RMAF 2010: Audiogon Sound Samples
Sound clips from RMAF that Audiogon (mostly Arnie, I think) recorded in some rooms.
The buffering algorithm sucks – so you have to let the sound sputter and die several times and then reload the page and then play it again if you want to hear more than about 5 seconds of music at a time [at least that’s how it was for me].
You CAN hear the character of the rooms, depending on the quality of your computer speakers. It will be not as stark as real life, but I think it is VERY much like going to the show.
I would suggest using standard Show Protocol. If, after some amount of time the sound in one room makes you feel like going postal… DON’T. If you have no reason WHY you want to go postal all of a sudden – don’t worry about it – just STOP trying to figure it out and go to (click on) a different room / sound clip.
I thought these all showed very clearly what we have been talking about except the Walker room, which, at least on my speakers, took more serious listening effort to hear the issues with the sound than just the ‘Do I Want To Break Something’ test.
Audio Federation Sound Clip at RMAF 2010
We did not get to choose what music we wanted to play when Arnie came in the room. In hindsight, he took some time to set up, and we could have quickly chosen something else… but what? We usually only play the 1st track on this CD, it is one of the more complex and interesting, but we figured it would be bad to change anything, CD or volume, since Arnie had already adjusted his recording volume and so here you hear the 2nd track on the CD [Neli and I kind of looked at each other, using hand signals and stuff as we agreed that doing nothing to the CD or volume was probably the best choice. Its not like Arnie *told* us he was going to do this :-)]. Sounds pretty good – certainly kind of hints at the quality of playback the system was capable of.
Too bad they did not get a sound clip of our Audio Note room. THAT would have been interesting.
YG Acoustics / Soulution Sound Clip at RMAF 2010
[Significantly more bass than the other systems]
Magico / Spectral Sound Clip at RMAF 2010
Both this and the Walker room are playing more challenging music. That first cut on Santana Abraxus *is* one of the more complex pieces of rock and roll out there, but… not quite up to the complexity of the tracks being played in the Magico or Walker rooms]
Walker / TAD / Technical Brain Sound Clips at RMAF 2010
One of the mental tricks I use when evaluating a new sound is to imagine myself having just paid a bundle for a new system that was making the new sound – me RELAXING [NOT concentrating on the sound] in my own room listening to it and trying to enjoy it. Would I be happy? Would it drag me into the music? Would I turn it off?
Anyway, interesting to hear what people think. My computer sound system is somewhat better than average, but not audiophile quality by any means.
Mike,
I think that Neli did a good job of conveying my thoughts about the relationship between noise level and micro detail/ micro dynamics. I think that as you point out, the question is more complex. Some units which have a fair amount of noise can also do micro detail at least to some extent. Have you noticed that the “black background” produced by different units differs rather significantly. With many transistor units black background is more akin to a wall painted flat black which is to say that it is two dimensional. With units like the KB’s, the blackness is more akin to a night sky on a dark night or a large space that is not illuminated. Sounds emerge from a three dimensional void. I don’t think that I am explaining this very wello, but at least it is a start.
Hi Fred!
Maybe if we split up background noise into two categories:
1. Background noise that is, or sounds like, it is ever-present. Like tape hiss.
2. Noise that appears and dies with each note: it accompanies notes.
Some digital players are good examples type 2 noise. They carry too many of the least significant bits around when doing floating-point calculations, causing lots of little errors which grow into audible errors. Between notes everything is quiet. But each note itself carries with is some light fuzz, confusing the imaging and soundstaging [the note requires lots of the more subtle middle-high-freq information to communicate its position to us, to be uncharacteristically anthropomorphic about it :-)]. One of the players you had there recently has, or used to have, this problem.
Generalizing, we can imagine that type 2 noise can come in all flavors, and muck up the dynamics, imaging, harmonics, etc.
Certainly, this is what it SOUNDS like the Emm Labs XDS1 you have gets right. That its type 1 noise is low, like most other players, but now its type 2 noise is low, and really tiny, tiny notes can actually be heard now and not fuzzed up and blurred in with all the others.
As for 3D soundstaging, information about the location of a note is communicated by it bouncing off of people, the instrument making the note, other people and other instruments, music stands, and finally walls. The note is kind of like a flashlight pointing right at us; we can only determine how far it is away from us by looking at its context, where it is relative to the other things in the room – and we can only determine this by its reflections off of those other things in the room.
This is all pretty subtle and perhaps one of the millions of things we are not measuring correctly for on solid state may be its ability to produce a, say, nominal 1K Hz note and its 4K – 8K Hz, say, reflections At The Same Time? I think a lot of equipment out there, including speakers and cables, focus on reproducing the primary notes at the expense of the more subtle notes. In general, people do not whine about this nearly as much as they do if the bass doesn’t thumb their chest real good 🙂
Thanks for posting!
