Reminds me of the movie Strange Days.
the purpose of hi-fi & music reproduction is to reproduce, from a recording, the original musical experience as well as possible. That original musical experience was a result of musicians, instruments, the place where the music took place but also included the human experience of the music, which was a result of ears, auditory senses, brain stimuli etc.
Key point is that the human ear & conventional listening is part of the original experience, so including the human ear & conventional listening in the playback experience is the absolute best way to reproduce that particular part of the original experience.
So anything “less”, such as this neuralink blah blah is by definition inferior, unless you can somehow modify the signal to include the effect of the ear, auditory senses etc.
concerning “lossy” I think a few people are confusing the meaning of lossy & lossless recordings with other impacts on live musical production. Room acoustics are part of the music. If you’d ever tried listening to music in an anechoic chamber then you’d definitely know not to refer to the impact of acoustics as a form of lossiness !
Sure, that could be done. Sort of what I was suggesting with the “live performance” filter.
But we see recordings being re-mixed all the time, to provide new experiences (Atmos, various surround processing). It’s not always about the original performance, it can also be about the listener experience.
That’s what you do when you haven’t come up with anything new but want to keep making money.
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Ah, but people buy them. They must be getting something out of the experience. Heck, there are Roonies over in the music threads raving about various remixed releases!
Most of them are collectors, so it’s more about owning it all…
I listen to IEMs a lot, I wear them when out on the farm most of the day and I use them in the car. I’ve had everything from wireless Sony noise cancelling (to protect hearing on the farm) through to my latest Earsonic Grace Platinum (after destroying my SE6 on the farm after being whacked in the side of the head with a branch) to use in the car. While they sound great none of them create anything that resembles the experience of a good quality system in a well treated room. The only music that sounds realistic on my iems or headphones is stuff mixed on headphones or those special binaural recording heads.
As for lossless, I think that depends on whether you listen to music or have it s as background. I can tell on material I listen to a lot and I’m familiar with, if you’re not familiar how would you know? I don’t notice for music in the car or on the farm.
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Yes, people. It’s about the waves!
I take issue with the statement that the singular objective in hi-fi is to recreate some mythical live performance. To me it is entirely subjective.
That certainly is ONE possible objective, but that only fits certain genres (what is an electronica live music performance? what does it mean to try to reproduce the sound of something already electrically amplified at the concert like a guitar with distortion or overdrive?). Plus I’ve been to plenty of live shows that sound like crap.
I personally tune my system to sound more like a club, perhaps with greater detail and clarity.
In terms of lossless codecs, I suggest those are more important for archiving than listening. While I might hear distracting artifacts in a low bitrate MP3, my ear usually adjusts enough to enjoy a high bitrate (320kps) without feeling like I’m missing something. But there is no point in going through the trouble of archiving anything with a lossy codec given how cheap storage is these days.
Direct neural input? I can see it already: neural reclockers, upgraded gold-plated Neutrik brain plugs; audiophile dietary supplements for greater neural links; one-way neural cables; anti-vibration head stabilizers; brain-lobe degaussing systems. A whole new world of snake oil crap!
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It seems to me that the neural link offers something that is not quite of sound, as it would be a direct electrical impulse. Would it require non-neural listening training so the brain would know how to process the input. I like the idea that sound exists without our brains and we just happen to have the tools to tune in. Up ears! I guess I’m sticking with FLAC for now.
Ah! If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it…
There’s always going to be a dirty river of snake oil crap, so it might as well be something new!
No question that the weakest link in most systems is the speaker / room / ear interface. There are a huge number of early reflections, decay functions and other sound wave interactions and this makes rooms and speakers really hard to optimise successfully.
My objective with hi-fi and reproduced music was originally similar to the late Peter J Walker of Quad - I wanted the impact of the perfect amplifier and speaker to be a “straight wire with gain” i.e. no coloration or changes to the original sound. However, it has proved to be an almost impossible goal, given the constraints of normal houses and listening rooms.
