Tuning a New World of Computer Audio Playback

Here's something Sonic found in the Wall Street Journal:


A Gift for Music Lovers Who Have It All: A Personal Utility Pole


Japan’s music fanatics want personal grid connection; ‘electricity is like blood’

By Juro Osawa

August 14, 2016

Read the full story and watch the video here:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-for-music-lovers-who-have-it-all-a-personal-utility-pole-1471189463

Sonic comments: I am particularly impressed by the second AudioFan, Itsushi Hamasaki, featured in the video. He has that huge system in a 250 sq ft apartment (a space that works out to something like 18ft x 14 ft for the almost his entire apartment – the listening area + living area + kitchen). His loudspeakers alone cost US$100,000, he has to move his listening couch each time he opens his refrigerator and says he has not bought any new clothes for 15 years!

These are the Giants whom Sonic salutes        

Sonic

Greeting Zonees

At one time Sonic was curious about battery-powered audio devices because these appear logically ideal – no exposure to the muck in power lines and certainly for those who have to be plugged into the power sockets of an apartment complex, not a chance of hearing the electrical pollution from your neighbour’s dishwasher. I was also told an audiophile I know was considering the purchase of a very expensive preamp that was battery powered which he told everyone he was very impressed with.

So I asked Mr Green and he had this to say:

“When doing car audio I always thought it was the wheels making the system sound rubbery, now I would say it was batteries."

"When I first got my batteries hooked up on the Altmann I thought I was doing something wrong, I really thought this was going to smash my wall power. I was expecting more dynamics, clarity and a warm tube like mid-range, Instead I got this immediate opaque sound that crawled right under my skin."  

"The sound was like you had electricity trying to push its way through dielectrics.  Why do some think it sounds better than wall electric? Maybe their fuse box is on the wall too tight, or their outlets are clamped down on their walls or cable inside the wall bent all over the place with sharp stressed angles. I don’t know but in my place and at my places in Nashville, Ohio and Bill’s the wall electric blows away the sound of the battery."

"The battery in theory should kill the wall electric but I think the housing (at least the ones I heard) stop the battery from being table to delivering it’s electricity without carry some baggage. BTW they do tune at that tells me that the electricity [the batteries] is vulnerable to mechanics, so the isolation bit is out. Honestly though Sonic, I think a lot of people listen with their head and not their ears.”

By posting this reply to my question on my Building a Room Full of Balanced Harmonics thread, Michael saved Sonic a detour through difficult and possibly fruitless experimentation.

Sonic

Greetings Zonees

Here are two comments from Michael, the first made in October 2012 and the second in January 2014. The reason why I am re-posting these are it demonstrates that Mr Green “heard” my room from Sonic’s description before I realised years later that in these two comments lay the Code to deal with my room!

A.
From October 2012:
 
Michael: “Do you have a wood coffee table? If so try it in 3 places.”

[Sonic: this suggestion became the foundation of the wood tables that support my turntables, preamp, phono stages, DAC and computer]

“It almost sounds like your room is working in layers not spheres and it is filled with anti-nodes and not nodes, Why? Hmmmm”

"Had this happen to me when working in studios that were on middle floors of the building. The walls were very hard and there was a weird low to mid resonate tone to them. Weird suck outs would happen and it would never be quite right until wood walls were put in the rooms. One thing that did help though was the use of strategically placed wooded tables that would fool parts of the room into thinking it was a different dimension while trapping underneath. All these rooms were about 10 feet tall or more."

"Do me one more thing. Turn on the music, get your latter out and place your head at half way from ceiling to floor in your room right at the spot where your listening chair is and tell me the sound as compared to your normal sitting height. If your room is layering you will have a specific sweet spot floor to ceiling like you do front to back."

[Sonic:  I have since discovered that Sonic’s room does indeed work in layers and not spherical Zones.  You see this in how this has been addressed with hanging DecoTunes and the EchoTunes arranged on the ceiling to deal with side-to-side flows as well as to treat a Zone that extends further from the ceiling surface than the Sound Shutters can handle. Soon I may be posting about a new project based on a re-reading of this from MrGreen where I am adding another dimension of control to this room with “trapping using tables” the way Michael describes here.]

B.
Then responding to Sonic’s questions in January of 2014:

Michael: “I may not have the answers you want, but I can tell you what would be my approach if this was my system.”

“First and foremost I would walk up to my wall and hit it.  If I do this to my wall in Vegas build the way it is the whole room vibrates, There’s this obvious book that is inside the walls and you c an feel that the walls are connected to each other 2 x 4 structures covered in drywall. I can jump in my room here and feel the floor give and again a loud boom and felt this the construction here is not overly solid but has a lot of flex to it.”

“If I did this same test in your room I would feel and hear right away that your room is built like a brick compared to the one in Vegas, your walls sound closer to the tile floors I have downstairs here  that they do my walls.”

“When I take my portable system and I set it in the downstairs room on the floor ad play it I can hear how the hardness of this material gets into my system. Keep in mind this is just the floor that is hard. When testing wood for some of the guys I laid down the 2 x 4’s on the floor and put the music ply on top, then I set the portable system back on and played it. The difference is more than shocking. The same thing has happened when I compare hard to flex walls in my factories and other homes.”

“plat” vs “drum”

Michael: “The first thing I think of when slapping or just barely tapping the walls here is a drum sound. A low resonant tone that is more like an explosion of mid to low bottom, It’s a boom, but not an echo type of boom that is unruly, a solid big round boom, Importantly it is easy to tell the room is connected with itself and speaks as if one voice, I hardly had to tap the wall, any wall, and the whole room made the tone not just that spot then the room joining but more like the entire room just made a movement.”

“The “Tunable Room” is all about creating the exact same sounds as musical instruments. If you were in one when only the frames were up you would be shocked at how the tone when just barely tapping it moved through the whole space, and how you can hear the entire range low to high with tones of harmonics. The opposite of this is then sound of a concrete wall.  It’s more of a dead slap with the room ringing and pinging instead of the whole room creating “body”.”

[Sonic: this is again an insight from Mr Green that is spot on.  I did the “BOO” and handclap test in an Australian friend’s woodframe and drywall Home Theatre room and found the sound very different from the concrete structures in my home town – the drywall room is quite “dead” and even when untreated is not “live” either, and I understood a lot about how the RoomTune and PZC are the perfect thing in these rooms yet have to be applied with a different approach inb a brick bunker room like Sonic.  Again the wood Sonic has since applied and I am adding to has alleviated much of the concrete bunker effect.]

Sonic

A Dialoque through which Sonic gained learnings from Michael

Sonic (to Michael): What is the process/drill you adopt when you change CD and start playing a new one?

Michael: This is something that none of us can change no matter what we do, but every recording and system goes through a settling period every time we put a new recorded code into our system. To be clear, this isn’t a system settling by letting it settle after a physical change, but the system settling into a common place with a recording.

