Stanley Tripod Flashlight

You just brought a smile to an old Shure Brother engineering tech.

Want to berate Dr. Bose please do.

Mark (sixoneeight) = 618

Reply to
Markem
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As a former touring sound guy with buddies employed by Mark Levinson / Madrigal (well, formerly sin JBL came along...) and Sennheiser, looking at stats and lab measurements, I can also try to berate Dr. Bose all day long. As pro gear goes, "No highs, no lows, must be Bose!"

However!

1.) NOTHING works and is as durable and all-day comfortable as their pilot's ANR headsets. Nada! Pilots who actually try them in flight still willingly plunk down $900+ bucks for them. "Bose Killers" come and go with the seasons in flying magazines.

2.) I still haven't found anything that sounds as good to a non-audiophile, with similar performance in a similar package, as those overpriced Wave table radio / cd players. Is the bass muddy? Yeah. Can you vary the tone? No. But so many LIKE them!

I know more people who are simply "music lovers", who don't know what SPL or THD or "Q" mean (and don't want to), who absolutely love the sound and the size of those things. I've got to admit that they're plenty listenable in the right room with an Ipod or CD, and it's the size of a clock radio. My wife has one particular CD, a Krishna Das w/ Walter Becker "chanting" disc that actually sounds incredibly clear and full on it, while playing rather loud. The spec reader in me didn't _want_ to like it, but I do.

Reply to
B A R R Y

As you know: Well known phenomenon in the studio control room - listen long enough over a set of speakers and, aurally speaking, anything sounds "good".

What the silly audiophile industry (fueled by those of a remarkable condescending nature in pursuit of what they are being duped into imagining is the ultimate (at the moment) of "recorded sound", and perpetuated by marketing geniuses who wouldn't know a hertz from a rental car) has NEVER taken into account is the simple fact that:

ANYONE who wasn't in that SPECIFIC control room, and listening to the subject mix over that SPECIFIC set of speakers, has absolutely NO earthly idea of what ANY recording is intended to sound like!

I guarantee that that is a _infu*&kingarguable FACT that can be put in their respective pipes and smoked 'til Roger Nichols and Steely Dan can't be uttered in the same breath.

There ... I feel better already. ;)

Reply to
Swingman

For just a brief minute there I thought I was reading rec.audio.* back in the '80s :-)

Reply to
Doug Payne

... and I too was there. Even Fletcher had a hard time keeping up in those days.

Reply to
Swingman

Can I take my CD player out of the box filled with green sand now?

Reply to
Robatoy

Snip

Not to discredit those people but probably few of them have ever been in a music hall with fine acustics to know that there are sounds that are created that the CD or Ipod will never reproduce.

Reply to
Leon

or ... I would rather listen to a bad recording of a good song, than a good recording of a bad song! ;)

fini, EOF.

Reply to
Swingman

All this recording stuff brings back memories. I used to be a recording techie and produced voice only programs.

My favorite story is about some JBL monitors I installed in my studio. They were the AM radio ones so they had no high end. Which was fine for me because I was recording voice only material.

I would put on some music now and then. People would walk into the studio and immediately exclaim that these were wonderful speakers that had a crystal clear high end. And nothing I said would sway them from that position. I would show them the frequency response test chart that came with the speakers when I bought them. I would scream, "See, there is no high end. These are AM monitor speakers. Which means that they have the same frequency range as an AM radio."

Nothing I said mattered. They were unimpressed with the chart. It sounded clear, so they created a nice high end for something that had no high end. A total psycho-acoustic effect.

Reply to
Lee Michaels

Or mics to pick them up in the first place, or speakers to reproduce them before they get to the final judge - the psychoacoustic properties of the individual human ear.

But to me what is really interesting/intriguing, and that anyone who has ever spent much time *mixing" in the studio can attest to, is the fact that there are often things you may hear in a mix/audience that are not actually recorded/played, but come from a combination of recorded/played sounds/instruments.

Indeed, there are some symphonies that intentionally have "ghost" parts that are "heard" by the audience, despite the fact that no one is actually playing that part.

I love that!

Reply to
Swingman

^^^^^ Key word!

