On the subject of HiFi

[Nick]

Yep, it was the distinction that a foot operated beater was required was the part that I was commenting on.

[vinylnvalves]

My lad would tell me off for calling it a kick drum... it’s a bass drum. Kick drums are what they are known as by the roadies, so they know where to put the microphone

[steve s]

This is getting interesting
I hear loads of people saying big solid state amps are better for the low end.
All I tend to hear, with a few exceptions, is a slowed down, thicked up, slightly bloated sound, with suppressed leading edges.

And coupled with that dsp clearly makes things worse to my ears
At the last wam show I remember a dealer telling me his dsp did not have an effect on the sound, I made a point of visiting his room, I decided he had different standards to me !
2d sound, slowed transients and noticeably less realistic than many of the rooms... it may well have been other things in the system but I don't think I've heard a really good system that uses it.

[IslandPink]

Mark, you must be Britain’s answer to the bionic man, did you have an ear transplant in your youth .

Well when i was at school..... we had an orchestra and a swing band. I played clarinet in both. Did that affect anything, maybe my training in evaluating the mids and upper frequencies best ?
I know Ed plays DB ... and DtB plays B ... does it affect where you gravitate to in hearing & listening, if it's early in life ?
I know that DtB is forensic about spotting subtle timing shifts and tricks in music.

[simon]

Something that has struck me over the years on this forum is that the guys that play instruments often talk about music in a very different way than I relate to it. It's like a different language at times.

I once read something that suggested the better the musician the less "help" you need from hi fi. I'm not sure that's universally true as there are musicians here interested in high levels of reproduction, but what did stick with me was the supposition that a classically trained musician performing at the highest level i.e. a symphony orchestra could get a buzz from simply reading a score such was their knowledge and understanding of what it represented. OTOH those that aren't musicians need more help.

Not sure any of that means anything really, but I do remember Dave saying to me at an Owston some years ago "that sounds like a detuned E string to me" and I wasn't sure if there was even a bass guitar...

[Nick]

but what did stick with me was the supposition that a classically trained musician performing at the highest level i.e. a symphony orchestra could get a buzz from simply reading a score such was their knowledge and understanding of what it represented.

If you contrast that to reading a book against watching a film its not so surprising.

[Ali Tait]

I am becoming increasingly convinced that Mark doesn't have the same hobby as me. I'm also feeling that he doesn't get as much enjoyment from listening to music as I do....

That's an interesting leap in logic..
You may be correct but at least i suspect you listen to more music than i do.
Please note that i do spend quite a bit of time watching music clips and LPs on Youtube in the evenings, so i don't need to listen to everything at high quality on the main system to get pleasure.
It's notable that when I've had depression to any significant extent ( hopefully not too much in the future ) , then I lose all interest in music.

I would like to listen to some music while working, like a lot of people do, but I've found that I lose too much concentration on the design work, I need all of my brain cells on the design job these days.

I do the same Mark (re. YouTube). Don’t know if you listen through your system, I find a lot of surprisingly good sounding stuff on there.

[andrew Ivimey]

So what is the 'quality' of YouTube?

It can sound very good indeed which improves with headphones to plugged into a hifi system.

[pre65]

So what is the 'quality' of YouTube?

It can sound very good indeed which improves with headphones to plugged into a hifi system.

Reasonable quality headphones make a great improvement in my opinion.

[IslandPink]

This is where the words come into it because i would use the word clean to describe what i mean. So for me the cleaner it sounds the more transparent it is to nick.
And the cleaner (me), more transparent (nick) it is, more of tonal colour (mark) is revealed. I also find the cleaner (me) it is the more cohesive (steve) it sounds.

I don't think there are many cross purposes between us.

Well said - I agree, I also understand the word 'clean' as being transparency.
I would only say that the 'cohesive' bit, for me, requires some decent timing, ie. reduced phase shifts lower down.

[IslandPink]

"I am becoming increasingly convinced that Mark doesn't have the same hobby as me"

"The bottom line for me, again, is that we're all in it for different reasons and we all value different things, and we all hear different things"

Ed, I feel that we are often at cross-purposes on music & audio aims.
However, you are a bit coy about the details.
In what ways are we so far apart - I am interested to know ?

