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Critic's Corner Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry. |
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Critic's Corner Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry. |
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In Reply to: RE: Perhaps right, definitely partially wrong. posted by Dale Clark on October 31, 2017 at 03:34:24:
> > oDo audio equipment reviewers get their hearing checked on a regular basis? < <
Not that I know of. Many designers don't listen to their equipment. They either design by theory alone (and are proud of it), have others listen for them, or listen themselves.
I doubt hearing acuity has much to do with listening skill. If that were all it took, any child would be an excellent judge of sound quality. Instead it is more like learning to play a musical instrument - years of practice. And just as an elderly musician may not be able to hear as well as he did decades earlier, that does not mean that his a ability to play beautifully diminishes - usually the opposite - unless his fingers are riddled with arthritis or such.
> > Am I the only one who thinks MQA is way too complicated for what it needs to do? < <
No, the only reason it was made so deliberately complex was to obscure what it is really doing, which is not a lot. It's called "smoke and mirrors".
> > Have any mastering/ recording engineers ever gone on record with any MQA thoughts or comments < <
Almost all have gone on record as disliking it, usually greatly as MQA changes the sound that they have worked so hard to achieve. The exceptions are those who are paid to endorse it, the most famous of which is Bob Ludwig. To read what most think, including Brian Lucey, who has done many, many famous albums in the last decade and hes excellent ears and a fantastic monitoring system, refer to this thread:
https://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/1171365-mqa-discussion-denver-rmaf.html
> > Has there been a professional reviewer knock MQA? < <
Yes, the two most notable ones being Doug Schneider of SoundStage and Srajn Ebean of 6 Moons.
> > Why isn't their more focus in audio magazines on general recording quality? < <
There aren't many studios left. When the record labels falsely panicked because of Napster (the heaviest Napster users purchased the most CDs, and it largely acted as a way to attract interest to musical groups, just as radio used to), they gave away all their power to Apple. Apple got 30% of the profits and even worse made every single song available as a single for a flat 1/12th the price of the album. People could "cheery pick" the one or two or three best songs on an album for a very low price. In the days of vinyl, you could get one good song and one throwaway song for 1/4 the price of the whole album, and almost everybody bought the full albums.
> > Back in the day, eq's were a plenty in high end systems < <
No they were in a few semi-expensive systems. The only practical way to make a graphic EQ is to use an innput IC op-amp, one for each frequency band, and a summing IC op-amp. All of these dozens of op-amps degraded the sound significantly. Plus the darned things were far too complex. The only thing they were good for was correcting speaker response, but people didn't have the tools to do that.
Cello made a good sounding, fully discrete (no op-amps) unit in the '80s called the "Audio Palette" but it was $8000 and didn't sell well as it was not needed for a good pair of speakers. Instead it was advertised as being used to correct for poor recordings. But most people would rather listen than fiddle with dials for 20 minutes on each album, trying to get the best sound. EQs are best left in the recording studio.
Hope that helps.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Perhaps right, definitely partially wrong. - Charles Hansen 10/31/1710:52:05 10/31/17 (0)
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