 9/30/2010 11:27 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Paul Klipsch was obsessed with the notion of getting the highest possible
efficiency from loudspeakers, because he believed that doing so would give
the lowest possible system distortion and cost by reducing the amount of
amplifier power required. In 1945, this was a very reasonable and wise
design philosophy. In 1985, however, amplifiers were a lot better and
it was no longer a good idea at all.

He also believed that if a speaker were 100% efficient it would
have a perfectly flat frequency response.

Well, that _is_ true. If it is converting _all_ electricity to pressure
it necessarily has to have a perfect frequency response.

But it can be 99% efficient and still have a pretty dreadful response.

I think that that would in fact be true if the speaker also had
a perfectly flat resistive impedance to match to the amplifier output.
But getting a flat impedance would be hard!

That's another different (but also substantial) issue.

But a perfectly flat power response need not imply a proper
spatial distribution of all frequencies.

That's also completely true, and that's really more of an issue with
modern real-world drivers than anything else.

In fact, the off-axis response problems of modern small horns used only
as HF drivers cause more sonic problems than any of the group delay issues
or compression distortion in most cases.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[William Sommerwerck]

He also believed that if a speaker were 100% efficient
it would have a perfectly flat frequency response.

Well, if it were 100% efficient at every frequency... grin

Some people also believe that a speaker's efficiency -- in the sense of how
little it has to move to reproduce sound at a particular level -- is related
to its transient response. I don't believe that's correct.

[Scott Dorsey]

William Sommerwerck wrote:

Some people also believe that a speaker's efficiency -- in the sense of how
little it has to move to reproduce sound at a particular level -- is related
to its transient response. I don't believe that's correct.

In 1945 that was also a good generalization to make; the smaller your moving
mass is and the better the magnetic coupling is, the better the transient
response and the better the efficiency will be.

This isn't 1945 any more and now we have a lot of very different driver
configurations that we didn't have back then.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Steve de Mena[_2_]]

On 9/29/10 2:47 PM, William Sommerwerck wrote:
The digital transfers of (most of) Caruso's recordings were individually
equalized so that the detailed tonal balance matched that of modern
electrical recordings of the same works. To my ears, the sound of
Caruso's
voice /did not/ match that of what I was used to hearing. It didn't
sound
like him, and I really didn't like the voice. Yet people who had heard
Caruso sing live proclaimed the new transfers as more-accurate
renditions.

The memory of how someone's voice sounded sixty years later is amazing
and probably not reliable.

Indeed. And as I think others posted about this earlier, Thomas
Stockham (for we are talking about his 1970s/early 80s RCA LPs)
was quoted -- as I recall -- as saying that he fed the sound of Jussi
Bjoerling's voice into his computer and instructed the computer to
deconstruct the sound of Caruso's acoustical recordings and
"reconstruct" the voice in Bjoerling's vocal image. Because he
(Stockham) thought their voices sounded similar, and he wanted
his computer to recreate Caruso's voice as it would have sounded
-- as sung by Jussi Bjoerling. In Stockham's mind.

I'm pretty sure Stockham did use Bjoerling recordings in his Caruso
restorations and wrote about it in an IEEE white paper:
T. Stockham, T. Cannon, and R. Ingebretsen, "Blind Deconvolution
Through Digital Signal Processing", Proc. IEEE, vol. 63, Apr. 1975

Steve

[PStamler]

Oh, as Colombo used to say, one other thing.

It ain't an RCA Victrola. RCA bought Victor in 1929, well after the
acoustical-recording era had ended for that label.

Peace,
Paul

[Arny Krueger]

"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message

William Sommerwerck wrote:
I think the room has a lot less to do with it than that
horn... there are some later echoes from the room but
there's so
much short-time-delay reflection...

Is there? I tend to think of the wavefront as simply
marching down and out of the horn, without reflections.

Unfortunately not, there are enormous numbers of internal
reflections. That's why the response of a typical horn
system looks like a hedgehog.

That's often the case, but not necessarily true in every situation.
Starting in the early 1990s people like Earl Geddes learned how to create a
diverse range of horn designs that were based on new solutions of the
acoustic wave equation. Up until then only a few such horn design families
had be found, and they had other limitations such as a lack of constant
directivity with frequency. Earlier Constant Directivity designs (e.g. some
designs by Keele) had used standing waves in the horn to obtain uniform
power response over their coverage pattern.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_speaker

[Scott Dorsey]

MiNe 109 wrote:
rje wrote:

If you want to hear what the acoustic process was capable of
capturing, listen to "The Edison Trials" on Marston Records. These
vocal test recordings were blessed by never having been played until
they were transferred several years ago. There are recordings from
1912 that sound like electrical recordings with lots of room sound
ambience. Amazing stuff.