Hiend1 brought this up when he listened to “Hell freezes over” Eagles. I also bring this up about my listening. This isn’t me making changes during the playback. This is letting the recording play on repeat at the same volume for a long period of time. As time goes on the stage begins to fill out and the instrument become extremely life like and vivid. I’m of course using a super low mass simple system so my setup is going to settled far easier than one with more parts and complexity.

Sometimes I do CD and CD, but I have become more fond of putting a recording on, and then when it calls to me after some settling, I’ll go in and listening. I have found that my system being so free resonant and so full of musical sounding materials, almost plays itself if I’m patient enough to let the system do it’s thing.

Right now I’m playing “Pure Prairie League” Amie & Others. When I first put it on it was OK but nothing to write home about. After a few days of having it settle I almost can’t get out of the room, learning more about that recording than I ever have. Even when I’m writing I’ll hear something (maybe a strum) I’ll head back in.

You guys have probably noticed that I use CD only and may wonder why.

Well a while back, and every time I have tried it since, one being recently, when I have done more than one source I hear something that bugs me, I even did this at the tunable room up at Bill’s and have done this on several systems. When you plug more than one input on a receiver or preamp there is signal loss. The other component doesn’t even have to be turned on, even have a component there at all. Just plug cable into any jack and you will the signal change.

When recording the same thing happened…..when I record I physically unplugged all the channels I wasn't using.

Every time you plug more than one source into any component you are creating another electromagnetic field antenna. Look at how close those RCAs are to each other The two fields are competing.

Remark from Sonic: Michael posted these insights answering Sonic’s questions back in December 2014.

Greetings Zonees

Here are extracts of a paper by Stuart and Howard published in the JAS (Japan Audio Society) Journal 2015 Vol. 55 No. 5 about Meridian’s MQA – Master Quality Authenticated.

Sonic has been doing research into Hi-Res digital audio particularly the purchasing of recorded music online.  

Meridian with its MQA appears something exciting with its ability to perform Music Origami (see section in paper) which is “folding” what is a greater amount of high frequency resolution than would seem possible into a given digital format. This might be a poor description on my part but read on to get a taste of what Meridian appears to have achieved.  This will have exciting possibilities for the future of digital music and how we may purchase quality music online to our computers, servers and mobile devices over an internet connection and 4G phone link.  

For the full paper with tables and graphs go to: http://www.jas-audio.or.jp/jas_cms/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/201509-008-019.pdf  


About MQA  -- Bob Stuart and Keith Howard

Introduction

Almost since the arrival of digital audio systems of sufficient quality for the recording, transmission and replay of high-quality sound – and particularly since the introduction of CD in major audio markets during 1982/3 – there have been complaints that digital audio falls short of the perfection it appears to promise. Early problems with the performance of A-to-D and D-to-A converters, excess jitter and inadequate understanding of the need for and correct application of dither all played a part in this, but even as these issues were resolved dissenting voices continued to claim that there was something ‘wrong’ with digital audio as represented by the 16-bit/44.1 kHz and 16-bit/48 kHz systems prevalent at the time.[1]

It is now widely, although not universally, accepted that ‘hi-res’ digital audio, with increased sampling rate or bitdepth, delivers improved sound quality. But it does so at large cost to coding efficiency. A 24-bit/88.2 kHz recording requires three times the data rate of a 16-bit/44.1 kHz alternative, and that ratio increases by further factors of two as sampling rate is doubled again to 176.4 kHz and then to 352.8 kHz, the sampling rate of DXD. While the progressive improvement in sound quality is welcome, it takes a disproportionate toll on data rates and storage capacity. Simply increasing sampling rate also fails to address head-on why it is that 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz sampling rates impose subjective limitations. Instead, sampling rate has become a proxy for resolution.

Human Hearing

Academic research has identified two distinct reasons why increasing sampling rate can improve sound quality.

First, despite the well-known c.20 kHz upper frequency limit of the human ear, we are able to perceive ultrasonic frequencies and there is evidence that their presence, at appropriate levels, is pleasurable. [2][3] Many musical instruments generate ultrasonic components at significant amplitude and it appears that this is not circumstantial, as previously assumed, but instead germane to their perception.[4]

Second, recent hearing research provides support for the long-standing notion that the time-domain performance of anti-alias and reconstruction filters – most especially steep digital linear-phase filters – is responsible for perceptible degradation of sound quality. Recently, direct evidence for the audibility of low-pass filters used in digital audio has been published. [5]

It has been known since at least 1946 that the Fourier time-frequency uncertainty inherent in conventional signal analysis can be ‘beaten’ by human listeners, and by a significant margin. [6][7] Indeed, recent experimental studies have shown temporal discrimination at least 5 times higher. [8][9]

These findings accord with the idea that the capabilities of human hearing have been determined by evolutionary requirements, in particular the need to identify sounds as ‘potentially threatening’ or ‘non-threatening’ in the shortest possible time interval, thereby providing the maximum opportunity for fight or flight. While vision plays a part in this too, of course, we cannot see through 360 degrees, around corners, or at as low light levels as some predators.

In these circumstances in particular, our hearing is the primary sense by which we detect danger, and speed of detection and rapid estimation of direction and range is of the essence. As too is the ability to separate direct sound from short-delay or closely-spaced reflections – which naturally require the resolution of short time intervals that are independent of frequency or bandwidth.

Our understanding of natural soundscapes, reverberation, animal vocalisations and speech, requires adjustable time/frequency balances which, up until now, have not been adequately accounted for in audio system design.[10]

This all suggests that the time-domain acuity of the human auditory system has been more important than frequency-domain acuity and explains why its time-frequency uncertainty is so much superior to that of an FFT analyser (and its close relative, the sinc-kernel of digital sampling). Causal signals are key to our achieving this feat; if natural signal waveforms are time-reversed we can no longer outperform the time-frequency uncertainty of Fourier analysis.[11]

Temporal acuity manifests a survival characteristic, one with origins that must reach back to much earlier in the mammalian timeline than the emergence of homo sapiens.

It would be strange indeed if our remarkable time-domain acuity were irrelevant to the perception of music. In fact there is persuasive evidence that this is not the case: those experimental subjects who have proven most adept at resolving time-frequency uncertainty are musicians, suggesting that time-domain acuity is enhanced – trained – by the process of becoming a musician.[11] So the traditional frequency-domain view of audio system performance is fundamentally at odds with our perception of music. A fresh approach to the specification and design of high fidelity audio encoding and equipment which takes much closer account of system time-domain performance is therefore long overdue.

A fresh start

MQA (Master Quality Authenticated – the reason for the name will become apparent), embodies just such an approach. As such it isn’t just a new technology, it represents a new philosophy of high-resolution sound reproduction: one which establishes performance criteria based on the abilities of human hearing and embraces the entire recording/reproduction process from the studio microphone to the replay D-to-A converter in order to meet them. It also has important ramifications for the downstream amplifier and loudspeaker or headphone that complete the chain.

The novelty – indeed, the radicalism – of the MQA approach is summarised in its mission statement: to cause no more ‘harm’ to an audio signal than its passage through a few metres of air.