As you mention, it is possible to get closer to this objective using headphones. The key is to recognise that most recorded music is NOT designed for headphones, so you have to accept either some form of crossfeed to compensate for stereo vs. binaural, or you can take a more radical approach like the Smyth Realiser, to simulate real-world speakers (D&D, Genelec, B&W etc.) in a near-optimal studio environment. You lose the typical coloration of a home audio system, but gain a huge amount in immediacy and transparency. As @Marian mentions, “A unique listening experience can be generated every time by using “immersive” techniques, i.e. HRTFs, head tracking and DSP to recreate the original placement of sound sources, independent of the listener’s position”. That’s pretty much a perfect description of the Smyth Realiser’s core functionality.
I am not sure that introducing neural links or playing with codecs is remotely necessary. Most audio “realism” is about perception - even live concerts can vary in dynamics depending on the position of performers and audience, and this is doubly true for home audio. Take out the speaker/room interface and optimise to headphones in a simulated studio layout - at least you can hear something that is closer what the original producer and engineers heard when the recording was made, which you can then choose to either leave unchanged, or enhance to a fully immersive experience. I am currently listening to a stereo 44/16 classical recording upmixed to Auro-3D and directed to a virtual set of eleven D&D speakers, each with the appropriate delay to effectively simulate a near-live concert experience. This is the closest that I have found so far to a “live” perceptual experience.
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lossless is good cause if you play with it with DSP there is less noise around the original signal. Room correction is sometimes nesessary in some cases and there is provision for that on here to. Something for everyone really.
@Bill_Janssen
Lossless: Redbook (CD quality) at home. MP3 on the move/out of the house.
To me it is about the quality of the mastering/recording. Dare I say a well recorded 320bps MP3 can sound better than a poor CD! Tried at a HiFi show a $14,000 DAC/Headphone set-up and my home speaker set-up was still way better, had a friend with me and we were both underwhelmed (IMHO & we all hear things differently! – right.)
HiRes: it is different – However to me it’s more in the presentation rather than adding something worthwhile! So, I am not fussed about it.
CD 44.1: At home from speakers is way ahead better that headphones IMHO… more detail, thump, nuance, engaging, feel-it, hear-it …
MP3: On the move = can still sound good saves battery life + carry more tunes! (Never really in an environment for real quality listening when on the move and noise cancelling headphones just does not do it for me.)
Never really taken to headphones and have had many a $1,500 headphone – kept and use AKG 812 IMHO best in class and SHURE 535 for on the move using a Sony NWZ-ZX1 DAP.
However (to all): If you only had one headphones – would it be an IEM or OverEar?
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I spent a few hours in the car today with some Sony IEMs with noise cancellation on, it’s a rattly ute I was in and it’s noisy. Here’s the thing I noticed, because I was specifically looking for it after this thread. The IDMs do not have a real sound stage, when I listen to music on my speaker system I can pick out the vocals in the centre and in front of me, the drums sit in the backgrounds behind the vocals and pan across the stage, the guitar and keyboard have a position on stage. That is not the case with IEMs and to a lesser extent with headphones. The musicians are sitting in your head, it’s far less real.
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Yes, a definite problem. Recordings need to be specially remastered to fix that, don’t they? Or sometimes even re-recorded. It’s a problem with headphones as well.
As I understand it that’s what those binaural recordings do. Binaural recording - Wikipedia
I’ve only ever heard a couple of recordings done this way, I think it was back in the 1980s when this was marginally popular amongst some enthusiasts and back in those days you could walk into half a dozen HiFi shops my city at the time and listen to stuff. Not so easy to listen now. I need to look through my collection I may have one or two tucked away.
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If you’ve got Qobuz, look for the regular stereo version and it’s binaural counterpart of …
… which is nice for doing comparisons!
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I don’t use streaming here but I can probably get a trial to give it a try.