Yes, I have these! They're not so great programming-wise, sort of
American Idol for European unknown opera singers doing short auditions,
but fascinating for the surprisingly good sound and the taste of what
"ordinary" singers were like.

I just bought this set on your recommendation, guys, and it's great! I
would love to know what processing went into it.

It's really interesting: the announcer, who is presumably well off to the
side, sounds very hollow and comb-filtered, while the performers who are
on-axis to the horn sound remarkably clean. There is some honk in there
but by acoustic record standards it's top notch.

I'd be curious if there was an attempt at notching out modes in the horn
by the folks doing the reissue. If so, I'd assume that the modes were
different off-axis and so the notching made the announcer's voice worse
even as it made the performer's voice better. If there wasn't any attempt
at notching, then the effect is strictly the result of poor off-axis response
of the horn.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[PStamler]

On Oct 5, 1:17*pm, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
MiNe 109 * wrote:

rje wrote:

If you want to hear what the acoustic process was capable of
capturing, listen to "The Edison Trials" on Marston Records. These
vocal test recordings were blessed by never having been played until
they were transferred several years ago. There are recordings from
1912 that sound like electrical recordings with lots of room sound
ambience. Amazing stuff.

Yes, I have these! They're not so great programming-wise, sort of
American Idol for European unknown opera singers doing short auditions,
but fascinating for the surprisingly good sound and the taste of what
"ordinary" singers were like.

I just bought this set on your recommendation, guys, and it's great! *I
would love to know what processing went into it.

It's really interesting: the announcer, who is presumably well off to the
side, sounds very hollow and comb-filtered, while the performers who are
on-axis to the horn sound remarkably clean. *There is some honk in there
but by acoustic record standards it's top notch.

I'd be curious if there was an attempt at notching out modes in the horn
by the folks doing the reissue. *If so, I'd assume that the modes were
different off-axis and so the notching made the announcer's voice worse
even as it made the performer's voice better. *If there wasn't any attempt
at notching, then the effect is strictly the result of poor off-axis response
of the horn.

And maybe some comb-filtering due to floor bounce.

Peace,
Paul

[Adrian Tuddenham[_2_]]

PStamler wrote:

On Oct 5, 1:17*pm, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
MiNe 109 * wrote:

rje wrote:

If you want to hear what the acoustic process was capable of
capturing, listen to "The Edison Trials" on Marston Records. These
vocal test recordings were blessed by never having been played until
they were transferred several years ago. There are recordings from
1912 that sound like electrical recordings with lots of room sound
ambience. Amazing stuff.

Yes, I have these! They're not so great programming-wise, sort of
American Idol for European unknown opera singers doing short auditions,
but fascinating for the surprisingly good sound and the taste of what
"ordinary" singers were like.

I just bought this set on your recommendation, guys, and it's great! *I
would love to know what processing went into it.

It's really interesting: the announcer, who is presumably well off to the
side, sounds very hollow and comb-filtered, while the performers who are
on-axis to the horn sound remarkably clean. *There is some honk in there
but by acoustic record standards it's top notch.

I'd be curious if there was an attempt at notching out modes in the horn
by the folks doing the reissue. *If so, I'd assume that the modes were
different off-axis and so the notching made the announcer's voice worse
even as it made the performer's voice better. *If there wasn't any attempt
at notching, then the effect is strictly the result of poor off-axis
response of the horn.

And maybe some comb-filtering due to floor bounce.

More likely wall-bounce. Most recording lathes were driven by a weight
motor which needed a four foot space beneath it for the weight to
decend. The horn could not be near the floor and any distant floor
reflection would be blocked by the performer's body.

I came across an interesting acoustic recording with real clog dancing,
which raises the interesting question of how it was recorded:

http://www.poppyrecords.co.uk/HXP107/hxp107.htm
Track 8

Having been a clog dancer myself, I can say that this sounds like the
geniune thing which might have to have been performed on a stone-faced
platform raised to horn height. (Believe it or not, clog dancing on the
top of a small stone pillar was a competitive sport)


--
~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk