16-Jul-2020, 00:40
@Confused ,
If one man's meat is another man's poison then one man's accurate is another's inaccurate.
I know an audiophile who once told me that he knows what music sounds like and that what it sounds like is what he hears when he goes to a concert in a particular hall and sits in a particular part of that hall. I remember once standing in a very small empty hall used for social gatherings with a friend who played Irish music on a tin flute. He propped up some music on a surface near a wall and played a piece while I stood a few feet away and listened. I then asked him to stand in the middle of the hall and play while I stood a bit further away towards the middle and listened. The sound was distinctly different to what I heard when we were closer to the wall but both sounded like music. It would be ridiculous to suggest that one of those sounds was more accurate than the other or that one sounded like music and the other didn't. The room acoustics certainly changed the sound I heard when we changed locations but it didn't make one more musical than the other, even if one sounded a bit warmer and the other a bit brighter.
Years ago, on a different system than my current system, I once played a recording of a friend to him and asked if he thought the sound I was getting was a good representation of the sound of his clarinet and he said "yes". He didn't say it was perfect and, in any event, I know from my own experience of listening to my guitar while I was playing it and listening to the sound of my guitar while someone else was playing it that the sound musicians associate with their instrument isn't quite the sound as someone in the audience hears that instrument, even allowing for differences in player technique. Overall I took his "yes" as an indication that I was getting "reasonably accurate" sound in some sense of the word "accurate" but what we were hearing would not have been an accurate reproduction of the signal nor of what the recording engineer heard.
Does the term "accurate" really define the goal if a musician can listen to a recording of a performance he made and say it sounds like what he played yet measurements show that the sound reaching his ears when he listened to the recording was different in significant ways to the signal on the recording? I can assure you that room acoustics do affect the sound in significant ways, especially at bass frequencies where room modes can change the amplitude of the sound by many dB producing a result that no one would ever call an accurate reproduction of the signal.
Accuracy sounds as if it offers us an objective standard to assess our systems against but I think in the end it turns out to be just as subjective as any other goal we assess our systems against. I think it's informative that 2 people with differing tastes for the sound their systems deliver can go to a live concert, sit side by side, and at the end share the same opinion about how good or bad the performance was, accept that what they were hearing was the sound of the instruments and voices, separate that sound from the effects of the environment that modified those sounds in significant ways and agree about what those affects were yet if the same 2 people sat down together to listen to a recording, at the end you can find them arguing about whether the piano sounded like a piano or the singer sounded like themself, and ignore the effect of the room on what they heard. Not only are they likely to attribute the good and bad aspects of the sound of the instruments and voices to the system, they may even disagree about whether a particular voice or instrument sounded like that voice or instrument should sound. We obviously don't judge accuracy the same way when listening to a live performance as we do when listening to a recording and that tells me that there's a lot less objectivity to our concept of accuracy than many like to believe.
If one man's meat is another man's poison then one man's accurate is another's inaccurate.
I know an audiophile who once told me that he knows what music sounds like and that what it sounds like is what he hears when he goes to a concert in a particular hall and sits in a particular part of that hall. I remember once standing in a very small empty hall used for social gatherings with a friend who played Irish music on a tin flute. He propped up some music on a surface near a wall and played a piece while I stood a few feet away and listened. I then asked him to stand in the middle of the hall and play while I stood a bit further away towards the middle and listened. The sound was distinctly different to what I heard when we were closer to the wall but both sounded like music. It would be ridiculous to suggest that one of those sounds was more accurate than the other or that one sounded like music and the other didn't. The room acoustics certainly changed the sound I heard when we changed locations but it didn't make one more musical than the other, even if one sounded a bit warmer and the other a bit brighter.
Years ago, on a different system than my current system, I once played a recording of a friend to him and asked if he thought the sound I was getting was a good representation of the sound of his clarinet and he said "yes". He didn't say it was perfect and, in any event, I know from my own experience of listening to my guitar while I was playing it and listening to the sound of my guitar while someone else was playing it that the sound musicians associate with their instrument isn't quite the sound as someone in the audience hears that instrument, even allowing for differences in player technique. Overall I took his "yes" as an indication that I was getting "reasonably accurate" sound in some sense of the word "accurate" but what we were hearing would not have been an accurate reproduction of the signal nor of what the recording engineer heard.
Does the term "accurate" really define the goal if a musician can listen to a recording of a performance he made and say it sounds like what he played yet measurements show that the sound reaching his ears when he listened to the recording was different in significant ways to the signal on the recording? I can assure you that room acoustics do affect the sound in significant ways, especially at bass frequencies where room modes can change the amplitude of the sound by many dB producing a result that no one would ever call an accurate reproduction of the signal.
Accuracy sounds as if it offers us an objective standard to assess our systems against but I think in the end it turns out to be just as subjective as any other goal we assess our systems against. I think it's informative that 2 people with differing tastes for the sound their systems deliver can go to a live concert, sit side by side, and at the end share the same opinion about how good or bad the performance was, accept that what they were hearing was the sound of the instruments and voices, separate that sound from the effects of the environment that modified those sounds in significant ways and agree about what those affects were yet if the same 2 people sat down together to listen to a recording, at the end you can find them arguing about whether the piano sounded like a piano or the singer sounded like themself, and ignore the effect of the room on what they heard. Not only are they likely to attribute the good and bad aspects of the sound of the instruments and voices to the system, they may even disagree about whether a particular voice or instrument sounded like that voice or instrument should sound. We obviously don't judge accuracy the same way when listening to a live performance as we do when listening to a recording and that tells me that there's a lot less objectivity to our concept of accuracy than many like to believe.
Roon Nucleus+, Devilalet Expert 140 Pro CI, Focal Sopra 2, PS Audio P12, Keces P8 LPS, Uptone Audio EtherREGEN with optical fibre link to my router, Shunyata Alpha NR and Sigma NR power cables, Shunyata Sigma ethernet cables, Shunyata Alpha V2 speaker cables, Grand Prix Audio Monaco rack, RealTRAPS acoustic treatment.
Brisbane, Qld, Australia
