Actual performance - vs - a Hi-Fi system....what say you?

treitz3

SeleniumFalcon wrote: »

Not too far off the mark, I took an audiophile friend to a live classical concert. An 80 piece orchestra playing Beethoven's 6th symphony and we had good seats, 10th row center. He didn't enjoy it at all. He felt the bass response was not very good and he couldn't locate individual instruments very easily.

Ken, I heard a cat many moons ago that stated that a live performance was too "Tubey".

Now, I have heard some zingers in my time but dang.

A live performance is just that.....as YOU heard it, in your own personal "perspective".

To say that a live performance is, "Not too far off the mark" or too "Tubey" is akin to saying that real flowers are not the same as fake.

This is the very definition of putting the cart before the horse, no?

I have to laugh at this aspect.

Tom

maxward

Dudes like that need to get out more, maybe a lot more. At live performances, one can criticize the acoustics of the venue, the playing of one or more of the musicians or the interpretation of the conductor, but to question the realism of the sound?

treitz3

maxward wrote: »

...but to question the realism of the sound?

My whole point.

Tom

SeleniumFalcon

I think what's happened, at least in his case, was that his mental "picture" of what was real was composed by listening to recordings that "enhanced" the listening experience. Recording engineers want to be able to correct for any perceived imbalance between one section of the orchestra with another after the recording has been made. They do this by placing multiple microphones throughout the sections of the orchestra and recording each microphone feed on an individual channel. This allows for highlighting certain instruments during the mastering of the final recording. What this results in is an overly imaginative presentation of what never happened.
He went to the performance expecting to be thrilled by hearing a bigger version of what he heard at home. He did admit that the orchestra's dynamic range and size impressed him, but he thought his system, "gave more detail".
I had another customer who played bassoon in a symphony orchestra and he wanted his sound system to sound like he heard things when he was in the middle of the orchestra. He was never satisfied with any of my demonstrations I set up. He would take a certain turntable system home and return it a few days later saying, "It's good, but not what I'm looking for". He eventually became an audio reviewer for a well known magazine.

VR3

Kind of like watching a game live versus on TV. You can definitely see more on TV but hardly captures the overall experience of just being there.

SeleniumFalcon

^ That's a very good analogy!

SeleniumFalcon

The next time anyone is feeling a bit let down by their audio system, try this. For about 2 hours before I'm going to sit down and do some listening I put those squishy ear plugs in both ears. I just go about what I would normally do for an afternoon, have some lunch or tinker with some gear wearing ear plugs. Then when I've got the tape cued or the record spinning I sit down and pull the plugs out. Talk about restoring your enthusiasm for what your system can do, this is it. All the second guessing and audiophile angst just disappear and you are thankful you've got ears and a system that works.

Clipdat

Alternatively if you don't want to futz around with earplugs, just smoke a joint before you listen.

maxward

Good point!

nooshinjohn

There are some things done in recordings that simply cannot be done in a live fashion. I prefer a live performance, but depending on the type of music and venue, sometimes a good stereo can be better.

Nightfall

Nearly all of the live shows that I watch are in small venues electric instruments horn loaded speakers that are turned up way too loud. My stereo at home always sounds better.

mantis

Some live performances are incredible. Some not so good. I feel this way about Hi FI systems as well.

I have heard many system capture that live sound and give you one hell of an experience. But Live can't be replaced with a Replay system.

txcoastal1

This will all depend on genre, venue, ambiance, and atmosphere

I've sat in a hotel court yard in the middle of multiple buildings. After a nice dinner, with your gal, good bottle of wine, or after dinner cocktail.
A single piano, or a little 3-4 piece band...bet you remember how good that sound was and what a great evening. Sound bouncing in all the right places...."ambiance, and atmosphere"

Or, a few feet from a well tuned piano and a good pianist. One of our old friends who has an alcove riser off the main living room with windows overlooking the bay. Jim will sit after dinner gathering periodically and get on his grand and play a few tunes....he can do it all from Jazz, classical, to boogie woogie. That area was built for his piano architecturally and acoustically

Or...
A show at the, Carnegie, The Met, Royal Albert, or and old local like Majestic in San Antonio etc

Dare you to start telling your gal, "I'd rather be at home listening to my rig"
Seriously though, these times to listen are hard to beat. I know you've been there!!

jbreezy5

Good to see you post @Mantis.

jbreezy5

SLSO is going to be performing Star Wars soundtrack soon.

Gotta make that happen.

jeremymarcinko

Well goodness live performances are all over the place and a lot depends on where you sit/stand or stand and if it’s indoors or outdoors, a mainstream act or a garage band etc. Recordings are too so, I don’t see how the two sounds compare in general when it comes to sound quality.

