flat earth only a speaker theme?!
Posted by: o.j. on 22 February 2004
Hy there! i wonder while talking about different solid state amps(no tubes),and if they are able to drive (if not the sound wil go out of phase)the used speakers, then it seems logical to me that in this case flat earth or round earth will only depend on speakers choice and positioning.What do you thinkabout this ?
O.J.
Posted on: 22 February 2004 by MarkEJ
OJ:
"Flat Earth" is (to me) only a method of judging the competence of an audio system. It uses precisely the same criteria one would use for judging a live performance (Are the musicians in tune? Are they all playing together? Are they having a good time?). An amazing proportion of modern audio equipment fails completely when the listener thinks like this. Some of it doesn't!
Best;
Mark
Posted on: 23 February 2004 by o.j.
quote:
Originally posted by Mark Ellis-Jones:
OJ:
"Flat Earth" is (to me) only a method of judging the competence of an audio system. It uses precisely the same criteria one would use for judging a live performance (Are the musicians in tune? Are they all playing together? Are they having a good time?). An amazing proportion of modern audio equipment fails completely when the listener thinks like this. Some of it doesn't!
Best;
Mark
I think flat or round earth means
the impression to the listener of the configuration of the sound stage ,round earth
seems to me being a thing of artificial room,
instruments appear larger than life and are therefore not that accurate because their unreal size comes out of wall reflections of
listener room,and the delay of this reflections to listener.Thats why i think a speaker that is more omnidirectional than an other one is more round earth.
flat earth linn kan or linn ninka, round earth vecteur premiere ,reference 3a.
o.J.
Posted on: 23 February 2004 by Mike in PA, USA
Mark, I like your prespective on this.
Posted on: 23 February 2004 by MarkEJ
Thanks Mike -- but although I would love to claim to credit for it, I cannot as it was one of the founding principals underlying the core values of both Linn Products and Naim Audio, way back before when 4-point text on music packaging seemed like a good idea.
Sometimes, something is simply right, and just because it's been around a while doesn't make it any less right.
Best;
Mark
Posted on: 23 February 2004 by o.j.
quote:
Originally posted by James:
quote:
I think flat or round earth means
the impression to the listener of the configuration of the sound stage
You can have a system that does the flat earth stuff (tune, rhythm, timing, coherence) well and still exhibit considerable spatial cues. Flat and soundstage are not mutually exclusive.
Hy james!last around chritmas i was in a concert in vienna musikverein.They played scheherazade.I have this famous decca record of Fritz rainer at home,cd and vinyl and i know it very good having it often heard in
a lot of different hifisystems.I had a good
seat in the concert,exactly in the middle left to right and concerning the distance to the performers i sat in a nearby perfect stereotriangle.during the whole concert i kept my eyes closed. And now my points:I never could
exactly say where the performers played concerning the depht of soundstage.
and i could often not exactly say where they played concerning left to right the stage.(this was easier to judge the horns than the violins)
With my thiels and jeff Rowland gear i had allways the feeling i could point exactly with the finger on every single instrument(playing solo)and am inside the performance(this does
not mean Involved like in the real concert i heard in musikverein.)
Naim3 and linn kan2 comes for me nearer to the
original i heared in musikverein ,although not as detailed as on my rowland thiel gear.
Intresting thing:a friend of mine is a classical horn player and he said often to me
he thinks my rowland/thiel system was one that let him hear musik more similar to that he heared playing in the orchester as an artist and not from the listeners point.
O.J
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James
Posted on: 23 February 2004 by Audio Visionary
Hello O J
Having also been in many concert halls, I agree
that when you sit further than 5 or 10 rows back
you lose the ability to precisely pipoint where the players are in the orchestra because you are
hearing so many reflections off the hall's boundaries. If you were hung 5 feet behind and 10 feet above the conductor's head, you would have a much greater ability to localise instruments in the orchestra - I believe this is why recordings often have the greater sense of imaging vs the concert hall.
