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Topic: [OFF-TOPIC] From: Have you ever regretted ABXing? (84719) (Read 4910 times) previous topic - next topic
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[OFF-TOPIC] From: Have you ever regretted ABXing? (84719)

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Quote from: Josh358 on
Surprisingly, to me, anyway, Fielder found that the noise of a quiet home listening room was below the threshold of hearing, and that the noise in an average room wasn't far enough above it to mask noise in a recording:


There seems to be a critical missing paragraph in the Fielder paper. It might be titled "Noise in recording Environments".

The paper as presented usecontains an unstated assumption that appears to me to be something like: "The dynamic range requirement for musical playback is irrelevant to noise in the space where the music is recorded."

IME, the space in which the recording is made is actually the weakest link. Large spaces are very expensive to make really quiet, and then you go and spoil the whole thing by putting performers into it. If you add an audience, then its close micing or lotsa noise, mostly both.

I see the Fielder paper as being a justification for HDCD, which we now know failed in the marketplace. IME the reason why is that due to the relatively high levels of noise in spaces used for recording, HDCD like SACD and DVD-A is a solution looking for a problem. It appears that SACD and DVD-A have also failed or are in the later stages of failing in the marketplace.



Hmm. I always thought that "noise" (audience noise excluded, that is jsut noise) was what some would consider the sound of the concert hall and a desirable element in any recording of acoustic music in a concert hall.

[OFF-TOPIC] From: Have you ever regretted ABXing? (84719)

Reply #1 –
Quote from: analog scott on
Hmm. I always thought that "noise" (audience noise excluded, that is jsut noise) was what some would consider the sound of the concert hall and a desirable element in any recording of acoustic music in a concert hall.


Weren't you the guy who didn't understand the difference between distortion and noise in another [a href='index.php?showtopic=84208']thread[/a] and even thanked for the clarification in the end? The sound of a concert hall is its characteristic distortion, not its noise.

[OFF-TOPIC] From: Have you ever regretted ABXing? (84719)

Reply #2 –
Quote from: googlebot on
The sound of a concert hall is its characteristic distortion, not its noise.
Sure, that's the "acoustics" of a hall we hear when music is being performed. But concert halls also have a background noise which is even there when there is no-one in the hall. It's mostly rumble, caused by city noises, subways, airconditioning, ventilation etc. There are great differences between various halls and even the same hall doesn't have a constant background noise character.
Most classical recording engineers have the habit of recording a few minutes of room tone (aka atmo) of the empty hall. This can be useful for "silence" between movements during the editing process. At Philips Classics we had tapes with "silence" from many different halls in every edit room. Since microphone and pre-amp noise also contributes, it's not always easy to find a perfect match, but it'll do the job. Digital silence between movements is usually concidered bad practice.

[OFF-TOPIC] From: Have you ever regretted ABXing? (84719)

Reply #3 –
Quote from: googlebot on
Quote from: analog scott on
Hmm. I always thought that "noise" (audience noise excluded, that is jsut noise) was what some would consider the sound of the concert hall and a desirable element in any recording of acoustic music in a concert hall.


Weren't you the guy who didn't understand the difference between distortion and noise in another [a href='index.php?showtopic=84208']thread[/a] and even thanked for the clarification in the end?


Really? Is that what went down? Maybe my memory is shaky but as I recall it was an issue of terminology on quantization error. Not an understanding of what noise or distortion in general mean. Now we are talking concert hall sound so I don't really see a connection. But I think in the end of that little exchange it was JJ correcting Arny on the correct terminology. But I think everyone involved there understood what quantization error was regardless of any nit picks over terminology.


Quote from: googlebot on
The sound of a concert hall is its characteristic distortion, not its noise.



Really? So now we are calling concert hall sound "distortion?" I see this spiraling down into semantic hell. So do tell, as a distortion is hall sound something we as audio purists should strive to eliminate in the quest for accuracy? 

[OFF-TOPIC] From: Have you ever regretted ABXing? (84719)

Reply #4 –
Quote from: analog scott on
Really? So now we are calling concert hall sound "distortion?" I see this spiraling down into semantic hell. So do tell, as a distortion is hall sound something we as audio purists should strive to eliminate in the quest for accuracy? 


A dry recording of a concert within an anechoic chamber, with an almost complete lack of room reflections, would sound poor. But that's basically the content of the orchestra's first wave front. A concert hall adds all kinds of distortion to that, several generations of reflections both amplifying and canceling each other out and frequencies filtered by the physical properties of used construction material. In the end this all sounds much better than the first wave front alone, but it is nevertheless distortion. You don't have to hardwire the term 'distortion' to 'bad' in your brain, if that is the case.