TroyD

Fact is, live music is the exception rather than the rule........and, as I've alluded to in another thread, is often disappointing to audiophiles. Symphonies tend to be very harsh and bright and, compared to records, the imaging is VASTLY different......

I love Beethoven's 6th....it's my favorite Beethoven Symphony. I've heard it probably 1000 times on the hifi and exactly once live. And it's a TOTALLY different experience. From an audiophile perspective....live was meh but from an emotional standpoint it was no contest. You can listen to a recording 1000 times and not really understand a piece of music.....but listen to it once and it becomes VERY self evident.

Again, it's about the music. All the audiophile approved sound artifacts are just icing on the cake...

Nightfall

I've never heard an orchestra live, would like to though as long as it's not hours & hours long.

txcoastal1

Catch a junior orchestra or a matinee ...pick a better venue

They are not that long and have an intermission. Read up on the piece as many are orchestrated stories written in music. This will help you get the plot

mhardy6647

treitz3 wrote: »

SeleniumFalcon wrote: »

Not too far off the mark, I took an audiophile friend to a live classical concert. An 80 piece orchestra playing Beethoven's 6th symphony and we had good seats, 10th row center. He didn't enjoy it at all. He felt the bass response was not very good and he couldn't locate individual instruments very easily.

Ken, I heard a cat many moons ago that stated that a live performance was too "Tubey".

Now, I have heard some zingers in my time but dang.

A live performance is just that.....as YOU heard it, in your own personal "perspective".

To say that a live performance is, "Not too far off the mark" or too "Tubey" is akin to saying that real flowers are not the same as fake.

This is the very definition of putting the cart before the horse, no?

I have to laugh at this aspect.

Tom

Did you see

Nightfall wrote: »

I've never heard an orchestra live, would like to though as long as it's not hours & hours long.

You just need to pick the right pieces of music.

treitz3

SeleniumFalcon wrote: »

I think what's happened, at least in his case, was that his mental "picture" of what was real was composed by listening to recordings that "enhanced" the listening experience. Recording engineers want to be able to correct for any perceived imbalance between one section of the orchestra with another after the recording has been made. They do this by placing multiple microphones throughout the sections of the orchestra and recording each microphone feed on an individual channel. This allows for highlighting certain instruments during the mastering of the final recording. What this results in is an overly imaginative presentation of what never happened.
He went to the performance expecting to be thrilled by hearing a bigger version of what he heard at home. He did admit that the orchestra's dynamic range and size impressed him, but he thought his system, "gave more detail".

I have a few orchestral selections that do not have this "imaginative presentation" and to be frank? They do sound somewhat unnatural when listening on the rig. The height and depth are exactly where they should be but the volume or impact of the instruments or sections of instruments are seemingly well of the mark. With that said, it is/they are recorded with what sounds like one microphone.

These type of recordings shine for playback as the listener would hear it but the deficiencies of differing volumes/impact can be rather distracting. Not bad but noticeable. Very noticeable in certain performances where the orchestra is spread out quite a bit.

As a young teenager, I ran the mixing board for my HS and I did exactly what the recording engineers did...multiple microphones and blended them to where after it was amplified, the singers and certain instruments were blended better for "overall" playback pleasure, no matter where you were seated within the concert hall/auditorium (or at least to the best I could get it....seating locations could make or break the end result).

SeleniumFalcon wrote: »

I had another customer who played bassoon in a symphony orchestra and he wanted his sound system to sound like he heard things when he was in the middle of the orchestra. He was never satisfied with any of my demonstrations I set up. He would take a certain turntable system home and return it a few days later saying, "It's good, but not what I'm looking for". He eventually became an audio reviewer for a well known magazine.

Hahaha....I can say with complete certainty that he was living a pipe dream. I know exactly what he is referring too, as I was involved with many a choir both in church and as a younger lad that would place me in between the orchestra(s) or smack dab in the middle of the "on stage" performance.

The thing is, the human race has not developed the technology to have a playback system "put you there". Case in point, listen to a train coming from off in the distance (standing about 20 feet from the tracks), listen to it as it rolls by and as it goes away, off in the distance. You can hear things live, as it happens with a depth and authority (along with spacial locationality cues) that you will NEVER hear on any playback system. Even NASA's.

There was a thread here many years back (IIRC....I believe it was here) where they took full range speakers and placed them where the instruments were within an orchestral layout. While this may give the listener the "illusion" that the Oboe section was located 20' center to left and 10 feet back and the bassoon (his instrument) was 30' center to right, 25 feet back (for example). The issue would be that the reflections and aura of each of the instrument sections would be compromised by the sides, corners and the backs of each full range speakers impeding, as well as reflecting unnaturally, the sound coming from each of the sections (if you will).