Bryan
The Gramophone
Posted on: 24 February 2004 by o.j.
quote:
Originally posted by Audio Visionary:
Hello O J
Having also been in many concert halls, I agree
that when you sit further than 5 or 10 rows back
you lose the ability to precisely pipoint where the players are in the orchestra because you are
hearing so many reflections off the hall's boundaries. If you were hung 5 feet behind and 10 feet above the conductor's head, you would have a much greater ability to localise instruments in the orchestra - I believe this is why recordings often have the greater sense of imaging vs the concert hall.
Bryan
The Gramophone
Hy brian!thats what i wanted to say.to bring you(artificial) nearer to the performance will change the relation between
distance listener/performer and performer/other performers.and round earth sound changes these relations imo.
to me it seemes comparable to running through
the street with teleobjektiv on a photocamera.
Of course i can see things better and more exact in far distance but everything that is near becomes blown up and non sharp,and the same i get the feeling that the oversized Voce and Guitar of tracy chapman looses its accuratesse in a round earth system.On the other hand flat earth means to bring me away from the performance but i get alot of accuracy because the relation of distances between performers becomes more real.
maybe right is the thing between flat and round
similar to wide angle an teleobjektiv in photography terms.in german we call this normalbrennweite 50mm and it means similar to what we see with our eyes
without camera.
O.J.
Ps.excuse my bad english,for me it is already
sometimes
difficult to explain my rocketsiencetheories in
german language.
o.J.
Posted on: 24 February 2004 by Markus S
o.j., has it occurred to you that the spatial perspective your former system presented to you may in fact have been the correct one? Try to sit in on a classical recording session one day and look where they mount the microphones. They are usually much closer to the players than you would be when sitting in the audience.
One of the diffrences between flat and round earth lisetening modes is that round earthers
care about soundstaging, flat earthers accept it as a nice artefact that can happen when a system really does a lot of things right.
Unfortunately, soudnsatging can occur even when a system makes a mess of the musical message. One shouldn't pay much attention to it.
If I may say so, you sound like you need to find a dealer who will demonstrate these things to you.
Posted on: 24 February 2004 by o.j.
quote:
Originally posted by Markus Sauer:
o.j., has it occurred to you that the spatial perspective your former system presented to you may in fact have been the correct one? Try to sit in on a classical recording session one day and look where they mount the microphones. They are usually much closer to the players than you would be when sitting in the audience.
One of the diffrences between flat and round earth lisetening modes is that round earthers
care about soundstaging, flat earthers accept it as a nice artefact that can happen when a system really does a lot of things right.
Unfortunately, soudnsatging can occur even when a system makes a mess of the musical message. One shouldn't pay much attention to it.
If I may say so, you sound like you need to find a dealer who will demonstrate these things to you.
Hy Markus! perfectly
riht! i agree the micro phones are not there
were my listener place in a classical live concert is. Vice versa:It is impossible to get a seat on the place where the microphones hang.
I come home from the concert and take place in
my stereo triangle in front of my system.Maybe
i have now the right sound from the microphones
in the concert hall.but from a quite other direction.in reality a basstuba reaches from
its direction first the microphones later on the top wall of the concert hall and then it is reflected to my ears.a trumpet will rech
my ears in quite another way than the microphone that is really of axis to this trumpet.So you must admit that from this point of View that the microphone place over the head of musicians is wrong.the correct position
has to be where the audience has their Places
to get runing time,delay and reflection of
the signal similar to what ears of audience hear.
Now i come to the playback through the loudspeakers.It seem neccesary to me that they
have not a lot of of axis sound concerning my
listener place because of otherwise they would
add a lot of reflections of the listeners room
to the signal and the original reflections of the concert hall.
it is also a matter of fact that a pair of stereo speakers cannot bring information if a voice is coming from the floor or from the ceiling because in a stereosystem out of two loudspeakers there cannot be any vertical information (maybe therefore it is called flat
earth)to create Vertical information
you need a system that is based on vertical and horizontal axes beginning at the microphones during the recording and later on
on replay with two vertical and two horizontal
loud speakers driven through a four channel
preamp and a four chanel amp.