In its aim to convey the inherent sound quality of analogue and digital masters with unprecedented fidelity, MQA puts an emphasis on time-domain performance, a process which began with Peter Craven’s Meridian-sponsored work on apodising filters.[12]

Concern that the steep low-pass anti-aliasing and reconstruction filters of classical digital audio practice add audible ‘time smear’ or ‘blur’ goes back still further, originating in the 1980s, but MQA addresses this concern in a more thoroughgoing and knowledge-based manner than has ever been attempted before. It sets as its target 10µs time resolution with extant recordings, with a recommendation of 3µs for future audio archives in order to better the 5-8µs discrimination ability of human hearing. [13]

Conventional 96 kHz recording – for which the sampling period is 10.4µs – might seem to satisfy the target. However that is to ignore the effect of the anti-alias and reconstruction filters, which employ a sinc kernel to provide inter-sample-temporal resolution – at the expense of elongating the system impulse response far beyond one sampling interval.

To achieve MQA’s superior time-domain performance requires knowledge of all the filters present during recording and replay, which is why it is an end-to-end system encompassing the entire chain from the microphone in the recording studio to digital-to-analogue conversion in the home. Even the behaviour of the tape machine is taken into account when legacy analogue material is being encoded.

An MQA decoder is matched to the associated converter while the complementary kernels used in the encoder and decoder combine to give the desired analogue result. Only by controlling the entire process right up to the output of the D-to-A converter in the replay device can MQA’s exemplary time domain performance be efficiently guaranteed.[13]

As MQA is also applied to the replay process within the mastering studio, the final sound achieved there is exactly that which is delivered to the home. This can be verified explicitly on replay by, for instance, an LED indictor on MQA-ready hardware, hence the name Master Quality Authenticated: the user is assured that they are receiving exactly the same analogue signal that was signed-off in the mastering process.

MQA’s time-domain performance relative to conventional high-quality 24-bit/192 kHz recording-plus-replay is at least an order of magnitude superior. Leading edge uncertainty is reduced from 250µs to 3µs, total impulse duration from 500µs to 25µs, and perceptual smear from at least 100µs to less than 10µs. Overall frequency and impulse responses for MQA are shown in Figure 1, while Figure 2 confirms that MQA’s effect is no worse than imposed by sound transmission through a few metres of air.

To put the impulse response of Figure 1 into perspective, Figure 3 compares it to that of a typical 24-bit/192 kHz ADC/DAC chain.

Ancillary Equipment

Such is the improvement in time-domain performance achieved by MQA that analogue devices in the audio chain can be limiting factors in achieving its full subjective benefit. This is the case with most microphones, some electronics and many loudspeakers. The deliberate curtailment of high frequency bandwidth to obviate ultrasonic noise or distortion – previously regarded as best practice by many audio engineers – is deprecated because each low-pass filter downstream of the replay D-to-A converter is uncontrolled and lengthens the system impulse response. Figure 4 illustrates this by showing how impulse response progressively lengthens with up to eight concatenated second-order Butterworth low-pass filters, all having a corner frequency of 30 kHz.[9]

Music Origami

We refer to the process by which MQA reduces high sampling rate signals to Fs = 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz as ‘music origami’, after the Japanese art of paper folding. Figures 14 to 16 show how it works for a 192 kHz source.
Although the process is depicted here in two dimensions, it is actually a three-dimensional construct.
The first ‘fold’ (Figure 13) reduces the transmission rate from 192 kHz to 96 kHz, and the second (Figure 14) from 96 kHz to 48 kHz. The folding process is not filtering and the inherent sample rate and bit-depth remain. In the transport, as we fold, each resulting sample conveys more information. In the MQA lexicon this first folding process is known as ‘encapsulation’.

The process is hierarchically scalable, so if the source were, for example, a 352.8 kHz file then we use three folds to reach the final transmission rate of 44.1 kHz. Similarly, if the source were only 96 kHz, then we start with the lossless process of Figure 14. MQA is also hierarchically scalable so that each type of fold can be used one octave higher to enable double-speed transmission options.

The second fold, illustrated by Figures 14 and 15, is able to be lossless because, as illustrated by the noise floor of the original analogue signal (blue trace), much of the available dynamic range with 24-bit encoding is occupied by noise.

So the second fold process uses buried data techniques to reversibly hide the signal information from above 24 kHz within the noise floor below 24 kHz.

Principally because of the combination of environmental noise and microphone self-noise (plus tape noise with analogue masters), very few recordings achieve let alone exceed 16-bit dynamic range. Add to this the fact that we can hear signals within noise only to about 10dB below the noise level (see olive curve in Figure 13) and it follows that bits 19 to 24 carry no useful information.[15]

Playback

If an MQA decoder is present then these two folding processes are undone to restore, in this case, a 24-bit/192 kHz output with the end-to-end frequency and impulse responses already shown in Figure 1. Furthermore, the decoder reconstructs the signals fed to the D/A converter with bit-accuracy, giving the identical result heard in the mastering studio; it authenticates and indicates this result.

If no decoder is present then the file replays at 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz, providing backwards compatibility.
If the transmission path can only pass 16 (rather than 24) bits, then an MQA decoder can reconstruct the baseband (area A in Figure 10) along with a lossy version of B (and C), which sounds very close to the high-res original and much better than CD replay.

Similarly, if the replay device is not capable of the highest sampling rate, the unfolding process can be stopped part-way through and the decoder optimises the temporal and frequency response.

Summary

MQA addresses two traditionally incompatible needs: quality and convenience. It provides sound quality which significantly exceeds that of current hi-res digital formats but it does not require high data rates, nor does it disenfranchise users who don’t own a decoder. Only one release format is required to cover the gamut of replay possibilities, and MQA material can be distributed like conventional PCM: streamed, made available as a file download, even put on a CD or other optical disc.

MQA has been demonstrated to many of the world’s leading recording engineers, music producers and record companies and has been enthusiastically received. Demonstrations to the press and public have resulted in widespread acclaim for it representing the future of digital audio.

Further Reading

A wide-ranging overview of the background to MQA is available in an Audio Engineering Society paper delivered at the 137th Convention in October 2014.[13]

Patent Notice

Several aspects of MQA are subject to patents granted and pending.

References

[1] ADA, ‘Proposal of Desirable Requirements for the Next Generation’s Digital Audio’, Advanced Digital Audio Conference, Japan Audio Society (April 1996)

[2] Oohashi, T., et al, ‘Inaudible High-Frequency Sounds Affect Brain Activity: Hypersonic Effect’, J. Neurophysiol, 83: 3548–3558, (2000).

[3] Oohashi, T., et al, ‘Multidisciplinary study on the hypersonic effect’, International Congress Series 1226, pp 27–42, (2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0531-5131(01)00494-0

[4] Boyk, J., ‘There’s life above 20 kilohertz! A survey of musical instrument spectra to 102.4 kHz’, http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.htm (2000)

[5] Jackson, H. M., Capp, M. D. and Stuart, J. R., ‘The audibility of typical digital audio filters in a high-fidelity playback system’, Convention Paper 9174, 137th Audio Engineering Society Convention, (2014).

