Fidelity to what? Or what are we tying to achieve with all our expensive gear?

[tannoyman]

Also, you find many inexperienced hifi newbes talking about 'that live sound' or whatever and you can tell they're just spouting words to try to sound like they know more than they really do, to get people to listen to their inexperienced opinions.

Hi Chris

It's called bovine excrement and there's a lot of it about. I of course only talk perfect sense! (hmmm)

david

[nat8808]

That probably explains why I generally prefer studio albums to live albums: it's the performer's creative process I enjoy listening to.

As for ensuring my system is on the right track, I try to get human voice, piano, trumpet and violin sounding realistic. If it does those well, it should do most things well.

Me too and for the same reason - live albums can be good of course but normally for the different versions of songs or improvisations.

I'm never quite sure about comparing certain instruments as a whole to judge my system by as I never know how things are recorded or using what or if a certain 'sound' has been engineered or close-mic'd instruments been eq'd to fit them in bette with each other (and the gear used to do that might be softening transients etc). It's interesting if you DO know, as you can try to hear that too.

Then if it's a simple two mic recording, I don't know how the piano, say, has been positioned in the room and has the bite of the piano been lost by the placement or by the room/hall acoustic etc etc?

In some ways, unnaturallly close mic'd instruments show off more of what your system is capable of but then the music itself needs to be minimalist so you can hear it. For me, the kind of sounds I enjoy are when you get the oportunity to stick your ear right near a live instrument, like your head in the lid of the piano or
really close to a cymbol or bagpipes (did that today - some chap playing outside a pub for a wedding reception - love the sound of close, live bagpipes and the crispness of the sound).

So a longer listen of everything should hopefully let you realise certain aspects of sound ARE being re-created at some point by your system, and if they are missing on some recordings, perhaps that's down to the recording then.

I guess I just listen generally with a wide-ish range of natural sounds, acoustic instruments, sythesised and electrified too and take a mental note of how often I'm impressed by things I hear and hope it's because they sound real. A very laid back process!

[nat8808]

Hi Chris

It's called bovine excrement and there's a lot of it about. I of course only talk perfect sense! (hmmm)

david

Me too! Perfect sense all the time...

[Macca]

I guess I just listen generally with a wide-ish range of natural sounds, acoustic instruments, sythesised and electrified too and take a mental note of how often I'm impressed by things I hear and hope it's because they sound real. A very laid back process!

That pretty much describes my process also. When you get a lot of 'wow listen to that!' moments you know you are on the right track.

[nat8808]

Annoying though when you hear one pair of speakers make you go wow at one thing, and another pair wow at another, but never the two things happen on the same speaker..

What do you do then? Spose have to keep trying more till you do, or constantly swap speakers...

I'm doing that with some AE AE2 Pros and JAS Oriors - the bite of the AE2s are adictive and actually a bit more natural, whist sounding a little dark. The Oriors nice and airy and open sounding .. which I miss.

[BTH K10A]

For those striving to achieve the realistic sound of live rock music this may be of some help


http://www.davethebass.com/pa.htm

[Barry]

From the Grave

[awkwardbydesign]

OK, I'll stick my head above the parapet. I think we've backed ourselves into a corner with the "High Fidelity" tag. It should be renamed, audio would do, or as I call mine, a "stereo". We all seem to want different things, so define hifi in different ways. I actually prefer live recordings, as I want "the closest approach to the original MAGIC". If the original SOUND was crap, why would I want that? Some records are technically lousy but sound magic, frequently (but not exclusively) live recordings. And our ears are all different, our cultural and experiential (is that a word?) preferences are different, etc.
How can we agree on "fidelity" when we mean different things by the word? The measurists demand to be able to SEE how accurate the reproduction is (I've never understood that. Would you define a great wine that way, for example?), while the pure subjectivists consider measurements to be irrelevant.
At the moment I am using an old pair of Mordaunt Short Carnival 3s while I try to finish the big speakers. The tweeters are those cheap £5 (back in the day) plastic Audax things. A bit primitive and there is no bass to speak of, but I'm really enjoying my new CDs (Fink and Tinariwen). The midrange is pretty good, actually. I'm not expecting "high fidelity", but I have adjusted my expectations accordingly, and knowing they are temporary I'm just enjoying. When the big speakers are finished I will expect far more from them, and if they don't deliver, well then, you could say the Carnivals are better spesakers!
So, change the name, unless you are in the recording business (and even there pop is monitored on little "transistor radio" speakers), and stop obsessing over a misnomer.
Discuss.

[Macca]

It's not about getting hi-fidelity to the performance it is about getting high fidelity to the recording of the performance. A subtlety that many seem to miss.

[The Barbarian]

Too many cuckoo's searching for something that aint there. Why not just buy a stereo stop farting about & just use it for what it was intended for. Some of the stereo's that people have, that i have heard i really feel sorry for them because if that is their idea of Audio nirvana they need a doctor immediately.