Maybe there is something wrong in my thinking,
and i woud like to hear other opinion.
o.j.
Posted on: 24 February 2004 by kuma
quote:
Originally posted by Markus Sauer:
One of the diffrences between flat and round earth lisetening modes is that round earthers
care about soundstaging, flat earthers accept it as a nice artefact that can happen when a system really does a lot of things right.
Unfortunately, soudnsatging can occur even when a system makes a mess of the musical message. One shouldn't pay much attention to it.
the soundstage properties are so much easier to be understood and seen than the musical message bits. You can talk about how wide, deep and tall are the soundstage yet the correctness of how things sound is too subjective and no way to pin point. so, it's much easier to pay attention to a physical phenomena than emotional one.
When I listen to the music via my Naim gear, it is still flater than others yet it sounds more real.
I think there are different degrees of flat and round earthiness. It should not be a black and white thing. A good system should be well balanced between the two.
Posted on: 25 February 2004 by o.j.
quote:
Originally posted by Todd Hutchinson:
For the record. Flat earth/round earth references the difference between bass and treble phasing. If I remember correctly, flat earth sound sends the bass signal before the treble.
todd
Hy Todd!please tell me! who sends? the cd player,the amp?the loudspeaker?
i know time coherent loudspeakers like thiels or audiophysics,or reference 3a ,but they are known as round earth.
O.J
Posted on: 25 February 2004 by Furnace
"For the record. Flat earth/round earth references the difference between bass and treble phasing. If I remember correctly, flat earth sound sends the bass signal before the treble."
For this to be true,we would need 3 earths
bass before treble...........flat
treble before bass...........round
bass and treble in sync......????
Posted on: 25 February 2004 by Stevea
quote:
Originally posted by Todd Hutchinson:
For the record. Flat earth/round earth references the difference between bass and treble phasing. If I remember correctly, flat earth sound sends the bass signal before the treble.
todd
Sounds like flat earth speakers are for me then. I can listen to the base when I come home from work and then listen to the treble over dinner.
I guess James' eIIIs are middle earth speakers being from Wellington and all.
Steve
Posted on: 25 February 2004 by kuma
quote:
Originally posted by James:
Round Earth folks focus on hi-fi artefacts like bass depth and slam, air, blackness, pin-point imaging etc.
But new Naim stuff do all those *round earth* things well,too.
Posted on: 25 February 2004 by kuma
quote:
Originally posted by James:
Is that why porno flicks grab the attention better than chick flicks? Perhaps women are indeed better listeners than men.
I don't know James.
But it seems to me that men, in general, are more visual than women.
I have to admit that I do like some sonic fireworks on occasion.
Posted on: 25 February 2004 by Mike in PA, USA
This is an interesting thread, and hopefully I can add something to it even if it is not so technical. I think the following is in some ways similar to Markus' "Sheherizade" example, but also demonstrates that often the "imaging" in recordings can be an artifact only or even downright flawed.
Steve Smith is a great drummer, and I had an opportunity to see him live with a quartet performing "Reimagined". Basically, this is a groups of "current" jazz musicians playing stardards with heavy interpretive liberty. Anyhow, Steve is a right handed drummer, and sets his hi-hat up on the left side of his kit, which would be stage left, or audience right for the listener. I sat right in front of the stage, right in front of Steve, in fact (it was a very small theater) and as I looked at the kit the hi-hat was to my right.
I recently purchased the same group's CD. Now, you would expect to hear the hi-hat primarily out of the right channel. However, it comes mostly out of the left channel. (I know the system is connected correctly). My only guess is that either the guy who mixed the tape was a musician who was accidentally thinking how the drum kit would sound if he were seated behind it, or else the channels got flipped at some point in the recording/mastering process. Regardless, whenever I hear the recording it annoys me, because it is litterally the opposite of my visual recollection of the group's performance. Anyhow, how would you explain this one?
-Mike
Posted on: 25 February 2004 by kuma
James.
