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Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics. |
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Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics. |
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In Reply to: RE: You're on to something... posted by Don Till on October 20, 2009 at 21:33:38:
"Few people have actually compared their systems to live music in real time. Even so, such comparisons are not directly relevant to how a system will perform at home, which is likely acoustically much different from the original recording or recording venue."
When it comes to proponents of the live reference it is exactly that truth which they attempt to minimize. It goes far beyond simply being a trained listener.
In the past I have done this with excellent results. I was using a single piano (Steinway B) and playing back in the same room in which the recording was made. There was no significant difference in sound quality between the live recording and the playback. The principle difference was that the sound came from a different place (piano vs. center of speakers). Apart from that, NADA, but it did take quite a few rounds of tweaking microphone position, speaker position, gain and polarity to get this result.
This quality of playback can be expected on small ensembles that would fit comfortably in one's living room. At the time I had a large space big enough for the piano and perhaps one or two other instruments. I was using AKG C451E cardioid microphones and Snell A/III speakers. I had more than enough headroom to reproduce the music played (Beethoven, Bach and Brahms).
Anyone using live references needs to have a tremendous amount of experience attending live concerts by a range of musical groups in a variety of venues and seating positions. There is simply too much variation from concert to concert, hall to hall and seat to seat to get an adequate perspective from a small experience set. Similarly, using a collection of reference recordings to calibrate a playback system requires dozens of recordings. Failure to understand this will result in judgments which do not translate well to other recordings. One reason for this is that there can be corresponding "errors" in record and playback that completely offset. As a simple example, if one tunes the system to sound good on LPs recorded with Columbia equalization it will not sound right on LPs recorded with RIAA equalization, and conversely.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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