Well, that and the recording would still (most likely) be compromised by said "imaginative presentation" and then add to that? The cost of said system along with the fact that the ordinary listening aficionado doesn't have a 100'x40' listening room to place all of those speakers in.

Now I will say this. This customer of yours had demanding tastes. I can certainly admire that but his expectations were wildly off the charts in terms of realistic playback ability......at least as far as we have come in technology as a human race to reproduce what he was looking for. The best our current playback systems can offer us is an approximation of the actual live event. As a reviewer for a popular audio magazine, I am quite sure that he has realized this by now.

Tom

WLDock

Every now and then we get lucky and catch that one live performance that just gels! The performance, the sound, your seated location, etc.

Also, there are some venues that just make the music come alive. I've been lucky enough to witness this on stage and in the audience listening to the band during rehearsal.

SeleniumFalcon

I believe the bassoonist (actually he plays the contrabassoon) has become an audio consultant for electronics companies and designs sound systems. I'm sure he has learned to temper his expectations to the reality of what can be accomplished. He was certainly a difficult enough customer that's for sure.

treitz3

Here's an example of a one microphone recording.....and the placement of the microphone itself.



There are (and I have many) recordings that use the microphone and its specific placement for the recording as the presentation. In other words, they don't alter the signal at all. They use the mic to do it all and transfer what the mic hears directly to the recording with zero alterations (unless they mix in another track done the same way).

The photo above isn't the situation I am referring too. We are talking about a very simple singer and maybe two instruments. The typical "audiophile music". These recordings are probably the most realistic playback approximations that I have heard to date. Problem is, the music is plain Jane, ho-hum, blah, fall flat on your feet, boring stuff. So, you get the best....this time, compromising what it is that you want to enjoy. That being the music itself.

There are some songs I have ran across that use this recording method and they are enjoyable but still not up to the par of being something I would "yearn" to listen too. They do sound phenomenal but it comes at the cost of compromising the music you would yearn to listen too. There is always a trade off.

Tom

treitz3

txcoastal1 wrote: »

This will all depend on genre, venue, ambiance, and atmosphere

I've sat in a hotel court yard in the middle of multiple buildings. After a nice dinner, with your gal, good bottle of wine, or after dinner cocktail.
A single piano, or a little 3-4 piece band...bet you remember how good that sound was and what a great evening. Sound bouncing in all the right places...."ambiance, and atmosphere"

Or, a few feet from a well tuned piano and a good pianist. One of our old friends who has an alcove riser off the main living room with windows overlooking the bay. Jim will sit after dinner gathering periodically and get on his grand and play a few tunes....he can do it all from Jazz, classical, to boogie woogie. That area was built for his piano architecturally and acoustically

Or...
A show at the, Carnegie, The Met, Royal Albert, or and old local like Majestic in San Antonio etc

Dare you to start telling your gal, "I'd rather be at home listening to my rig"
Seriously though, these times to listen are hard to beat. I know you've been there!!

DUDE....you speak my language!

My grandmother had a grand piano in her LR and when she played (or my Dad?) So nice man....so nice. She was a piano teacher and Dad was one of her students. We didn't have a bay to look over (except the pad overlooking Puget Sound in WA) but the sounds? Oh....oh, so nice! I have yet to EVER hear a recording or playback system that could even come CLOSE to what I experienced in that LR or any of the other grand piano's I heard played by them in other venues/houses.

Some live music just sounds better than.....well, it's just a slice of heaven here on Earth, to be honest. There is no better experience and nothing can compare to it. From the courtyard, to the private performance, to the guitar plucker that is feet away from you to the madrigals that are belting it out 7 feet away from you as you stand in complete awe of what is going on.

Yeah, I've been there. I'm sure many of the other folks who are reading this have been there too.

It's one thing to talk about the "magic" that happens within a system. It's quite another thing to experience the "magic" that truly happens with live music. There is nothing else like it.

Tom

treitz3

At some point we keep improving and improving out systems and what eventually happens is that you don’t particularly need more of anything…..frequencies are flat across the audible spectrum, soundstage is huge and enveloping, pace, rhythm and timing are pretty much state of the art, dynamic response sounds fast and natural ….in other words, any further development of the system’s hi-fi attributes would start to drive it into areas of exaggerated or unnatural sound.

mhardy6647

Ahem. On topic...
Some of all y'all might enjoy/appreciate hearing, e.g., some of this fellow's recordings.

https://hifihaven.org/index.php?threads/temecula-valley-symphony-life-begins-to-return-to-normal-2021-2022-season-live-recordings.7957/

https://hifihaven.org/index.php?threads/poway-symphony-orchestra-2021-11-21-the-music-is-back-videos-added.8140/