by Michael

Imaging, Soundstaging, Reality and Enjoyment

[Neli thinks I write too many pieces on the industry, so here is one on sound]

I was surfing and ran across an article on imaging and soundstaging at Romy’s site

Now, Romy is too opaque for me in that thread, but I am pretty sure I disagree with what he is saying 🙂

Lot’s of people are confused about soundstaging – and it is indeed popular to tarnish it as being faux and imaging as being required to be in some nebulous constraints of size and specificity.

Let’s define these two, shall we? At least for the duration of this post, and I hope these are more or less in line with what you think of them as. So we will define:

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Soundstaging: as the location on a virtual 3D stage of where a sound is coming from, usually on the side of the room where the speakers are

Imaging: as the spacial and textural definition of the musician and or sound – their outlines, their weight, etc.

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So imaging has to do with perceived image specificity and soundstaging as its location in 3D space.

I think I will ignore imaging in this post and talk about the much maligned soundstage.

I, personally, love the soundstage. Even though it is probably 5th or 6th on my list – it is still very important to me.

The only thing I can think of why people disparage soundstaging so much is, as pointed out on Romy’s thread, is that it is popular to do so [though not for monetary gain, as implied there, and which requires a very cynical view of the industry to imagine – though, yes, there are many unscrupulous types in retail out there, I just don’t think they are this smart :-)].

It obviously occurs in acoustic reality. But what really interests me [and I think upsets the detractors] is the liberties that sound engineers take with the positions of sounds in the 3D space.

On a good system [the precise quality and make up of which we can debate and agonize over some other time] you can hear the sound engineer move things around, fade them in and out, and change them in other ways that have nothing to do with unamplified/unprocessed sound.

I think of sound engineers as the ‘forgotten musician’. They add all this stuff to the music – and yet they do not get the big bucks. Nobody knows their name. And many people – audiophiles anyway – think the music would be better off without them.

I don’t think so.

Obviously I am talking about bands like Radiohead and Pink Floyd, and not Led Zeppelin or classical music. But if you listen to your casual pop rock country and crossover songs – in the background, there is a lot of stuff going on that is very entertaining. To me anyway.

And that is why I like soundstaging. I enjoy all the background stuff and the way it appears and disappears and moves around [in, out, left, right, up, down] and [rarely] changes phase and pitch and texture.

On a car radio, or iPhone, all this stuff is merged into The Song. But on a quality high-end audio system – this stuff expands into a wondrous playful menage of delightful sounds, which just feeds back into greatly enhancing the overall song.

For me.

And hopefully for you too. The more things one enjoys in this life, the less room there is for things we do not enjoy. 🙂

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Philosophy 0 comments
 by Michael

Forums

Spintricity has forums and I have been wondering about how to keep it from being a place I hate.

About 90% of all people we talk to actively hate the forums – by which they mean people running them and/or the people on them.

Which, if this is true in general, means that forums as such are really not very successful.

I have certainly imagined a forum that I would like to be able to visit – where people are nice, passionate about audio, think about things and share their thoughts freely…

*sigh*

People seem to like Facebook and MySpace. Young people I mean.

Perhaps forums should be organized around groups of self-selected people, like those two communities are. So the forum would actually consist of lots of tiny little forums …and no jerks would be allowed to stay long in your forum unless you wanted them to [because there is the possibility that we are all jerks at some level or another ;-)].

So we could, for an example, have a Jorma Prime Cable forum, where we could all talk about this cable, post new topics [threads] and discuss our experiences about this cable.

Or it could be more general, like The $4K A Meter And Above Cable forum.

I think this would be better than just, say, Cables [does anybody even have a cable forum, anywhere? Or am I forgetting…]. Or the Exotic SET Tube Amps forum instead of … the Amps forum like a few forums have.

You would probably want to participate in many… dozens… of forums… but you would NOT have to participate in the $100 and below cable blow-out forum unless you wanted to [or ones where there are so-called audiophiles who cannot hear the difference between cables]. Or between power cords [I know, I know, it is harder to hear differences in cables on some equipment that has a very strong sound of its own.. ].

So…

Here is your chance…

If you want a nice forum you can go to and chat as your amps warm up for the evening after the power has been out all day — a place you can find out ways to improve YOUR system, and not just read a could of bored guys chatting about nothing to each other adinfinitum… then speak up about what YOU would want at a place like this.