As you well know, and despite the best efforts of acoustic engineers, all rooms have areas (sometimes quite small, so small that the simple turn of your head will bring it into play) where a particular frequency combines, or cancels, to create a standing wave "node". If you happen to be in that node (position), then what you hear therein is often startlingly not even close to the original.

IOW, there are areas in a room where highs that aren't in the original may indeed be accentuated, or the bass or mids attenuated, to the point of fooling the ear.

IME, and in keeping with Murphy ... particularly in a strange control room, there are generally one or two of these nodes _right_ where the mix engineer sits to mix, and just waiting to bite him in the butt. DAMHIKT. ;)

Reply to
Swingman

Exactly. It was a long time ago but when I was still in school and in the choir, our instructor would record our practice sessions. Very low tech but it always sounded different to us. We were not looking for a quality playback so much as sounds that we would improve upon in a particualr hall. We could not hear the sounds when singing but the recorder would let us hear the problems.

Exactly! There is nothing like live and no electronics.

Reply to
Leon

If the speaker put out meaningful soundpressure at 8K, and had enemic LF output, the illusion of 'highs' would be there. Next question would be who/how the charts were created. Was it a composite including off-axis response as well?

Reply to
Robatoy

Hush now ... you're bringing back bad memories. ;)

At one time it was required knowledge to even walk into a studio control room, and I learned/knew it cold, well enough to eventually own/run a commercial recording studio (still do, but no longer operate, or even participate, unless at the point of a gun).

But now it's so nice to be able to just sit back and LISTEN, without all the analytical details that are absolutely necessary into creating a modern commercial recording, no matter how "golden eared" you are!

I never thought that getting older, no longer having that quality, and actually knowing when to quit, could be so pleasant. I wonder how Bruce (Swieden) still does it?

(Actually, I do know/understand the psychoacoustic "why" of "how" he does it, but like your quote above, it makes me tired thinking about it!) ;)

Reply to
Swingman

Don't you just love those guys who are trying to fit a 30 Hz wave (38 feet long) into

7-foot car? (Even a 1/4 wave is still almost 10 feet long.) A goofball, in his riced-out Civic was beside me at the lights a few days ago, windows up (it's cold) must been some loud in there as *MY* review mirror was vibrating. As he looked around, he saw me looking at him and he had such a vacuous look, that I burst out laughing. When the light turned green, he retaliated by accelerating away making all kinds of racket...and I blew his doors off....with my van. I guess it wasn't his day.

Mythbusters disproved the existence of The Brown Note.

Reply to
Robatoy

But bass players (young one's, that is) routinely prove the existence of The Pink Note.

Reply to
Swingman

I wife has heard the identical performance in both a 30 seat room and a "real" concert hall.

Reply to
B A R R Y

That episode reminded me of Servodrive's late 80's AES demos where they blew out candles.

Reply to
B A R R Y

Swingman,

Think about that, and this:

Negotiating night after night to place the console in a spot where those standing wave and comb filtered areas are favorably used to create the best possible product for the audience. Remember...

1.) You've never been in the room before, so you have little time to try to locate them. By the time power can be applied, it's too late to move. Your main tool is an Anvil briefcase you can have dropped on the floor and listen to the returns and decay as you move around. 2.) The house management might not be so thrilled at your solution. 3.) Last night was a wonderful sounding 5000 seat theater, tonight is a brick and glass university "field house" designed for basketball and indoor football practice, and tomorrow is a former bowling alley, department store, airplane hanger, you name it.

It's all even more interesting if you flew into town this morning in a pressurized aircraft.

Reply to
B A R R Y

My sincerest sympathies ... I hope you've been able to recover and, except for the wooddorker part, lead a normal life?

Like a good little musikian/recording engineer, in the earlier days I supplemented my income with live sound gigs. Not stadium size events like you, but a few well known traveling acts in the larger local clubs and at festivals, so I can definitely feel your pain, to a limited extent.

For the most part I hated it! ... particularly when the drunk fans/lead singer's GF/Lead guitar players GF, etc, could actually get to you at the mixing console ... my hats off to you and you have my undying respect and sympathy.

The latter because you might actually need therapy later in life to deal with the PTD!

Reply to
Swingman

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