[6] Gabor, D., ‘Theory of Communication’, Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, 93, III, p. 429, (November 1946). http://dx.doi.org/10.1049/ji-1.1947.0015

[7] Gabor, D., ‘Acoustical Quanta and the Theory of Hearing’, Nature, 159, pp. 591–594, (1947). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/159591a0

[8] Oppenheim, J. M. and Magnasco, M. O., ‘Human Time-Frequency Acuity Beats the Fourier Uncertainty Principle’, Phys. Rev. Lett., 110, 044301, (2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.044301

[9] Oppenheim, J. M., et al., ‘Minimal Bounds on Nonlinearity in Auditory Processing’ (Jan 2013). arXiv:1301.0513 q-bio.NC.

[10] Lewicki, M.S. ‘Efficient Coding of natural sounds’, Nature Neurosci. 5, 356–363 (2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn831

[11] Oppenheim, J. M., et al, ‘Degraded Time-Frequency Acuity to Time-Reversed Notes’, PLOS ONE, 8, pp. 1–6 (June 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0065386

[12] Craven, P.G., ‘Antialias Filters and System Transient Response at High Sample Rates’, J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 52, No. 3, pp. 216–242, (March 2004)

[13] Stuart, J. R. and Craven, P., ‘A Hierarchical Approach to Archiving and Distribution’, Paper 9178, 137th Audio Engineering Society Convention, (2014).

[14] Japan Audio Society (JAS), ‘JAS’s action plan for High-Resolution Audio’, (June 2014) [15] Stuart, J.R., ‘Noise: Methods for Estimating Detectability and Threshold’, J. Audio Eng. Soc., 42, 124–140 (March 1994)

[16] Fellgett, P.B., ‘Thermal noise limits of Microphones’, J. IERE, 57 No. 4, 161–166 (1987). http://dx.doi.org/10.1049/jiere.1987.0058

[17] Dragotti, P.L., Vetterli, M., Blu, T., ‘Sampling Moments and Reconstructing Signals With Finite Rate of Innovation: Shannon Meets Strang-Fix’, IEEE Trans.Sig. Proc. Vol. 55, No. 5, pp. 1741–1757, (May 2007) 10.1109/TSP.2006.890907

[18] Rieke, F., et al, Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code, ISBN 978-0-262-18174-7, MIT Press (1997)

[19] Unser, M. ‘Sampling – 50 Years after Shannon’, Proc. IEEE vol. 88 No. 4, pp. 569–587 (Apr. 2000). http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/5.843002 [20] Widrow, B., Kollár, I., Quantization Noise: Roundoff Error in Digital Computation, Signal Processing, Control, and Communications, CUP, Cambridge, UK, ISBN: 0521886716 (2008)

Hi Sonic, wanted to visit. We've been in summer cook out season the last little while but have had our systems fired up for friends to enjoy. It's always nice to come up and see your posting . You've become the TuneLand information center. Keep up the great posting

Jim

PS: I also like that you are using Michael's quotes in some of your research. There's so much truth there that sometimes we don't get it till years later after we ourselves travel the tune's footsteps.

Hello Jim, good to hear from you and congratulations on the progress with your system

Yes, Sonic has found that Michael has called the issues with my room and provided me the directions to take for the solutions. My recent re-posting of Mr Green’s insights on my threads from 2012 – 2014 came about from a reading back which led Sonic to solving some of my long standing room issues.

Based on these "guidances" from Michael, I have finally found and shaped the Pressure Zones that Michael identified on Page 5 of this thread (see Mr Green’s post of May 17, 2016) and Sonic’s application of his suggestion on May 20, 2016.

I have found that Michael’s circles were accurate and Sonic had in my solution of May 17, 2016 not got the point of his read of my room -- basically Sonic missed the spot slightly. Now I have repositioned the DecoTunes like his diagram and the “concrete ping” plaguing this room disappeared completely. Sonic is being cautious about talking too soon since I have embarrassed myself way too often by proclaiming Sonic has achieved the Tune only to find out that it wasn’t the case.

The way the room is settling now, you would not think this was the same concrete bunker Sonic was fighting for years in these pages. Wood is also involved along with movement of the “burn” material about plus using the JVC SEA10 Equaliser. More on this soon when I am more certain because I don’t want to disappoint fellow Tunees, or Sonic.

In the meantime while I am posting these instances of Michael’s “remote listening” there is also stuff that Sonic finds in visits to the Japanese audio sites which will get posted.

Sonic loves the Japanese audiofan ethos.

Apart from their martial art dedication to audio, Japanese audiofans have wonderful ways of describing their audio experiences.

Who else in the world will describe the hissy, crackly sound made by an aging vacuum tube as "Gasagasa Gosgoso"?

Yes….Gasagasa Gosogoso

Where did Sonic get that??? See here: http://audiooyazi.exblog.jp/page/4/

The page numbers run on this blog so if you don’t find it on Page 4, go look for the posting of 2016-08-29 18:28.

Sonic

I'll tell you guys, if Sonic wouldn't have been here during this summer TuneLand would have been one dead place to visit. Thank you Sonic

My work is not over but I can finally see the end of this summer time's tunnel. Now I'm starting to walk around the place saying this will have to be moved and that will have to go.

fun I think

Hi Michael  

Sonic is privileged to be part of the Tune and post here. It is my pleasure. I will be posting more about my newest experiments along with the pictures in the next couple of weeks. Sonic thinks that the code of my room is being cracked  

Hello Zonees  

Here are more things Japanese for Zonees to feast your thoughts over.

This is the audio system of Accuphase founder Jiro Kasuga (1977).



And here is this story about a fan – not exactly an audio-fan in the sense we know but certainly a martial art exponent nevertheless:




Source: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/09/14/general/rescuing-gadgets-from-the-golden-age-of-made-in-japan/#.V8bYJ5h97IV




Piles of old electronic gadgetry, most of it out of order, clutter Junichi Matsuzaki’s “studio” on the first floor of an aging public apartment building in Adachi Ward in northeastern Tokyo. To visitors the outdated technology may look like junk, but to the 53-year-old self-proclaimed consumer electronics collector, it’s treasure.

Filling up the 80-sq.-meter space from the floor to the ceiling are “Made in Japan” appliances that Matsuzaki has a soft spot for in one way or another.

“They don’t necessarily have to have monetary value,” says the skinny, soft-spoken man, noting that he picks consumer electronics whose designs reveal the creativity and ingenuity of Japanese electronics makers from their golden years of the 1970s and ’80s.

In fact, those were the years when a number of domestic manufacturers — including Sony, National (the predecessor of Panasonic), Sharp, Toshiba and Victor — grew out of the “copy technology from abroad” mentality of the 1960s, he says.

