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Post by superluc on Apr 29, 2017 14:07:35 GMT
Somerthing I think some people mean by 'depth' is about the same as 'sitting X rows back' or 'front seat'. This seems top have a really high correlation to frequency response. The less 'presence/clarity' the 'further back' the sound is evaluated. Similar to sitting in a venue. The closer you are to the band the more upper mids/treble you can hear. All the way in the back there is more massive lows and less clarity. Perhaps that is meant by 'depth' ? Probably. Personally, when i feel some frequency recessed is like there is a sort of distance, some depth in the sound, like two or more stratus. |
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rostele2
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Post by rostele2 on May 7, 2017 18:29:35 GMT
I don't hear the 3D imaging, at least not projecting sounds forward. The closer you are to the band the more upper mids/treble you can hear. Large orchestra's usually are recorded with lots of overhead mics which also pick up echo's from the ground. NOT TRUE UNLESS DONE BADLY So 3D imaging may only be 'partly' recorded with 2 mic or dummyhead recordings, everything else is studio manipulated. NO TRUE EITHER The principal problem with all headphones is the image will appear to be behind your head. This is No1 reason why using headphones to make & master recordings is stupid. Next, 90% of all commercial recordings are rubbish, - really fit for the bin. Lastly, recordings made using an artificial head (say using Bruel omni microphones) are some of the best recordings that you will ever hear. They work, when done well, with good compatibility between both speakers and headphones. In reality the main difference when moving from testing a recording on headphones to listening on good electrostatic speakers is the influence of the room acoustic and the much more neutral sound of ESL. In practice if you do coincident microphone techniques (say like typical French methods or a la Michael Gerzon) then you will immediately see the terrible quality of most multi microphone and studio recordings for what they are. (I don't even want to talk about TV sound and the video crew stuff!!!). I say this, because you really have to bring some objectivity into all this. Lots of recordings sound terrible on good headphones, quite simply because they are terrible recordings! |
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Post by tupisac on May 7, 2017 20:12:07 GMT
Any examples of "good recordings"?
Also, why headphones render the sound as located at the back?
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rostele2
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Post by rostele2 on May 8, 2017 4:50:35 GMT
Any examples of "good recordings"? Also, why headphones render the sound as located at the back? They just DO. This is not just my opinion, my Professor friend ex-CNRS researcher also states the same, as does one of my sound engineers. Good recordings, yes I can post a sample of what we did about 2 weeks ago, but it's limited to 1Mb here, so don't know a solution. Here's some things to think about. Precise source location, correct microphone placement, a sense of space, lack of compression artefacts/high dynamic range, coincident rather than multi mic, as well as LIVE acoustic & handling direct sound fields properly, are all key elements in making top quality recordings. Sound source location is done on most mammals with minute differences between the 2 ears in arrival time of the source signal. For animals with highly selective and sensitive hearing, they actually have the ability to differentiate the source and fine tune the phase by moving their large directional ears around on their heads (thinking of Dogs, Rabbits, cats here). Phase correlation is an important aspect of how we perceive surround directionality information with only 2 ears. Humans are no different, whether the sound source is natural or artificially created or natural source reproduction. (eg. I have a magical recording of birds singing in spring in a forest environment). If the re-creation is in stereo, the ears/brain simply makes mathematical calculation from the difference in timing (intensity is not so important, that locates more the depth of source in direct or diffuse field). Most people are unaware, an important part of what we hear also travels through the bone mass of the head directly, not just through the ear. It makes no difference whether this is by headphones or speakers, the result is the same, except of course speaker audition places demands on the room acoustic, which veils the original recording acoustic,(if it has one) by the new room acoustic and its reflections. Speaker reproduction places pressure constraints on the whole body. They also inevitably add significant levels of THD and IMD to the total which headphones should not be able to do. Most recordings have been optimised for reproduction on loudspeakers not headphones. Good sound engineers have to have a "virtualisation" ability to imagine, how the reproduction will be when passed through the entire recording chain to less than ideal monitoring systems to imagine how it should be when reproduced on the ideal monitor system. This becomes far more complex when people like myself begin working on surround source material for surround monitor reproduction. The vast majority of "high end" loudspeakers are unable to provide even the resolution of 16 bit audio, never mind 18 or 24 bit, which makes the debate about SACD and DSD, bit depth and high sampling frequency to be seen to be the manifest monster bollox it really is. The "added value" mission creep, of those technology freaks running companies such as Apple, Sony+Philips, Microsoft, Dolby on the "just sell this crap bandwagon or you are not up to date" (just to name a few guilty parties), is one of the largest most nefast tendencies represented today. |
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Post by rostele2 on May 8, 2017 10:22:03 GMT
DON'T AGREE, just because there are lots of clueless people doing audio and lots of clueless musicians has no bearing on how to do it properly!
