Amusingly, after someone listens to the mic feed during the dress rehearsal they often ask if they can listen to the concert this way. That is, the feed typically is more detailed and intimate than what we hear as audience members. Ironic.
But that connection to the live event is still a matter of artifice. So many variables that require an aesthetic choice about how to record the event and master it. It’s all choices, choices, choices. And the choices made by Bob Fine in his Mercury recordings, and by Kenneth Wilkinson in his Decca recordings, and by Lewis Layton in his RCA recordings were all different, and all valid choices reflecting the live event as accurately as they could.
1 Like
artifice: a sense of falseness and trickery; a clever trick or stratagem; a cunning, crafty device or expedient; wile; trickery; guile; craftiness; cunning; ingenuity; inventiveness
Exactly.
"Clever or cunning devices or expedients, especially as used to trick or deceive others. "
- Oxford English Dictionary
An audiophile seeks to be deceived.
3 Likes
some pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the pleasure of deception
in the early 1970s, I had a jazz trio/quartet. We would play at people’s homes.
(I was deceptive though, I had no idea how to play the proper notes, but my enthusiasm saved me)
3 Likes
Not having a DSD player, I find gin lubricates the art of deception. Most people will believe anything after a couple of drinks.
Elk:
Are any of your recordings available to the public?
Nope, they are all archival. I have encouraged their release but it is not my call.
3 Likes
Fully agreed! This reality unfortunately is a complete contradiction to most arguments in the high end scene where every intent and result seems to be reasoned by the supposed reference point „live concert“. A mock argument.
3 Likes
Yes and no. Every engineer tries to reach the live experience in some ways and doesn’t care if he surpasses (and doesn’t meet) it in other ways.
A polarizing and exaggerated statement:
The closest experience to a classical live event is a one point recording (rarely exists at all), played back on Maggies in an overdamped room. I know…soundwise no one wants that.
Please don’t take it fully serious, but a bit.
1 Like
You have made this look like a DSD issue but you haven’t compared the same albums with other formats? You compared your DSD purchases with other albums on streaming?
This is comparing apples to tomatoes.
I’m sure you will find other formats of the same albums will sound mostly the same.
So you should purchased the redbook versions of the same albums for completeness.
So really you are complaining about the mastering job, not the DSD format…
Many mastering engineers on Gearspace will tell you , you wouldn’t like most jazz and classical without dynamic range compression.
i.e. what they are saying is too much dynamic range can be a real problem.
@Paul I wonder if this is the case with these 2 albums (Temporary Circumstances and Also Sprach).
1 Like
True. No setup is comparable to live music’s instrument separation, timbre, dynamic range, harmonics, and more. I have yet to be fooled that a hifi setup cannot be distinguished from live vocals, instruments, and performances. Nevertheless, they can be a fine alternative…readily available and remote controlling.
I report my observations to try to share that I have not too-quickly arrived at my assessment, and have challenged my assessment often before and after my initial post here ------ my comments are based on being a keen listener to hundreds of setups and tens of thousands of performances – live and audiophile artifice (see definitions above) – since the late 1960s. I spent hundreds of hours at a premier hifi store as a ‘professional ear’ listening to and optimizing the best equipment ever made (the IRS-V was my standard for a long time, more recently impressed by Clarisys; I have yet to hear PSA Aspen speakers).
‘Apples and tomatoes’ is in effect what we do. Sometime, the same system in the same room compares apples and tomatoes (the oranges are out to lunch). After several hours of warm up on a listening day, sometimes a system sounded so bad we would turn it off within a minute and move on. Importantly, nothing I have ever heard comes close to live music.
My comments about DSD were not based solely on the examples I presented. As noted, I compared extensive, numerous, and accumulative appreciation sessions of streaming vs files vs SACD discs.
Yesterday, I confirmed again my assessments, again. Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain is available as DSD and FLAC stream, the latter is better (presumably, the DSD is a remake of the master tape or WAV/FLAC). Also, none of the dozens of DSD files I have comes close to the magic, sparkle, depth, nuance, detail, liveliness, and instrument focus and respect as presented on the 1982 44.1/16 streamed CD of a 1982 recording, Alternate Blues by Clark Terry, Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gilespie, and Oscar Peterson. The standup bass’ notes are discernible as rich, layered notes, not tympani thumps. All instruments have their rightful and detailed place in the hologram. No DSD comes close to this kind of delivery, though perhaps as you and others suggest this are engineer decisions. Likewise with Steve Gad’s albums. Again, these are examples from a very long list, not all there is to my assessment that DSD is relatively technical (which may be why listening to headphones minimizes the differences), dry, suppressed, and lacking the secondary and tertiary sounds vinyl and carefully-produced streams can offer. The high dynamic range of DSD misrepresents the high dynamic range of live music, seemingly preferring to accentuate some performers at the expense of others (Octave’s Temporary Circumstances is one example, doing a fine job on vocals and electric bass only (standup bass, my primary instrument when I played professionally, on Octave DSDs does not fare well).
As rightly noted recently, the DSD procedure has limited material and is subject to delivering what the engineers and marketers think we want.
Fewer apples and oranges could be offered if the same musicians, instruments, song, microphones, and a whole lot more were recorded simultaneously in DSD and WAV/HiRes FLAC. As I noted initially, I embrace DSD technology and thus hope/presume the DSD would shine.
No doubt…pertaining to recordings, not live music.
As for complaining, I prefer to say I am disappointed by DSD so far.
Wait now, the people spread out in my room aren’t actually there??!!
I’m going to put out less snacks and drinks now! A huge savings.
(I was curious as to why no one touched the pigs in a blanket tray)
6 Likes
Yum, yum….
1 Like
@akro, I admire and respect your willingness to share what you are experiencing in your listening. I don’t doubt that you are reporting accurately on what you are hearing. That your experience is so completely different than my experience is one of these anomalies of our hobby. That we can all agree in the joys of listening to MUSIC is the treasure.
Thank you for your reporting! I encourage you to keep exploring, and, importantly, to keep sharing.
3 Likes
Article in Copper. There’s a few things in here that may be controversial.
1 Like
Heh. Oh dear.
2 Likes
Hm, interesting article. I am not exactly sure but I have the feeling that I stumbled over this text before it was published as an article in the Copper Magazin. Maybe it was in a thread on Audiophylestyle? I am not sure… anyways, it‘s not important.
Does anybody know where exactly in the ESS Sabre DAC chip documentation it is mentioned that any DSD stream below DSD1024 in „converted to DoP“ (as it is claimed in the article) before conversion to analog?
DoP == DSD, just a different way of packaging the data.
Any decrease in sound quality would be a sign of a poor implementation.
2 Likes
I am pretty sure @tedsmith wrote something similar about this somewhere in the forum.
3 Likes