Interesting. So it is true Naim is 'bandwidth 'limited.
Then how come they don't sound that way?
I must have tin ears.
Posted on: 25 February 2004 by o.j.
quote:
Originally posted by kuma:
quote:
Originally posted by James:
Round Earth folks focus on hi-fi artefacts like bass depth and slam, air, blackness, pin-point imaging etc.
But new Naim stuff do all those *round earth* things well,too.
I think there are two sorts of dynamic.(My opinion maybe technical not exact)
the difference between loud and silent.
and the time every hifi system takes to bring out this difference.
it is possible to bring out more than 100db
out of a loudspeaker and on the other hand
nearby 0db on silent passages not changing the
volume.But increasing time of the signal(at listener place out of the loudspeakers) is
at the most time slower than in reality,and that means of course phase shifting.
hearing with headphone this difference is alot smaller,i think because of the mechanical membran mass comparing to loudspeakers and less air between ear and membrane.,and also there are no room reflections of listener room.
of course there stay differences in amplifier speed depending on their construction.but with earphone they seem to be not so big.(take a good headphone a discman and give a try.Playing not ultraloud you will notice what i mean)
and of course i know there are no 100 db difference on the software.
concerning amplifiers it is often said roominformation is a bandwith thing and i remember i have read that naim bandwith is not so big than for example spectrals.(do not know if this is correct)
O.J. (rocket scientist)
Posted on: 26 February 2004 by kuma
quote:
Originally posted by James:
Everything is bandwidth limited. Even the big Krells and Mark Levinsons, only less so compared to Naim.
Spectral and Halcro supposedly have ultra-wide bandwidth and low distortion.
Both have excellent dynamics and effortlessness yet lacking big time in personality.
Phase responce shift must be the part of voicing process in that it must add some flavors to the amplifeirs.
It is fascinating what you can read and measure vs. what you actually hear.
Posted on: 26 February 2004 by Top Cat
quote:
Anyhow, how would you explain this one?
As a drummer of quite a few years experience (some of it semi-pro) I can state for the record that it's a convention thing, though obviously not a hard and fast rule - generally recordings of drums reflect the drummer's perspective (assuming we're talking individually miked drums & cymbals) which is normally hihat on the left, snare central along with kick drum, and toms from left to right panning as the tom increases in size.
On less close-miked kit recordings you might find a more homogenous miking arrangement which reflects a more 'live' sound which would reflect what you would hear from (say) the mosh pit.
Meanwhile, another thing to bear in mind is piano miking. How often have we heard a stereo pan on a piano - left hand (bass clef) to left speaker panning across to right hand (treble clef) to the right hand speaker? It's common, and again doesn't necessarily reflect what you'd hear out in the audience (whereas a single mic'd piano placed in a stereo 'position' - rather than a pan would). Again, let's call it player's perspective.
It's tricky to get a decent drum sound, and close miking allows relative levels of the various drums to be more carefully controlled - which is why a 'live', wide-area mic'd kit would have a lot more 'bleed' and may sound more accurate from a listener's perspective*. However, this rarely sounds right to my (educated?) ears though it reflects the relative balance between the various drumset elements' volumes.
John
* If you've ever sat behind a drumset and played with any real technique you'll find that you will perceive the kick drum to be at a much lower volume than the snare, which seems dominant. The ride-cymbal wash is much less transparent than how it records, and can overwhelm you (which is why IMHO a lot of jazzers use styx such as Premier Jazz E and the like, as they have less weight and are less prone to 'washing').
This is of course based upon my own experiences as both producer (of drum sound) and consumer (as a music fan) - and trying to correlate the two.
I'm sure someone can probably fill in the gaps, but the essence of what I'm trying to say is that there are many accepted conventions (for right or for wrong) based upon the experience of engineers to get good sounds. Not that it always works, of course...
