Newsgroups: rec.audio

Dave makes some excellent points:
>We should always purchase a peice of gear based on the pleasure we derive
>from it.   As profesionals in audio, we should not be talking about taste
>here.   As profesional's in the audio feild, we should be deriving pleasure
>from the life-like sound our design's produce.
>
We should derive pleasure from what gives us pleasure.  IF someone gets a
bigger bang out of reproducing a 3.1415927 khz square wave "perfectly" with
their audio gear, then they are well within their rights to search for
the gear most capable of doing such.  They just shouldn't chant "this
gear makes the most lifelike music".

>Kerry and Lon;  In your zeal in addressing the entire merits shown
>by CD vs. those by LP in what you both profess as a "logical"
>and "intelligent" manner, you have fallen victim to a trap so
>prevalent in audio:
>
>You've come to judge the merits of the technology by its merits
>in meeting the intent of the model (lower measured distortion, etc.)
>and not by its performance vs. the only realistic goal: Providing
>as life-like an illusion as possible.
>
>Your insistence at proclaiming  CD's superiority while never once
>explicitely claiming it brings you closer to the "real thing" bears 
>this out.
>
>If a unit leads to a more life-like presentation, but measures relatively
>poorly, who cares?  Such a case would only highlight inadequacies in the 
>subjective model.
>
What I've found fascinating is that my listening the past two months has
shown me that the most "lifelike" sound I get from my system is from 
using the DSP with lots of "lesser equipment" driving the "other 5
channels of sound".  The fascinating part is I don't read much about
the "highenders" even considering DSP.  

If I consider the subjective example where I went and listened to a
blues musician friend play at a local blues club (JJ Blues in Mtn View,
CA) and then came home and tried to get as close as I could to the sound
with my home system.  One method was to turn my main amp on VERY loud
(which duplicated the 'difficult to talk while the music is being
played' experience) and the other much more enjoyable method was to add
the DSP with its "inferior electronics and speakers".

Now you could ask me "which gives you more pleasure:  listening to a CD
with just your two highend channels or with 5 additional midfi DSP channels?"
My answer might surprise you.  Some days I prefer the more lifelike 7
channel DSP sound, but most others I prefer the easier to listen to
2 channel sound - maybe because I ENJOY listening to cymbals decay, base 
thumps decay, identifying individual instruments, whatever else I feel
like listening for.  

I'll add one more experiment (accidental) that I did last week.  I had
just purchased Vols 1 & 2 of Chesky's Jazz Sampler and test CDs.  I was
cooking dinner in another room of my townhouse while I had the CD
playing for the first time (system is in living room) and a piece came
on that all of a sudden made me think "boy, that sure sounds like the
Yamaha E1000 is on one of its DSP modes".  I went and got the CD booklet
and sure enough the recording was done in a famous jazz club to show the
effects of reverb.  It turns out that the jazz club was the same one
modeled by the E/A-1000 DSP chips!

Now why don't we read more about DSP giving more "lifelike" recreation of
music?  Is this similar to saying one likes "Telarc", prefers Bose, or
just has the nasty D word in it?

>The fact that the majority of highly skilled and trained professional
>subjective reviewer's find LP reproduction closer to the final goal
>of life like reproduction supports my argument.  The fact that CD
>measures better awakens us to the existence of inadequacies in the
>subjective model.
>
I don't think LP comes close to good DSP.  Add good DSP to an LP and I
might agree, but I haven't heard that yet.

>Dave Dal Farra
>

Kirk (boy did I ever bite into a big one here) out
=> "We are what we pretend to be."  -  Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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