What was good at the BBC and what took years to build up has all gone out the window since they shut BBC research and put it under a bus. Don't look to the BBC for anything resembling quality any more it's all gone down the toilet.
NO, they do it because they are hopeless at doing anything else, and now it's become accepted in the profession if you don't have 64 channels and 50 microphones on stage you can't be any good.
If you turn up with 2 microphones, they look at you like from outer space!
Most of it is just total bollox, for impressing everyone with a microphone forest.
It's even worse in China you can't even begin to imagine how horrible it is there!
I CAN, because 16 bit resolution truncates the reverb as it hasn't enough bit depth. If you look for those clues combined with typical compression artefacts you can blind test for bit depth and hear it 100% easily.
Most people in the profession are in denial, and of course the same guilty parties as last time forced everyone to adopt the CD, made a mammoth FAIL in copy protection then tried to invent yet another failed standard to cover up their previous fails, while yet again taking a machine gun to any good competing standard (Linear PCM DVD-A with MLP being a good one).
You couldn't make it up!
We use 24bit source to go to 16 bit.
It's demonstrably better for dither & resolution to do that.
If you regularly record in live environments with natural acoustic you need bit depth.
Just remember what happened when digital arrived.
Before, you could hide behind tape noise and all that, with the natural compression of valve AF stages and tape.
Then engineers went to digital so they could be lazy and be ignorant because it was assumed you had to know very little.
They remained that way ever since,and recording quality went backwards since the mid 50s to late 60s.
Go listen to a early stereo 50s sound release like DECCA and it sounds great.
Probably the golden period was in the 70s and 8os when the BBC were prepared to have a shot at surround on FM, people like Gerzon were working with them on Ambisonic UHJ, which was used on all Nimbus records, and people still believed in Analog audio
Good people like Meridian date from those days.
Sadly, Nimbus were filled with clueless engineers who insisted on using the horrible noisy POS the soundfield mic, then they insisted on writing it to Vinyl, like some nutters still do today!
I have their SAM (super analogue 45rpm master and the UHJ decoder).
Interesting ideas spoilt as usual by the British penchant to screw up the execution of just about anything technical.
DAB is crap, a total FAIL. I remember those idiots coming along to demonstrate this horrible clone of musicam codec, and trying to convince us (con us) into adopting it.
It's all about money remember and vested interests!!
You have to isten to some of our recordings, you will love it.
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Post by hifidez on May 8, 2017 13:21:12 GMT
Turn your back for 5 minutes and a thread doubles in length.
A simple explanation of why headphone sound stays inside the head?
Play a mono sound through 2 conventionally positioned stereo loudspeakers and we perceive a single source mid way between the speakers.
Headphones are no different. We percieve a centrally placed sound mid-way between the headphone 'speakers'. Right between the transducers, in the middle of your head. How can it be otherwise?
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Post by hifidez on May 8, 2017 14:10:39 GMT
I've said before (?) somewhere on here that an album I think does quite well for being more 'outside the head' is Joe Walsh's "The Smoker You Drink... ". It was one of the first recordings I played on my, then new, Oppo PM3s. Will re-visit. Maybe I was just 'in the moment' for it to sound that way.
By the way, I think I listen at comparatively low levels with headphones. Particularly with 'classical'; set the level for the loud bits, leave the quiet bits to sort themslves out. Recent visits to concerts have reminded me just how quietly some parts are played. You can hear EVERYTHING, but it just ain't that loud.
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Post by hifidez on May 8, 2017 14:20:55 GMT
Given that heaphones produce a soundfield that typically appears over and behind the head then how would you be sitting in a real acoustic to experience such a situation? You would have to be lying on your back with your head towards the performers, feet pointing away. Now that would be an informal 'prom' wouldn't it? The audience lying flat on their backs?
Reverse your headphones (or reverse the channels in some other way if your 'phones have different L & R fitting earpieces) so the orchestra will be the right way round, and then lie on your back on the floor and pretend the orchestra is behind you and on stage some distance away from the top of your head. It works. I've tried it. But maybe it's just me.
And, no, I haven't opened the wine early.