“Japan has long had a culture of copying,” Matsuzaki says, noting that manufacturers grew rapidly in the postwar era by copying products invented in the United States and Europe, such as TV sets and audio recorders. That changed, though, in the 1970s, when Japanese companies began adding a touch of originality to their products, he says.

While his collection includes TV sets, record players and even non-electronic items such as furniture and metal figure molds, Matsuzaki’s biggest obsession is portable radio-cassette players, that is boomboxes. He has collected 3,000 so far, mostly at recycle goods shops and garage sales, he says.

While their designs and features vary, typical boomboxes contain one or two cassette slots, a radio tuner, a speaker, and often a microphone to record live sound — all in one. And while individual components were Western inventions, the idea to put them all together in one portable product was unique to Japan, he says.

What’s more amazing, Matsuzaki has brought countless numbers of broken electronics back to life, though he has never worked at an electronics company or studied mechanics at school. He says he learned the repairing expertise all by himself, by manually disassembling the components and putting them back together, learning the functions of hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny parts along the way.

“I don’t know how many machines I ruined while learning how to fix them,” he laughs.

Today many people regard him as a “repairer of last resort,” asking him to fix stuff even the manufacturers don’t know how to mend. Because he has spent so much time fiddling with the gadgets, he can now detect major causes of breakdown; it’s typically a few key worn-out parts or the piled-up dust that ruins a product, he says.

When he can’t find parts to replace the broken ones, which is often the case because manufacturers are reluctant to stock replacement parts in-house, he gets new ones made just for him. He showed me one of 20 identical Sony single-cassette players that he has collected and is trying to fix. The 1973 black model still had no plastic cover on, exposing a circuit board, a bunch of parts and cables and a speaker half the size of the entire machine.

To fix that one, he needed to have a tiny, rubber-covered tape roller specially made by a factory in China. “The minimum lot you can order is 5,000 or 10,000,” he said. “I have had to spend hundreds of thousands of yen to get just one component replaced.”

However, when he is done with all the work, turns on a switch and hears the sound of soft, mildly reverberating music, he feels rewarded for all the pain and trouble, he says. As he talks about this, he takes out an old cassette tape with recordings of ’80s pop music by YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra) and plays it on the Sony player.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” he says, indulging in the music for a while. “The reason I’m obsessed with (vintage) Japanese products is because they use really high-quality parts. You can’t get this kind of sound from today’s radio cassettes, which sound more like thin metals rubbing against each other.”

He adds that the vintage audio devices come with numerous levers/switches that allow users to fine-tune the volumes and textures of sound, a detail that is missing from portable audio devices today.

“The iPhone, for example, only lets you scroll the volume bar on its touch-screen. Vintage radio/cassette players, on the other hand, are equipped with a sound meter, which shows (real-time) changes in sound volume, and a cassette counter, which marks the passing of time,” he says. “It visualizes the ritual of listening to the sound. Maneuvering such gadgets is so much more fun.”

Matsuzaki, who quit his job as a corporate interior designer 10 years ago to start his own company “Design Underground” at the apartment, says that just repairing broken electronics, which takes days and sometimes weeks per unit, is not enough to sustain his living. But he has succeeded in building a network of clients with various needs, such as stores wanting vintage electronics to create retro-chic displays, and studios wanting electronics from the ’70s and ’80s for TV dramas. For example, last year, he was asked by the public broadcaster NHK to collect 5,000 vintage TV sets to create a warehouse set for “Made in Japan,” a three-part drama series about a fictional Japanese electronics giant on the verge of collapse. The drama’s theme resonates with what’s really happening in the nation’s manufacturing industries today. It’s a theme that Matsuzaki, too, feels very close to.

“Many Japanese consumer electronics companies have lost their luster,” he says. “Their products are more or less the same anywhere, both in design and function. For the past 10 years or so, the Japanese companies have failed to come up with anything unique, and their products are indistinguishable from products by foreign brands such as Samsung and Haier.”

But that wasn’t always the case, he recalls. Sony, for example, used to be criticized for its trouble-prone products, so much so that users joked that its products were all equipped with an internal “Sony Timer” designed to kill them soon after their warranty expired. What was happening, though, is that Sony in the old days took pride in marketing products featuring cutting-edge — albeit a little shaky — technology, Matsuzaki says.

Meanwhile, Matsushita Denki (Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.), which the Osaka-based manufacturer was known as in Japan before switching its name to Panasonic in 2008, once donned the nickname “Maneshita Denki,” for its tendency to maneru (copy) technologies already marketed by its rivals, such as Sony. Such criticisms — as poignant as they were — were signs that each manufacturer in Japan used to have a distinctive character, he says.
Matsuzaki attributes the lack of originality among today’s makers to the loss of an engineering culture that encourages the development of high-quality, long-lasting products: “The pace of development has become so fast — with model changes taking place every two or three years — that it’s hard for them to come up with good products. Coming up with more designs in less time means they have to compromise on quality and development costs.”

Can Matsuzaki’s attention to vintage electronics — and the technological heights encapsulated in them — shift the tide? He says he has approached many domestic manufacturers with proposals to innovate their designs — in vain.

The makers today are so financially strapped that they can only market safe — and mediocre — products, he says.

Having given up on convincing the unconvincible, Matsuzaki is currently planning on creating his own electronics brand, “Matsuzaki Denki.” To start off, he will release his first original product — a limited edition of high-quality cassette tapes — in October.

“Today it’s possible to become your own manufacturer, developing and marketing a small number of goods to a small community of people,” he said. “If you need cash to start, you can source it from customers wanting a particular product. All you need, in fact, is flexibility.”

Michael listens and diagnoses from a distance of 8,770 miles.....

[Sonic: this is something that Michael posted on my earlier thread years ago.  Sonic is now discovering the significance of what he said, and applying Tunes accordingly]  

Michael: Sonic has an extremely high ceiling. I will have to go back and look or I’m sure he’ll post it again, but we are talking over 11’ high. For those of you who have compared 8’ to 9’ you can tell stories of how remarkably different these rooms are, but jumping over 10’ is like another world. It’s literally like you are way down at the bottom of the pressure and there is tons of airpressure over you.

Plus in Sonic’s room we are talking about harder walls with not a lot of full range flex as compared to drywall. 3 things that he has going for him though are the wood floor, the wood doors and the wood book-casing.
With this much space I would be tempted to use clouds in the room. You can see them in my pro-pictures. I use these mainly in studios but have used them in my factory and loft systems. Problem with this is where to put them and not putting tons of holes in the ceiling trying to find the perfect spots.

[Sonic: when Mr Green pointed out the positions of my ceiling pressure zones in the pictures on Page 5 of this thread, I had a starting point to mount the DecoTunes as Clouds and did they work! Since then Sonic has shifted the position of the DT Clouds to mirror Michael’s diagnosis better and it looks the room is responding and the hard wall “ping” is gone.]

Michael: You must take it very slow and listen for any dulling effect. As you know it will sneak up on you.