Because we can do just about anything… limited only by our imagination [which, although a significant limitation, is less so than the average human’s lemming tendencies to repeat the same mistake everyone else has made… vis-a-vis forums in this case]

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Philosophy / Spintricity 0 comments
 by Michael

Details, Details

For the longest time I would get so confused when I read someone posting that, say, the sound of Boulder solid-state amps had more detail than Edge solid-state amps, which I totally disagreed with [this was back when I believed everybody who posted about how something sounded had actually heard the darn thing. How innocent we all were about the side-effects of anonymity on the web in those good-old days].

I finally figured out that they were talking about the the ‘leading edge’ of the notes, combined with, in this case, less continuousness which made the notes ‘stand out’.

If we think about the sound as composed of many notes, and each of those notes having texture [dynamics of things happening inside the note] and harmonics, we can compare sounds to, say, sand on a beach.

You got your fine sand, you got your larger grains, which when large enough are ‘pebbles’. You got [depending on the beach] larger pebbles that eventually get so be as to be rocks [boulders, boulders would be like the cannon shots in the William Tell Overture]. Each one of these grains is a different shape, with bumps and different colors all over them.

OK.

The Edge amps have lots of finely grained sand detail [which we now call finesse – to get around the problem that people do not agree on just what detail *is*.] and the Boulder has pebbly detail.

The music has some of both [usually], large and small, and we can think of the sand->pebbles->rocks being dynamics and the color of their facets being harmonics/tone.

Solid-state equipment tends to reduce the beach to black and white and tube amps turn up the color saturation a bit. Solid-state equipment also shines a light on the beach like high-noon in death valley [the edges of the pebbles appear sharp, the find sand disappears into the background of white glare], tube equipment like, like, … ambient sunshine on a beach right after a rain just when rainbows are starting to come out [makes you think I like tubes better than solid-state, huh :-)].

[So far, we have only modeled sound and its harmonics and dynamics by comparing it to the visual appearance of a beach. We can also think about the experience of *listening* to sound with that of walking on the beach… some people want a nice soft sandy walk, some want a rougher, firmer walk. Some don’t care and are only getting exercise or going for a swim.]

We can think of playing music, then, as taking a yardstick and scraping it across the sand, larger pebbles being more dynamic than smaller, the colors of the pebbles representing different tones.

So, using these models…. we can [try to!] define:

Dynamic Resolution: Numbers of different sizes of sand that a system is capable of rendering – higher resolution systems are able to make a particulate of sand sound different than a slightly larger one, which would sound the same on a lower-resolution system. Note that this is often a function of the size of the grain: i.e. two boulders, one inch different in size may sound the same, but two pebbles, one inch different in size would sound different. The best systems are linear… if the pebbles, boulders are more than, say, 1% different in size, we can hear them.

Fractal Dynamic Resolution: The smallest size of a facets on a reference sized particulate of sand that a system is capable of rendering. We want linearity similar to that described above. This indicates the dynamic resolving capability of the system while it is already reproducing another dynamic. Very few systems can do this at all.

Harmonic Resolution and Fractal Harmonic Resolution: Similar to the above, but for tone [frequencies] instead of dynamics. The Lamm ML3 has really good Fractal Harmonic Resolution – it can render not only the colors of fine sand, but of their facets as well.

Dynamic Detail [ability to change direction]: the cleanliness of the beach [i.e. how much mud :-)]. Is that yardstick we are using make some good THWACK sounds as we hit things, or does it kind of slide up and over them. Again we want this to be linear – to behave the same for larger rocks and tiny particles of sand. Otherwise certain dynamics [horns anybody?] and frequencies [tipped up midrange anybody?] are over / under-emphasized. [We, Neli esp. usually calls this ‘light on its feet’. Most people referring to detail are talking about only the leading edge this very small set of dynamic changes somewhere between micro-dynamics and macro-dynamics – i..e kind of small sized next to slightly but noticeably larger pebbles. Not sand, and not rocks].

Dynamic Control [accuracy]: the ability to accurately trace the edges of the sand/pebble/boulder [what we usually call the note envelope]. That yardstick traces the pebbles up and over, without going too high, without pushing the pebble down into the sound … AND without jumping down too quick and missing tracing all the detail on the other side.

Fractal Detail and Fractal Control. Same as the above two, but for facets. The Audio Note Kegon Balanced amps are great at Fractal Dynamic Control.

Harmonic Detail and Harmonic Control: and Harmonic Fractal Detail and Harmonic Fractal Control: same as above, but for tone [frequencies].

See, we all knew that the reproduction of music was a beach.. 🙂

in Audio Note / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Lamm / Philosophy 0 comments