Take care-
Mike
Yet another instance of the Audio Note room being completely ignored by the media. The end of the hall location may not have helped, nor did the strategically placed housekeeping cart which made us invisible for a good portion of all the show days, but from our perspective, RMAF actually SHRANK quite a bit this year.
Won’t get fooled again!
Hi Dave,
Think there is a lot of that Ignoring Flu going around. 😉
Our traffic this year was about 1/5th of what it was last year. We *were* in a new room and kind of off in a corner, and the ice and coke machine’s threatening-like whirring and buzzing might have intimidated people, thinking they were about to experience the Rise of the Machines right there and then probably didn’t help. 🙂
Noticed we both didn’t make it into Dave and Carol’s show report at Positive Feedback, either [along with several other rooms of note]. Haven’t checked out the others yet.
But a lot of the people we talked to HAD been to your room, so I think the people in the know [kind of leaves reviewers out, that phrase, huh?] found our rooms, but that we lost a lot of casual traffic this year.
Not sure about not getting fooled again, seems like that is part and parcel of getting out of bed each day :-), but we do need to try and get better rooms next year.
Take care,
-Mike
Hi!
This is extremely interesting. I would never have thought that one can actually tell any difference in sound that way. It seems that musical clues survive even being broadcast over the internet.
Your room sounds like music, while all the others you linked to sound like a collection of sounds. I actually find the TAD room the best of the rest. Certainly a little on the bright side, but maybe that’s the recording.
I tried switching back and forth between the samples and every time I switch back to the Audio Federation room I seem to relax. Maybe that’s the choice of music as well, but I doubt it.
I am still extremely baffled by how this works. I am listening to the samples on my system connected to my computer via USB. The overall price of my system is maybe as much as an interconnect in a really top level system. Nevertheless I can clearly hear shortcomings, especially when it comes to harmonic content and overall coherence.
This would mean that some top dollar systems have LESS resolution than the recording device and my stereo system. If it would be the other way around I would not be able to tell the difference.
This also suggest that musicality and maybe “drug-ness” goes at a right angle to where high end audio is going right now.
Speaking of “Fuzz”. I wish you would elaborate on this “Type 2” noise sufficiently for me to place it in the context of two different sounds that tend to bother me unless/until I know their source…part of live music (natural its ok ITS OK), or something generated in the reproduction process (fake – time to upgraded UPGRADE). Sound 1 example that might fall in the category of Type 2 occurs on piano recordings in conjuncton with the sound of the piano felt striking the strings. On live pianos, the striking sound varies depending on the compresson of the felt. Old felts get compressed and tend toward a click or clack or tack hammer hitting a piece of plywood where as new felts being softer and less compressed are quieter in the strike. Also, the sound is louder or more pronounced as you move up the key board and the strings are tighter. And by the way the hard felts make the piano sound brighter. This sound varies in playback, however and yields on occasion what sounds to me like an exaggerated object-striking-object sound that I associate with (cheap) solid state cdp’s. The piano sounds mechanical rather than musical and thus distracts this listener. Does this resonate with anyone?..PP (Pardon Pun) Sound 2 is closer to a fuzz sound or a hiss sound and occurs with grouped strings, and to a lesser extent the fewer the strings it seems, especially upper strings, e.g., violins…it occurs more or less at the instant or as the bow hits/strikes/makes contact with the strings. It is a hiss, sound like an AM radio trying to home in on a station tghrough static and interference. The sound plays out differently on different systems…it is like the hissing noise generated in speaker sound tests. It can be faint, absent, or loud and its character changes dedpending on the playback gear in the room. I asked a concert violinist about this and he said when 3 dozen bows strike the same note that’s a lot of bow strings making contact before actually vibrating the violin string and is a natural sound…accept it…sort of like the piano felt striking the key. But it continues to distract me until I know if it is real and part of the instrument or a type 2 interference. And even if these “strike’ sounds are real, are they exaggerated by close mic placement….Its one thing to put a mic inside the piano….right next to the violoinist. BUT, does a person sitting 10 rows back in the concert all hear them as loudly and distinctlyh? I’ll get back to you after I attend my next live concert Nov 19…maybe you can attend too???
Hi umea101,
Thanks.
Not sure what all this means, that we can hear the differences so well on equipment that is not ‘top notch’.
My computer sound system is inferior to yours, consisting of an adapter that fits in the headphone jack on my PC that allows me to hook up a pair of RCA interconnects to it [forget which kind, but cheap – like a dollar a foot – and made for guitar amps] which goes into a 10 year-old Lexicon surround-sound preamp that is now worth about $200 [which says more about the way they run their own products into the ground more than anything else] and then into a pair of self-powered $500/pair Yamaha speakers.
I want to respond to your individual points…. But a few things we can say right off the bat:
1. Studios and recording engineers who do a better job on the sound WILL sound better in everybody’s cars and on everybody’s computer systems, not just on our super-duper audiophile death star systems.