Hard walls are the pits when it comes to fhining (?) where things are. For me I look at my new symmetrical surrounds once I establish my listening position and do a mix of laying out things according to the dimensions of the room or if this is not the flow, my new room dimensions.

What do I mean by new room dimensions? This means not treating the room by the walls but treating the room by walls plus the objects and treatments in the room. When I divide things I look at how things are between an object and the wall or the next object, picturing in my mind what is happening in that area. Then I go shape that area.

Many times I do my experimental placement by what I see from my listening chair and not an actual measurement dividing the room out.  Not all rooms do, but many will let you shape the sound stage to your sound stage cues. This can get tricky because it can become recording dependent. Another thing to always look out for is deflating a pressure zone which usually results in immediate loss of bass.

[Sonic: the last insight is a critical idea – Pressure Zones and bass/girth go together. Kill a Pressure Zone and the bass rolls and the sound goes thin.  Then there is Michael’s advice to Sonic to treat the room as an entity not just by the walls.  This with Mr Green's advice to think of the wood tables in my room as acoustic traps,  this has led to accelerated progress. I am wonder how to make the tables more powerful in effect – perhaps sticking RoomTune devices such as EchoTunes to the bottom surface of the tables with the absorptive sides facing the floor?]

Sonic

Greetings Zonees

From someone Sonic reads for perspective frame in my brain about audio – Richard S Burwen. He has also built an astounding horn speaker system. Let's change gear from what Sonic's been posting recently and hear Burwen's thoughts.

Source: http://www.burwenaudio.com/Questions_and_Answers.html

Burwen’s system: www.burwenaudio.com/Sound_System.html

Some excerpts taken from the Burwen Audio Q&A

Burwen: During my 60 years of designing circuits I designed a lot of vacuum tube, transistor, and switching power amplifiers and know how each performs. In the 1950's I designed the lowest distortion vacuum tube amplifier ever, the Krohn-Hite UF-101. It was rated at 50 Watts, 0.005% total harmonic distortion, 50 dB of negative feedback, and it sold in small quantities as a laboratory instrument for 20 years. Today I wouldn't take a vacuum tube amplifier as a gift. Why?

What you are really buying is not quality amplification but a high distortion equalizer. The lack of feedback in many of today's tube amplifiers gives the amplifier high distortion and a high internal output impedance, typically in the range of 1 to 5 ohms. At some frequencies such as the fundamental cone resonance, and crossover frequencies between drivers, the load impedance of the speaker rises. The voltage divider effect delivers more signal to the speaker terminals at these frequencies. With some amplifier-speaker combinations the effect on frequency response is very pleasing.

This load impedance effect was epitomized in the July, 2004 Stereophile review of the world's most expensive amplifier, the $350,000/pair Wavac SH-833, by Michael Fremer with measurements by John Atkinson, page 73.

The curves clearly show up to 2 to10 dB of bass boost at 80 Hz depending upon the load impedance. The measured distortion is shameful for even the cheapest amplifier. A vacuum tube amplifier should really be regarded as a nice piece of furniture with wires, that glows in the dark. Use a real equalizer to improve the frequency response of your speakers!

Equalizing your speakers is not enough. Any fixed frequency response system may optimally balance the tone on about 1 in 500 pieces of available program material. You need really flexible multichannel program equalization to balance all the rest.

In my own sound system for 30 years I used Phase Linear 400 power amplifiers that I redesigned for lower noise, -115 dB re 200 watts, and reduced bias drift. The 34 channels each drive 1 woofer, 1 mid-range horn, or 9 or 12 of the 30 tweeters in each 13 foot speaker horn. With the 4-way electronic crossover the equivalent sound level available is that of a single 20,000 watt monoblock.

Before purchasing these amplifiers I compared one with my Krohn-Hite UF-101 Ultra-Low Distortion Power Amplifier. The sounds were identical except that the Phase Linear 400 played louder before clipping.

In 2004 after tiring of repairing the Phase Linears whose transistors suffered thermal fatigue, I replaced them all, purchasing 19 QSC SRA1222 dual 200-watt amplifiers. I chose these amplifiers, after measuring one unit, for their 200 watts/channel, (all my speakers can handle), low internal impedance due to high feedback, flat frequency response, low distortion, low noise (6 dB worse than my Phase Linears), high slew rate, switching power supply,
under $1000 each and for somewhat more money QSC offered up to 1800 watts/channel into 2 ohms in the same size. I cannot detect any change in the sound. In 9 years of operation at 70 hrs/week, none have failed.

That is the sort of amplifier I suggest for you and there are plenty of other good amplifiers from other manufacturers in the professional area. And forget expensive cables. They are inaudible furniture.

How can 5 channels made from 2 can be better than 5 discrete channels?

For me, frequency response is a much more important aspect of reproduced sound than directional effects. I find that what your ears like to hear is not flat frequency response, but balanced average frequency response with hundreds to thousands of resonant wiggles – produced by high frequency reverberation.

If you listen to a trumpet outdoors with its bell pointed at your ears, it sounds awful. That is flat response with no sound reflections.

To make the trumpet enjoyable, listen to it in a reasonably live acoustic space, at an angle of 45 degrees or so off its axis. Multiple sound reflections from the surfaces of the room (preferably non-parallel) add and subtract at various frequencies via comb filtering to produce many hundreds of resonant ripples in the frequency response. That is what makes instruments sound musical.

Physical dimensions and sound absorption prevent significant reflections above 5 kHz in real rooms. Artificial reverberation systems typically roll off the high frequencies in an attempt to simulate real rooms or concert halls. My high frequency reverberation software does the opposite – it emphasizes the highest frequencies up to 20 kHz.

When it adds to and subtracts from the direct signal at various frequencies it produces resonant peaks and dips in the frequency response at random intervals of frequency averaging only a few Hz apart. The total number of peaks may be around 5000 vs hundreds for real reverberation.

A 5-microphone system produces some of this pleasant comb filtering effect because, at your ears, rear channel sound adds to and subtracts from front channel sound at multiple frequencies. It also has the advantage of apparent natural placement of the sound sources. However, since music generally comes from the stage in front, the principal contribution from rear microphones is ambiance and overall more musical effect due to multiple resonances when combined with front sound at the listener.

Greetings Sonic

I'm finding your new style of writing to be beneficial. It's difficult to follow entire concepts by MG but by quoting Michael and placing his thoughts in the present is the proper way to dissect the message. Michael's biggest problem is not that he doesn't know but that he knows too much and can overwhelm a person easily. A reader needs a microscope to follow Michael on a roll. He breaks topics into bite sizes but more times than not his bite size is a whole meal that needs digesting.

Greeetings allboutdasound

You are right that Michael's comments can be hard to take in and he has indeed posted lots on my threads that are only now making sense through recent applications Sonic made. I am glad you like what I been doing in re-presenting the information.

