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May 4, 2009 - 11:04am
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When Bad is Good - Or Is It?
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Very interesting post Pete. I can offer one guess:
Yes, listeners will usually choose a brighter sound as being "better" unless it was already too bright to begin with. Eddie Ciletti writes a tech column for Mix magazine, and he once put forth a theory that makes a lot of sense to me. Eddie said that LP cutting heads are very expensive, and can burn out if fed too much HF energy. So mastering engineers routinely insert a limiter that compresses only the highest frequencies to prevent damage. When the limiter kicks in it can add a glassy sheen to music, perhaps in a way that's more pleasing and less harsh than simple EQ boost.
--Ethan
Everything in audio is a trade off. Presenting just one small portion of "this vs. that" is not offering a fair comparison of your chosen alternatives.
And why stretch back to AR3a's? Is anyone still using a pair of 3a's? Is anyone still building a speaker similar to the 3a? Is cabinet and grill diffraction not a well known issue at this time? What's your point with this one?
As in the "dynamic range" thread, the solution is simple, we all pick our distortions and build a system that minimizes the worst and compliments the best of each selection.
Do you suppose starting yet another thread that has the premise of "this is better than that" is going to move the discussion forward in any way? If so, how? As with jj, what are you trying to prove with this thread? What's your point? Haven't we been here a hundred times before?
You don't understand open discusssion, please leave the thread.
Just as a note, nonlinearities are not quite that simple. If you impose a nonlinearity, and then do ANYTHING to the signal beyond a known gain, (i.e. frequency shaping, phase shift, etc) of a linear nature, then you can not reverse the nonlinearity without first reversing the linear system.
Just as a note.
Otherwise there would be many things one could do for speakers that would be really great, and not involve Volterra filtering and other such headaches.
In what way does this thread argue that "this is better than that"?
You are projecting your own prejudices into this discussion, and as a result you appear to be harrassing any individual who dares to raise a technical issue.
When the title of the thread is "When Bad is Good".
I assume you can get that, "good" = "better" while "bad" = "technically inferior". The premise of the thread seems to be LP's are flawed while digital is "nearly ideal". Solid state has "better specs ... Lower distortion, flatter frequency response, better damping factor" than tube amps. And I still dont understand why anyone would discuss "vintage AR's" or diffraction at this time but they have (had?) problems too. Obviously, one thing has been presented as superior while another has been shown by limited example to be inferior.
Therefore, another thread that argues "this is better than that". We've done this a hundred times before. You weren't here yet, jj, but, trust me, we have. A few will argue specs above all else and maybe a few will say "not so fast" and this thread will go back and forth and nothing will be accomplished other than an agenda. Now that a fine fellow like yourself has shown up here we can guess at your contribution since you've already started it. Where's Xeno? He's so good at telling us what someone else meant.
If that's not the case, that this is another "this is better than that" thread, then that's what I've asked to be explained so we can avoid all of that.
What's the point?
That shouldn't be any more difficult to answer than the question regarding the distortion components of a typical SET amplifier.
Rather than accuse someone of "picking arguments", harrassing or not understanding open discussion, why not just answer my questions? If I'm satisfied with the answers, then I'll decide whether to stay or go.
It seems to me you would be advancing the thread to make these things clear. Unless, of course, you really didn't want a discussion.
All you need to do is answer a few questions. Is that good or bad for the thread?
Endlessly fascinating topic.
As I get older, I wonder how many audiophiles still hold the sound of live music as their paradigm.
I mention that because some of the 'inferior' products that are paradoxically popular often seem to come with a descriptor that someone thinks they sound more like how live music sounds than 'better measuring' alternatives.
There probably are people, as you describe, who have come to prefer certain sonic signatures from gear, but using a live comparitor would argue against the notion that people have developed a certain fondness or 'habit' for preferring certain distortions.
Just for conversation sake, an example of why I still love vinyl is that it does something 'around' (for lack a better term) the sound of the voice that I find more convincing than I do for certain other recorded media. All recorded sound fails at sounding truly real, but my analogy for this effect on vinyl would be "bass relief" vs and analogy for CD's sound as more 'lithograph.'
There just seems to be a little something there that isn't present on most digital media.
There was an article about younger people actually preferring MP3 sound to higher rez media because that's what people have become accustomed to listening to - I find this disappointing purely because it shows so many people whose musical reference is entirely within the realm of listening to recorded music and not hearing the obvious flaws that are notable when one considers a live reference.
Maybe we need to bring back the 'young listeners' programs to the schools!
Hope that wasn't too flame like!
Absolutely!
Indeed. I have also found youngsters who prefer MP3.
That is, UNTIL they hear the good stuff for a while.
Then, whoops
Ah, yet more common ground!
So, the fact that I routinely say "SNR is like the Earth in the Hitchhiker's guild, "Mostly Harmless"" in my talks on how human hearing works somehow placed me in the "specs above all else" crowd?
I simply don't understand that.
I can contrive a signal and noise wherein a 6dB SNR will give you a signal that can not be distinguished from the original.