John
Posted on: 26 February 2004 by Mike in PA, USA
John,
It is good to hear your insights. I used to play bass guitar, have done some amateur recording, and pretty much understand everything you say. It still pisses me off, though, to hear Steve Smith playing drums in my living room, but on a left handed kit. "Player's Perspective" just doesn't make sense to me as a listener.
Oh well.
-M
Posted on: 26 February 2004 by o.j.
Hy there!
facts are following:as said before Naim is
bandwith limited comparing to halcro or spectral.
Amused to death is a software that is made with
alot of special effects out of phase shifting.
fact is also that reproducing a live performance means live listener position has to be reproduction listener position.and vice versa.only way to go for this is to position
the mics were the audience sits and later on
to put loudspeakers where the performers sat.
doing this reproduction in a room without
reflection this would(theoretically) come nearest to 1to1.
go to cinema .movies are made from audience
perspektive and in cinema you see them from nearby the same perspective.(the camera perspective)
Next thing is no fact only my personal feeling.
hearing cds like amused to death it seems to me
more spectacular with ultrabandwith equipment,
because of it makes me able to point more exactly on the places where the sound seems to come from.Maybe it is right that bandwith
in connection with perfect linear frequencresponse would be perfect.
but imo better a limited
bandwith and linear frequence response than ultra bandwith and a lot of phaseshifts.
both perfect would be the solution but nearby unaffordable but imo fm acoustics would be the perfect amp for me which does it all.
O.J.
Posted on: 26 February 2004 by Paul Ranson
If your round earth system does its stuff with CD then it's nothing to do with bandwidth over 22kHz since CD has none. And SACD only has noise. And you cannot hear it anyway. If FM ever sounds good it's doing so with a max of 15kHz and a steep filter beyond.
Reproducing good music isn't a matter of phase distortion or ultrasonics.
Paul
Posted on: 26 February 2004 by o.j.
quote:
Originally posted by Todd Hutchinson:
What the phase shift does is retard the HF cycle relative to the LF, but the signal will happen at precisely the same time.
James[/QUOTE]
That is very interesting. If I understand correctly the high frequency cycle is, for lack of better understanding, "muted" as compared to the low frequency cycle? and this combined with less bandwidth creates better PRAT.
It sounds like that at 70kHz Naim is still a ways off from many manufactures in the realm of bandwidth but it is enough of a difference to add round earth quality without sacrificing what we value in the product line.
Is it not possible to have both?
todd[/QUOTE]Hy todd!as james said it is very difficult to understand.years ago some people thought it is not necessary to go for big bandwith because the human being is not able to
hear high frequencies like 100000 or two hundred thousand hertz.later on somebody noticed that cutting the bandwith with a filter
will strike back to hearable frequencies which are in a proportion to those non hearable frequencies,i think harmankardon called this effect aliasing in their earlier papers.
i would compare this effect with a bridge that
begins to swing through a frequencie from outside and will transform this swinging to another frequencie and than destroy itself by strongening this swinging (only a metapher to understand) but we are talking about akind of electrical resonance.on the other hand it is very difficult(and expensive too to build super
linear amplifiers with ultra bandwith.)this would be theoretically the correct way.
and now here comes the marketing factor.
bandwidth of an amplifier is as sexy as big frequencieresponse of an loudspeaker (remember the seventies),or the superstable running of a direct drive turntable.given in a technical papersheet.
Look at this forum most guys here demand a lot
of accuracy of their stereosystem but nobody
can deny that he would also like to have a deep uncoloured and controlled bass ,and a fast one too. and in the end naim seems to
to do this compromise better and better,their
products are still pratkings and over the years they got higher bandwith ,and last not least they are affordable.
Intresting question for me would be to hear others
opinions if for example mark levinson or krell
does today better prat than 10 years ago.
imo levinson does not.
O.J.
Posted on: 26 February 2004 by kuma
quote:
Originally posted by o.j.:
Intresting question for me would be to hear others
opinions if for example mark levinson or krell
does today better prat than 10 years ago.
imo levinson does not.
o.j.
Krell's strength has never been the pace nor timing.
but they can be fun especially driving ATC speakers.