Here are a couple more I prepared:

On the use of Wood Blocks like Low Tone Redwood Above and Below Equipment:

Michael: One area to maybe look at is when the blocks are used on top of things. The vibration that is upward from components is different than those going down. Remember that gravity pulls downward so as things shake out and settle if you have too much mass above touching something the effect can be bigger than if a small tuning rod is coming down touching the top.

For me (Michael Green)when I use a block on top of components it's a little much.

On Whether Top Tuning Down Rods should be Sharpened to a Point:

Sonic asked Michael “ to your ears should the resitone rods be sharpened to points? Should they rest on some MW thins?”

Michael he say: “If you like this setting (sharp point) stick with it until you hear anything that might bug you. Usually there is a rule of thumb. Bigger transfer point more body, smaller more focus. (usually). Finding the balance between those two is the goal. I find myself leaning to a fatter transfer most of the time.

[Sonic found that when I switched my top tune rods to flat-top at both ends the sound was richer like adding chocolate sauce to a cake rather than tasting the sharpness of focus of a lemon sorbet]

Hi Sonic

Didn't find the "Gasagasa Gosgoso" but crazy how different audiophiles look at the same hobby.

Hello Rotelguy  

Aren’t the differences in expression across cultures fascinating?  Sonic likes things Japanese, their audio, their food, their aesthetic, their manic dedication to detail and how they express things in their language – an example: we English speakers say pigs go “oink, oink” while Japanese say pigs go “Buh, Buh”.....sounds like Sonic’s BOO! test, yes?

Greetings Michael and Zonees    

Sonic is experimenting again   .....I asked myself “what does my room sound like   ” The issue being to assess what colourations are emanating from the room materials and construction.

For certain we cannot determine this without loudspeakers and the two have to work together since “your room is your speaker”. Yet how to have my speakers (the Magneplanar MG1.5 QRs and the Janis W-1 subwoofer) activate the room in a way I can get the sound signature of the room?

There is a way to do this thanks to fellow-Tunee Robert Harrison whom we have not heard from for a very long time.

He once pointed out to Sonic in an earlier thread there is a speaker placement method for planar loudpspeakers called the Rooze.

It looks like this as an idea:



Which when applied looks like so:



This only works with planar speakers like Magneplanars, Martin Logan, Quads and such. With planar speakers which a dipoles, there is a point at the sides where the front and rear waves cancel each other – a null point.

The idea of the Rooze is to have these null points face the listening chair and the sound waves from the two opposing sides (there are no longer “front” and “back”) of the panels activate the room  and as less direct sound from the panels reach the ears, what we get to hear is more of the sound of the room.

“Worth a try” thinks Sonic given that Magneplanars are easy to move around though with my Tune done to couple the panels to the floor for mechanical grounding, things get a bit more delicate.

Sonic did this:





Sonic will report the effect as settling occurs and my learnings.  

While I have my doubts if this will become a permanent placement, Sonic does not rule that out. The first effect is a much larger projected sound space with the sense of the size of the room and the limitations of the physical space overturned.

Let’s listen.

Sonic

The Rooze Report – 1

Sonic has done a couple of days settling and evening listening. Zonees will have noticed from the pictures in my Friday Sept 9 post that Sonic has placed a FS-DT at the side walls directly in front of each MG1.5QR speaker.

Without these FS-DTs, I get hard reflections off the walls that give away the speaker positions by pulling treble out to the sides in a way that distorts the music in that instruments and voices at the speaker positions/sides of the soundfield are brighter than those in the middle. Not natural sounding at all and this experiment will be a non-starter if not for the FS-DTs.

All comments after this are therefore with the FS-DTs in place. My impressions:

1. images that are normally heard panned onto loudspeaker locations have now moved back to a point about a foot behind and outward of the panel locations

2. the soundfield is larger than the physical surfaces of the room – there is more width and depth impression, and some emphasis in all round ambience. Sonic is however always cautious when I hear more low level details and ambience – it might be better resolution or compression of dynamic range has occurred. The dynamics seem OK but I am watching this

3. transients might be a little blunted though this is heard mostly on rock music, much less with jazz and not at all with classical. Vocal sibilants are smoothed out somewhat

4. images are larger, closer to what might be life-sized in a small room. Images in the centre of the soundfield are somewhat larger than at those at the Right and Left edges but no fish-eye lens effect

5. while there is improved sense of lateral width, there is no sense of “seeing” instruments and voices outside the walls of the room. For example on the Sun King Cricket test, with Sonic’s eyes closed I might point to crickets that seem far away but when opening eyes and looking at the spot, I hear/see images that are smaller and therefore in perspective terms further away towards a vanishing point though still within the surfaces of the room (hard to describe in words)

6. tonal balance between bass, midrange and treble are good, tightness of the bass is about the same as before

7. images from analog sources seem slightly more diffuse than with FLAC files

At this stage, Sonic has heard nothing that would make me run and put the speakers back to a normal placement, neither do I hear any improvements of a degree to make me wish to say that this will be a permanent placement method for me. Though if you like “BIG IMAGES” from your planars, Rooze is something to try.

Listen on….

Sonic

Hi Sonic

Michael's place was the first time I had heard a speaker able to be turned without the extreme toe in toe out effect. I was thinking this was because of the free resonance design. How do your pressure zones sound? Is your sweet spot at the listening position bigger or smaller?

Greetings Rotelguy

Your questions have stumped Sonic somewhat. I am still in the process of getting acquainted to this sound so I am not sure how to answer you.

What do my Pressure Zones sound like? The focus has gone softer and the soundfield feels a lot bigger though this is only an impression because on critical listening to familiar recordings, the placement of images are the same.

The height of the soundstage when seated and standing is similar, the rise when standing is less than the amount moved vertically by my ears.

As for the sweet spot, Sonic has only one listening seat and as I don't listen seriously/critically from any adjacent spot in the room, I cannot tell if the sweet spot has expanded.

Yet, there is a visual effect that causes the sweet spot to have effectively shrunk -- it is my wanting to see the two panels perfectly edgewise and if I were to move my head a little to the left or right I see more of the nearer panel. When that happens I adjust my head position. Sonic finds I am doing an increased amount of position adjustment, that is fidgeting.

The overall tone signature of the system is similar to earlier though the reduction of the direct sound has things to move in the warmer less snappy direction.

Sonic is still trying to find the actual sound contribution of the hard walls and ceiling.

Any observations from you or Michael on what I have replied here?

Sonic

Something from Richard Burwen -- while Zonees are unlikely to agree with his thoughts on audibility of tweaks, some of his experimental observations are valuable.  The underlining is mine:


Audible Tweaks That Cannot Work

Richard S. Burwen

I am a non-believer in audio tweaks, especially power cords that feed regulated power supplies in any piece of equipment. Scientifically they cannot possibly have any effect on the audio signal. Yet I am convinced it is very possible, even likely, that testing them will demonstrate an audible effect. How can that happen?