[OFF-TOPIC] From: Have you ever regretted ABXing? (84719)

Reply #5 –
Quote from: analog scott on
Really? So now we are calling concert hall sound "distortion?"


No, what concert halls do to the sound of music is both noise and distortion.

If you're looking for a generally agreed-upon example of "euphonic noise and distortion" then what good concert halls do might be it.

I think that there is pretty much general agreement among those who have heard it  that music that has been recorded in an anechoic chamber with measurement mics and played back with minimal audible changes is undesirable or at least less desirable than the same music played in an appropriate venue.

Note that playing certain kinds of music in concert halls can be pretty ugly. There has to be be some matching of genre and venue.

[OFF-TOPIC] From: Have you ever regretted ABXing? (84719)

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Quote from: analog scott on
Really? So now we are calling concert hall sound "distortion?"


No, what concert halls do to the sound of music is both noise and distortion.

If you're looking for a generally agreed-upon example of "euphonic noise and distortion" then what good concert halls do might be it.

I think that there is pretty much general agreement among those who have heard it  that music that has been recorded in an anechoic chamber with measurement mics and played back with minimal audible changes is undesirable or at least less desirable than the same music played in an appropriate venue.

Note that playing certain kinds of music in concert halls can be pretty ugly. There has to be be some matching of genre and venue.



*This is a nit pick.* But I think we are getting into terminology issues here and they can lead to confusion. "Noise" in a concert hall is just that, noise. Whether it comes from traffic, airconditioning systems or people coughing and shuffling. That is noise. It is largely undesireable. But the Hall "sound" that being it's acoustic properties is not distortion in the same way as we talk about distortion in audio. It is an intrinsic part of the sound. Just take a look at any paper on concert hall acoustics. here are some examples.
http://www.concerthalls.unomaha.edu/
http://www.anstendig.org/Acoustics.html
http://www.akutek.info/Papers/JH_SmallHalls_Strength.pdf
http://www.akutek.info/Papers/DG_How_Loud.pdf

And there are many other papers on concert hall acoustics here
http://akutek.info/index_files/papers.htm

No where in any of the papers is the word "distortion" even mentioned. Not even in papers that talk about correcting the sound of concert halls. Concert hall sound in those circles is not considered a form of distortion. It is simple part of the concert sound. The some total of the hall and the musicians palying their instruments in that hall. IMO it is a mistake to refer to concert hall sound as distortion. Clearly that doesn't happen when acousticians talk about it.

If you want to talk about room distortion then let's talk about the playback room. That "sound" is pure distortion.

[OFF-TOPIC] From: Have you ever regretted ABXing? (84719)

Reply #7 –
Quote from: analog scott on
Clearly that doesn't happen when acousticians talk about it.


When you provide references, make sure they support your point. The first link is rather amateurish, so I skipped it. The second already contains 9 hits of the term "distort".

Quote from: analog scott on
It is an intrinsic part of the sound.


Now you are spacing out into esoteric BS again.

[OFF-TOPIC] From: Have you ever regretted ABXing? (84719)

Reply #8 –
Quote from: googlebot on
Quote from: analog scott on
Clearly that doesn't happen when acousticians talk about it.


When you provide references, make sure they support your point. The first link is rather amateurish, so I skipped it. The second already contains 9 hits of the term "distort".

Quote from: analog scott on
It is an intrinsic part of the sound.


Now you are spacing out into esoteric BS again.



did you read the papers or just do a search for the word and not look at the context in which it is used?

[OFF-TOPIC] From: Have you ever regretted ABXing? (84719)

Reply #9 –
Scott, a hall's sound is nothing mythically intrinsic. You can reduce all absorptions and reflections (or reverberation) at a specific position within a hall to a mathematical function*. Depending on your perspective this function applied to an original signal results in a distorted signal. A person wanting to capture exactly that kind of distortion (from a signal theoretic point of view) usually doesn't call this distortion which doesn't change the fact that it is, with regard to the original signal.

And yes, the text explicitly calls components as reflections and reverberation, which largely make up the sound of a hall, "distortion".

* Not necessarily linear and excluding uncorrelated noise, which is audible only during silence and doesn't alter any other qualities of an actual signal.
 

[OFF-TOPIC] From: Have you ever regretted ABXing? (84719)

Reply #10 –
Somewhere around 30 posts ago this thread broke. Perhaps the title should be changed to "Have you ever regretted sitting in a concert hall?" (i know i have).

It's gone off topic a bit. Would a mod mind splitting it off into anther thread?
If the original posts points have gone dull, that's fine.
--------------------------
Have you ever experienced Buyers Remorse from ABXing something?


edit: "mod" not "mid". I hope we don't have mids running this place.
Music lover and recovering high end audiophile