[ed]

Ed, I feel that we are often at cross-purposes on music & audio aims.
However, you are a bit coy about the details.
In what ways are we so far apart - I am interested to know ?

I don’t think I can defend my remarks with anything detailed, it’s more of a general feeling.

Based on:
You have a thread which is nearly 190 pages long with 2800 posts. Much of this thread relates to you chasing perceived imperfections in the presented sound. There are similar discussions on other threads.

It is an example, to me, of somebody chasing very specific technical issues in the kit. Sometimes involving very narrow frequency ranges. Personally, I am not capable of hearing some/most of the things you describe in that thread. Either as a consequence of, or out of indifference, I don’t pursue this hardware related quest, but just tap my feet and get lost in the music.

If I’m coming from the musician’s point of view I’m happy to hear what I think the player was trying to do. In respect to the recording side I try very hard to place the instruments in a space where they don’t interfere with each other. As to what the instruments themselves really sound like I can’t comment if they sound real unless it’s my own recordings. Within limits I don’t believe many can.

So, to summarise, from my point of view, I can’t help feeling that you are disappointed with a lot of your listening because you write about trying to improve some aspect of the delivery. It’s very personal and I can only imagine/conclude that we listen to different things, Ergo we are different in what is important to us.

[Ant]

This is where the words come into it because i would use the word clean to describe what i mean. So for me the cleaner it sounds the more transparent it is to nick.
And the cleaner (me), more transparent (nick) it is, more of tonal colour (mark) is revealed. I also find the cleaner (me) it is the more cohesive (steve) it sounds.

I don't think there are many cross purposes between us.

Well said - I agree, I also understand the word 'clean' as being transparency.
I would only say that the 'cohesive' bit, for me, requires some decent timing, ie. reduced phase shifts lower down.

The phase shift bit is the bit that gets me, the reason being is that im not sure what that phase shift sounds like, i.e. the effect that it has towards the bottom end. I think with the faital metronomes it showed up as a subtle blurring at or around the crossover point between the 6fe100 and the sb acoustics tweeter that went pretty low and was able to be crossed over at around 3k ish. It was as if that bit of the window had a perfectly square bit of dirt on it....
The 6fe100 had to have an inductor on it because the response was horrible at the top of its range with breakup. I presume that the inductor and cap i used to form the crossover was causing a phase shift in the 'voice band' for want of a better term.
If one could have a 3 way speaker with a bass driver covering up to say 200hz, a mid covering there to say 7k and a tweeter for the top like say a yamaha ns10000, and push the crossover points out of the range where most of the music is, having one driver covering that range, would that be a workaround for the phase issue? To push the phase change away from where it is noticable or have i got that idea arse about face?

[Nick]

The only direct example of phase I have is the RIAA one in the phono. That was a global effect in that the overall tempo of the music seemed to drag. It clearly wasn't actually slower, but there was no insistence in the rhythm when there should have been.

[vinylnvalves]

As I have mentioned before, my phase related light bulb, assuming it wasn't a con by Linn, was when they were going to make their dsp software available to all for a price , of course.

They played a piece of music with conventional crossovers, which the phase changes you expect from the passive components, which most DSP's replicated with their filters. They then changed to a linear phase set of crossovers using FIR's. There was a marked difference, space and depth improvements were marked. I have heard a similar trait with the Grimm LS1's.
Whether it was smoke and mirrors by Linn, I cannot say. There active system which uses cheap d class amps is well out of my price range to consider, they never end sold the system without their speakers in the end.

What Ant is saying about trying to push the crossovers outside of the critical range is what I am trying to do. However as we know harmonics of the drums well go well into the kHz and are still needed to paint the correct picture, so the range may be bigger than we think. The "swan song" speakers are getting around the challenge of a small midrange driver not having the presence by increasing the sd by multiple drivers.
The alternative approach maybe would be where to put the crossover in the critical range and do it properly, concentric drivers.
As with all this using drivers which are linear an octave or two either side of where they are being used is key. This is where DSP gets a bad reputation, when a poor driver with an awful response is tamed with convolutes. They may measure well but don't sound good.
Scott will probably disagree- suggesting clever passive crossovers can make a silk purse out of the proverbial pigs ear.