[Gary Eickmeier]

There are lots and lots of discussions and descriptions of what we can hear
in the subjective press and in these halls of RAHE. Some of these
descriptions go into detail that is sometimes real, sometimes imagined,
leading to wild arguments about double blind listening tests vs subjectivism
and long experience. I think most of it misses the main points of genuine
"hard-nosed" listening and being honest with yourself about what you are
really hearing with your system. I mean, like, you want to think that your
speakers or whatever are better than they are, or that your ears and tastes
are so sophisticated that you can hear all of these marvelous aspects of
recorded sound - and you hope that the rest of us will believe you, that
either your hearing is so much better than ours, or your components are
"revealing" so much more due to their greater "accuracy."

So let's cut the bull**** and ask ourselves what CAN we really hear about
the original live sound and the reproduction, and thus what kind of
correlation can we draw between them to possibly see how far we have come,
or how far we can go. I struggle to come up with a catchy name for these
characteristics, but for now let's all them the Essential Elements of
Fidelity, or EEF.

THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF FIDELITY

OK, everybody stand up and shake your hands, wiggle you ears and noses,
whatever it takes to shake off all preconceptions of "inner detail," "phase
anomolies," "transient response," "togetherness," "toe tapping ability (my
personal favorite)," or any of the many other supposedly audible
characteristics of reproduced sound and let's start over again.

1. PHYSICAL SIZE - whether you're talking about the real thing or the
reproduction, we can hear the size of a room we are in. This is due to the
time between reflections, the characteristics of the reverberant tail, and
maybe some discrete echoes, which good spaces shouldn't have, but in any
case we can tell whether we are in a big or a small room. In the
reprocuction, one of the main problems is that the acoustics of the repro
room are superimposed on those of the recording, and we can sense that
fairly easily. This means, the larger you can design your room, the more
realistic it will sound, because it will be more like the real thing. It
also does away with some other pesky acoustical problems at the same time,
but right now I just want to point our that physical size is audible.

2. POWER - of course we can hear the enormous power of a symphony orchestra
or a big band, or even a smaller group. This means that the more power we
have in the reproduction, the closer to realism we will get. You can have
great fidelity in a boombox or a desktop computer speaker system, but it
will not have the POWER of the real thing unless and until you get some
speakers that can take any amount of power you can give them and get louder
without distorting, and amplifiers that have that power rather than the
audiophile fave raves of dainty 20W tube amps. Power is definitely audible.

3. WAVEFORM FIDELITY - I have been taken to task for calling it that,
because the actual shape of a waveform is not the point, but I can't think
of a term to describe what I mean by just simply the accuracy in the
electronic domain of the recorded signal transmission. This includes, of
course, frequency response, noise, and distortion. We struggled with these
for a long time in our audio history with LP records and magnetic tape. But
now with digital, we have essentially eliminated this characteristic from
being a problem in recording or reproduction. Still, it is one of the
factors that we can hear, so I list it for completeness.

4. SPATIAL CHARACTERISTICS - This is the biggie, the collective term for
the realistic reproduction of auditory perspective - the stereo effect and
all of the possible recording and reproduction systems and schemes. But for
now, all we need to point out is that we can hear the spatial
characteristics of live and reproduced sound, and those characteristics are
very important to both the enjoyment of live sound (and quality of a concert
hall) and the realism of the reproduction.

Now, not to impugn your intelligence or vast knowledge, if most of us think
we understand what this spatial stuff is all about, but to emphasize the
difference between the spatial and the temporal, the two aspects of a sound
field that get continually confused with each other, I would like to add an
illustration.

Your friend is a novice audiophile on his way back from Best Buy, where he
has purchased a new home theater system and learned all about hi fi from the
salesman. He sets up the speakers all up front, perhaps all in a row or all
on top of his "teevee" and he plays a movie or some music. It is very
accurate, plays all of the frequencies and the timings of the ambience that
were recorded, but it just doesn't sound realistic yet. So you go over and
show him how to correctly place all of the speakers to reconstruct a
semblance of the sound field that was recorded in his listening room. You
place the front speakers LCR for correct perspective of the frontal
soundstage, and you place the surround speakers back and to the sides, where
the ambience of the hall should come from. You have addressed the SPATIAL
characteristic, which has nothing to do with the temporal, but rather with
the directions form which the various sound fields arrive at the listener,
or exist in the listening room. I bring this up because of a frequent
question about my statements on getting the spatial more correct. They
always tell me that getting the spatial more correct can't work because you
can't make a small room sound like a concert hall. They have confused, or
"fused" the spatial and the temporal.

So I try to explain the difference but for now I only want to state that
these are the main characteristics of sound that we can hear and try to
reproduce. Do you have any other "biggies" that I have left out? I would be
fascinated.

So what is the state of the art of attempts to reproduce all of these and
how far can we go?

The physical size and waveform accuracy and power we can easily get a handle
on and improve, if for example we are in a small room and we understand that
limitation. The spatial stuff is the biggie and is where I say we need more
basic understanding of the process in order to get any further than we have
already come in 100 or so years.

The most basic and foolish mislead is thinking that good "stereo" comes from
the direct sound alone, and trying to kill the room reflections or design a
speaker that casts all of its sound toward your hapless ears. This
misconception, or mislead, is caused by the confusion between stereo and
binaural.

Stereo does not work like a "window into another acoustic." Rather, if you
think of it as a model of the original, in which your room is the performing
space and your speaker setup attempts to get the spatial closer to the
original, then you have a fighting chance for greater realism, but you also
inherit the understanding that it is not an "accuracy" process, and we can
never get all the way there. We cannot, in other words, totally get to the
goal of a "you are there" experience but rather more like a "they are here"
experience in which your room is the performing space and you design it for
good sound and arrange THE BIG THREE of speaker positioning, radiation
pattern, and room acoustics to get the model closer to the live situation.

So what can we hear? We can hear the spatial, spectral, and temporal
characteristics of our listening room and speaker situation, or layout,
superimposed on that of the recording, and we can hear the physical size,
power, and electronic accuracy of your system. When we play back any
recording, we CHANGE the spatial characteristics of the original to those of
our playback system and room.

That is slightly too bad, but once we understand the limitations of the
system and what can be achieved, we can stop worrying about false goals and
start concentrating on more fruitful paths that can lead to greater realism.

Gary Eickmeier