I can also, in a quiet listening room, contrive a signal and noise where in the noise is obviously audible 70dB or more below the signal.
So, SNR is at best "mostly harmless". Anyone working in psychoacoustics in the last 50 years could do the same as I, simply by doing in-band noise masking noise at one extreme, and tone masking out of band tone (or not masking, to be more precise) at the other extreme.
Without at the very least a short-term error spectrum, unless specs are very good (circa 100dB or better below average listening level) SNR is "mostly harmless".
Christ, everything is a personal attack against you. You're like the drunk in the movie, "Barfly".
Heh, I've been gently cussed out by more than one portable-player listener for educating them in terms of listening. The usual complaint is "I had to go back and reencode everything at 256kb/s AAC, (*&(*it", or even better, lossless.
No, I don't feel much guilt.
Yes, I'm one of the people who invented MP3, perhaps the person who first (or at least second) pushed for active perceptual coding as opposed to homomorphic types of coders, and the primary person behind MPEG-2 AAC, but you know, the coder tutorial I pointed people at a few days ago here somewhere says "USE IT ONLY WHEN ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY". That slide was in the original 1989 slide deck, and remains to this day, albiet with even brighter colors and more attention-grabbing graphics.
No, I have not told anyone to use it at 64kb/s for stereo. It is better that words fail me than I describe what I think of that.
What ever are you on about this time? First, you're pushing this absurd conspiracy theory, now you're reduced to making stuff up from nothing and complaining about it?
I'm not complaining. Just throwing another log on the fire. Troll.
I'm not placing you in any camp - yet. You've placed yourself where you are.
I have no interest in your games.
Why not just answer my questions? If you don't know the answer, just say so.
So is the transmission of genital herpes.
It's OK, you were just doing your job.
Sorry for the old prison camp joke.
With any luck, Moore's Law will see us through until every form except Hi Rez is rendered moot...and mute.
Absolutely right. My kids are in school and are performing music. They also own MP3 players. They also hear my stereo system on occasion, but primarily when we watch movies with the 5.1 channels.
They don't seem to mind the MP3 sound in their portable players, but can tell if the bit rate is too low, prefers a better sound with higher bit rates, and understands the concept of lossless encoding leading to better sound. They're not audiophiles - yet.
I suppose those youngsters who are around live music will know the importance of good sound reproduction (but can't afford it on their own).
I've also shown the kids digital camcorder video, and the compression effects it has on the resolution when they want to send a clip over the internet to their friends, and the clip is severely compressed to make it pass the MB limits.
Because I don't answer questions that contain claims of fact not in evidence, council.
There are a few places, satellite transmission in particular, where bandwidth will be limited for the forseeable future. So for that, coding must be done, even if it's, well, unpleasant. Customers have made it clear that "something" is better than "nothing".
For things like HDradio, at the bit rates of the current system, too-low-bitrate coding is also necessary. There's a whole story in that, how the system was designed to accomodate old licenses, etc, and how one could uproot the whole system to get much better performance all-around, but that's not going to happen... So we have 96 kb/s stere coding, katey bar the door. And a smaller service radius for 96kb/s than for FM. No, not my bright idea to say the least.
But for computers, modern storage devices (I mean, when I can get a 2G flash card for, um, $20. you know, space is just no longer an issue.) just use lossless. Good grief. And make the portable devices able to cope with it, puhleeze???
If you can't do lossless, do high rate, (sorry, omitted plug for the best known high-rate coder here) so that you really have a lot of headroom between the coding and the masking threshold.
But yes, I am appalled. I had viewed the original coding as a stopgap measure and as a way to enable limited-rate services, not as a bulk storage mechanism (cringe!).
Again, just don't ask me about HD radio, I'm not sure I can be polite about the politics and outcome of that "system".
That's what I thought, you don't know what the op meant any more than I do.
And yet you were willing to jump down my throat for asking questions, even turning this simple exchange into an attack. I did not claim facts not in evidence. I asked for motivation. What facts I repeated have already been introduced by the op in his opening post. You can go back to the opening of the thread and see for yourself.
Why'd you come here, jj? To jump down people's throat with each post they make or to be helpful? You obviously have more than a passing knowledge of all this stuff that you could dispense with less stoking of the flames than you've managed so far. Why this attitude that certain members here are not worthy of your time and effort? Why turn every post into something it is not, "council"? No one here started out with a "get jj" attitude but I must say you come on with a "get everyone" approach that is turning people off to your message. You take a post and twist it and then complain about how you've bent it.
Not everyone is going to agree with you or simply bend to your will. That doesn't mean they are attacking you. What they are doing is participating in a public forum.
Why not just settle down and be helpful instead of being pissy? We all have our own set of experiences and knowledge that we bring to the forum. If we all share in a cooperative way, then the forum gets better because of the effort. If we continue to jump each other over the slightest perceived wrong, then the forum goes no further than it is right now. Which as you have admitted is you know nothing more than I do.
So, why'd you come here, jj? Why are you staying?
Now, posibly the op can get over his own problems with me and explain why this is not just another "this vs that" thread and answer my questions.