2. That lots of downloaded music in general really sucks, not because, perhaps, so much due to the format as it is due to the recording itself. I say this because the sound from the better rooms at the show sound quite a bit better than what I am used to hearing on my computer.
1 and 2 are related… it is my suspicion that many recordings are dumbed down because they think that the systems that are going to be playing the recording suck anyway, so why bother putting the effort into making a high-quality sound. But we CAN hear the difference, even IF our systems do ‘SUCK’.
“This would mean that some top dollar systems have LESS resolution than the recording device and my stereo system. If it would be the other way around I would not be able to tell the difference. ”
This is not exactly the case… trying to come up with an analogy… like watching HDTV on a non-HDTV ready TV, you can still tell the basic quality of the HDTV recording itself, even though your TV has defacto less resolution. I THINK the way to describe this in terms of information theory is to note that our sound systems both filter and perform TRANSFORMATIONS on the sound, they are not just pure filters based on their relative quality. Not sure if this is quite right.
“This also suggest that musicality and maybe “drug-ness” goes at a right angle to where high end audio is going right now. ”
Yeah, more and more things seem to suggest that this is the case, esp. the more we talk about the requirements for drug-like systems.
Ugh, long day. More tomorrow…
Take care,
-Mike
Hi Jim,
[Finally got some zzzzz’s. After a year or two of 4 to 6 hours sleep every night, I have embarked on a campaign for More Sleep].
OK. Noise.
The noise that you talked about, thin felt, dropped picks, broken strings, bows with dangling fibers, musicians humming and even singling to themselves during the performance :-), all these things audiophiles really love, perhaps even more than the music itself 🙂 [for many reasons, not the least of which is reflected in the old saying that the beauty of a thing resides in the ways it differs from perfection i.e. it makes the performances unique and Real as opposed to Studio Perfection, which is a little too perfect sometimes]. These imperfections are also cool because we audiophiles can actually hear them and it makes the whole performance seem more Live and Personal – that the musicians are real people and not some computer generated rhythm – and that… well, reflect other very human-to-human and reality-to-human frailties.
Hope this helps!
Take care,
-Mike
Mike – either you need a little more sleep to grasp my somewhat obscure point, or I need to express myself more clearly (as opposed to IN MORE WORDS). I assumed Type 2 was artifical sounds generated by the digital equipment, drawing this assmption from:
“They carry too many of the least significant bits around when doing floating-point calculations, causing lots of little errors which grow into audible errors. Between notes everything is quiet. But each note itself carries with is some light fuzz, confusing the imaging and soundstaging [the note requires lots of the more subtle middle-high-freq information to communicate its position to us, to be uncharacteristically anthropomorphic about it ”
What I meant was the natural and normal sounds of the felts were accompanied by some unnatural “light fuzz” of digital origin that made them sound more like tinker toys connectors (or drumsticks) striking a wooden floor and that the friction of the violin bow rubbing the strings was accompanied by some extra and erroneous bits of data that made it sound like a hiss.
I stick by my former allegation that poor qualilty cd players enhance unnaturally the mechanical felt contact sound with an added digital signature that is distinctly not musical and not natural. But, and that is a big BUT…I discovered today that what I thought was a second example, a hiss accompanying the bow hitting the violin string, and what I had heard only in the right speaker, was in fact caused by a hearing loss in my right ear making my right ear unable to resolve the detail in very low volume strings (strings playing pianisimo). such that hear friction of bow to string blut without the musical accompaniment. How did I figure this out, you ask? Well…. As soon as I turned 180 degrees away from the music, placing my back to the speakers, the supposed musical defect suddenly appeared in the other speaker. This is an occupatonal hazard of aging male audiophiles. I’m told hearing loss begins by 50. But don’t worry….I can still tell the difference between the Ongaku and my Levinson 32/33H. It’s actually a bit worse. The right ear can’t hear low extremely low volume detail and the left hear can hear detail but it must be at a higher volume. So, I turn up the volume and balance the speakers 3 db to the left and all is fine!!! (And yes, Audio Note will, on reques, build an Ongaku preamp unit with separate volume controls for each channel.
ATTENTION AGING AUDIOPHILES…IF YOUR VINTAGE SYSTEM, WHICH HAS PLEASED YOU FOR YEARS, STARTS TO SOUND BAD, ESPECIALLY ON ONE SIDE, TRY 1) THE 180 DEGREE TEST AND 2) GET YOUR HEARING CHECKED. The former’s a no cost diagnostic and the latter’s a lot cheaper than buying a new system to “fix” a non system problem.
OK, if you must ask when to start worrying: I’ll be 69 in December! If you’re bad at math, that’s 4 days after Pearl Harbor. If you’re bad at history, that’s December 11, 1941. The good news…I’ve never bought an upgrade I couldn’t hear and (not sure how good this is:) I’m still buying. and (bad news?) it still hurts but it hurts sooooo goood.