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Post by hifidez on May 8, 2017 14:49:18 GMT
That's why high definition recordings don't do well. There is no real audience for them. A small percentage buy them but at the prices that they are sold, people don't. They actually don't care if their music is 120 MP3. It's all down to costings. It's odd how the audience at large don't care about improved audio quailty in terms of bit rate & depth isn't it? And 'we' accept that the 'plebs' are not seeing 'real and obvious' improvements over, say 120 MP3. Indeed, they've even been conditioned to expect and enjoy the rougher-edged presentation . The same reasoning, however, does not apply to mobile phone cameras. Give the average punter the choice between a 6MP camera sensor and a 20MP job and they will choose the 20MP EVERY time; they've been 'taught' that 20 is OBVIOUSLY better than 6. It has to be. It's a bigger number. But I'll stick my neck out and say no-one makes any use of such high resolution in a mobile phone, and, in any case, the built-in lens isn't up to making use of it anyway. The average punter will accept and enjoy his generous allowance of megapixels while happily ignoring the better spec of hi-res recordings. Maybe the producers of hi-res audio should market it as music that 'goes up to 11'. |
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Post by hifidez on May 8, 2017 15:28:26 GMT
When I tell people how much an hd650 costs they can't believe anyone would spend that much on a headphone. A friend told me that she would never spend more than £30 on a headphone. But quite content to pay significant money for training shoes, iPhones and games consoles. Curved screen TVs? They're popular. Now there's a bomb looking for a war... curved screen TVs. |
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Post by rostele2 on May 8, 2017 16:36:08 GMT
 ...one thing that came up was the sound. I got a couple of Neumanns and boy did that make a difference to my recordings. They are lovely mics with a beautiful, rich sound plus the very very low signal/noise ratio. They really give room for engineering. And that all depends WHICH Neumann you use! Some of the modern ones sound pretty poor, and are not worth the money. I can think of some of the TLM and KM18x I wouldn't waste 5 mins with. I can also remember some of the Schoeps cardios being quite poor too. For a number of years I used some old ex BBC Calrec mics which were totally underrated by most people. We are still using them today (in fact the last 4 days in La Boheme, they are perfect for the harp...). I did most of my recordings of Gitlis with the Calrecs. They sound very similar to another golden oldie the KM84. The funny thing we were chatting about the other day on the stage was how we moved back again away from Denmark to Germany & UK. Our final beautiful warm sound came from an assembly of old Gefell, older Neumann, a pair of Calrec and the rest were DPA omni. Can't beat it, Iron curtain DDR, British eccentricity and more relaxed German engineering! We then swopped headphones and stories for 3 days trying to work out why Dante and the D-A convertors were jittering. |
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Post by solderdude on May 8, 2017 18:11:13 GMT
quite a derailment.
From a consumer perspective only I hear left and right and a blob in between on lesser quality headphones and left and right and everything pin-pointable in between with better headphones.
Never in front, back, above or below me.
Of course, that's just the way my brain processes the 2 channel left-right input.
Also have to admit that a lot rides on the recording (or should I say mixing/mastering) quality and for me not on the final format of the music carrier.
That said most (if not all) of the music I listen to is not binaural nor 2 mics but just 'studio' stuff but with good headphones I can still pinpoint instruments and singers both on headphones and speakers.
For me it doesn't really matter what mic, console or monitors are used.
What the ambience was, the placement of mics from performers etc.
As long as it sounds good to decent to me.
Fortunately most of the music I like does.
That said... if I were passionate about those things I probably would hear each 'aspect' of that too.
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Post by rostele2 on May 10, 2017 12:51:02 GMT
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Post by rostele2 on May 10, 2017 13:26:17 GMT
The hiss is not hiss, analyse the spectrum it goes right down to 10hz. It's a mountain stream. Even in LBR this one sounds OK. Pretty well known pianist btw... spiv_excerpt2.mp3 (574.59 KB) oh, and this is when I'm in bad mood,- when I see & hear what is supposed to one of the world's finest orchestras playing like a bunch of semi-educated pigs. gerg_extract.mp3 (1013.58 KB) |
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Post by rostele2 on May 10, 2017 13:55:25 GMT
Is it Lutoslawski? Don't hear a lot of him in this part of the world. I really like the sound of the piece. Is it his variations? Correct! Year Composed 1941. The choir seems like it's in front of the orchestra on headphone, It might be more to do with stereo separation which sounds wider with the choir than the orchestra. Were they wooden flutes? Choir was behind and yes from one side of the stage to the other. Correct about flutes, normal for Bach. Next question. In which recording was a figure of 8 mic used? |
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