The answer is: the room acoustics changed - the test was uncontrolled. In a good listening room, successive sound reflections from the ceiling, floor, walls, and any objects in the room add to produce standing waves at any given audio frequency. Because the many signals travel different distances, their differing phase shifts add and subtract to produce different sound levels at different positions. A sine wave sound from two or more speakers will produce standing waves, even without reflections. If you walk across the room while a speaker plays a pure tone, you will hear the sound become louder and softer as you pass through peaks and valleys of sound pressure.

The higher the frequency, the shorter is the wavelength, and the closer together are the peaks and valleys. Because the standing wave pattern is different at each different frequency, a graph of the audio frequency response at a fixed microphone position will show hundreds of peaks and valleys, no matter how flat is the equipment and speaker system producing the sound.

All it takes is a change in position of the listener to hear a different frequency response. Furthermore, a change in position of another person or any object in the room will alter the standing wave pattern, thereby changing the frequency response at any particular listening position.

Your ears are surprisingly sensitive to frequency response. What you hear most is the general trend of the response curve, an average of the peaks and valleys, and 1 dB is noticeable. I found that if the sound is very well balanced, adjusting the response as little as 0.1 dB with tone controls becomes important to a critical ear. The peaks and valleys in frequency response produced by room reverberation may be as small as 1 dB, or as great as 30 dB, when nearly complete cancellation occurs. If an instrument in the orchestra happens to play a note that peaks at the listener, it can stand out like a sore thumb. Moving the listener’s head a few inches may reduce its level very noticeably.

My own listening studio is very live and the peaks and valleys in frequency response are big. I made a test by feeding a 5000 Hz sine wave to my 5-speaker system and placing a sound level meter on the coffee table in front of my best seat. Doing the best I could, not to move my body, I slid the sound level meter sideways from one major peak to another. The distance between peaks was only 6.7 inches and there were two minor peaks in between. When I rotated my head about 110 degrees I heard 4 peaks and 4 valleys in the sound level. Moving my body about 6 inches created a small valley where the meter was reading on the coffee table. If I moved a glass of water only 1 inch it produced 1 dB change in level at a major peak. If the meter was measuring 10 dB or so down on the side of peak, all I had to move the glass was about ¼ inch to make a 1 dB change in sound level. The glass is a small reflecting object in a 47 foot long room.

How does the change in sound with position relate to overall listening? Here is a little story.

One of my most favorite recordings and a powerful demonstrator is my own live concert recording of Mahler's Symphony 6, played by the Boston Philharmonic in Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory, Boston, in 1984. One of the instruments of the orchestra is a sledge hammer! For each of Mahler's 3 blows of fate in the final movement, a muscular guy took a full swing and struck a whopping big anvil on the front of the stage. My two special omnidirectional microphones, pointed at the ceiling to get high frequency sound reflections, captured it well.

This was a 2-channel recording made on a Sony PCMF1 machine, now made into 5 channels using my AUDIO SPLENDOR program which added ambiance in the rear and front channels. It was saved as a 6-channel, 88.2 kHz, 32-bit floating-point, W64 music file. I love this recording so much I had re-mastered it 6 times, each time improving the sound for my own studio. After the 7th re-mastering, I called my wife Barbara down to hear this great symphony and sound. She sat in the center seat and I sat beside her. When the recording played, the violins no longer sounded quite right. I thought about one more re-mastering. After my concert finished and Barbara went upstairs, I embarked on fixing the violins. I played the offending musical passages again, but this time the violins sounded good.

I had been using quite a lot of rear speaker sound to add to front channel sound at the listening sofa and sweeten the violins. When Barbara sat in the center seat, she partially blocked sound from the right rear speaker. I figured out what to do. People damage the sound by absorbing and blocking it. So no more visitors will be allowed.

Well, that conflicts with the purpose of my sound studio. Once again I re-mastered Mahler’s 6th, increasing the high frequency reverberation 0.2 dB in all channels, increasing the rear channel gain 0.8 dB, and tweaking the tone control sliders a few tenths of a dB. I spent the last 15 minutes deciding on a 0.1 dB increase in the 3 kHz slider. Without it, the orchestra was more natural. With it, the cymbals were more natural.

As you can see, frequency response is so critical, and sensitive to the listening position and reflecting and absorbing objects, it is impractical to make a truly controlled listening test on a tweak. To accurately compare one power chord with another, every person and object in the room would have to remain in the exact same position within about 1/8 wavelength at 20 kHz, only 0.08 inches. This effect is in addition to the Power of Expectation. So the controversy will go on.

www.burwenbobcat.com

www.burwenaudio.com

Hi Sonic

"Any observations from you or Michael on what I have replied here?"

mg

The only comment at this point would be, I like what Rotelguy asked about how do the pressure zones sound.

Are you noticing a difference in pressure as you walk around the room, and can you hear the build up of zones in the room as much or has the room as you walk around become less of a rise and decline?

The Rooze Report – 2

Day 8 and Sonic is getting more of a sense of the Rooze placement effect.

First to answer Michael and Rotelguy’s question on my pressure zones – it would appear to be less pressure noticeable in the room when activated by say a BOO!  

Other observations:

1.
The impression of Big Images is certain yet Sonic has some concern of the relative sizing between those images in the centre being bigger and those at the walls being smaller.  Might the shrinkage towards the walls be an artifact of the hard walls?

2.
The sound has lost some immediacy of direct sound and gone towards the warm, soft end of things yet the sound is not dark

3.
The sense of soundstage width can be a increased somewhat by turning the FS-DTs a little towards the listener though the result is somewhat artificial.

4.
Sonic is concerned that the more laid back analog sound with the Rooze placement is reducing my wanting to play LPs.  

5.
Sonic has been listening to FLAC files mostly as a consequence.  Large orchestral works from Beethoven, Hindemith and Tchaikovsky can be appealing in scale especially on loud passages.

6.
The vocal and instrument plane has moved back towards the front wall. When playing rock recordings, the band now is lined up straight, no curve in the images and moved to within 1 foot from the front wall.  Depth is pretty good though with Mozart’s Notturno for four orchestras, the depth separation between the main and the mini-orchestras is not that much (perhaps reduced from earlier) though the sense of the four orchestras are playing in a cavernous space is now increased

Sonic is listening for any other effects that may be characteristic of the hard concrete walls and ceiling in my room. So far we have smaller images towards the walls – which is not good. The dulling of transients likely the effect of the entire sound being heard being reflected in nature. Let us hear if there are more artifacts.

A comment Sonic read on Audioasylum (where the non-Sonic pictures for the Rooze Topic came from, that is this placement is essentially Bose in nature. The Bose speaker (901) was originally designed on the debatable premise that in a concert hall only 1/9 one hears is direct from the orchestra and 8/9 is reflected.  With the Rooze set up there is in fact nothing direct reaching the ears.  

Here is a picture of another form of placing planar speakers (from Audioasylum) – the opposite way in thinking:



Listen on…

Sonic

Michael’s Freaky Experience

Sonic likes mono reproduction. That is real single loudspeaker mono, not double stereo where the two channels play the same signal. With the old mono recordings – and they were made till 1968/9 – the sound can be wonderful.  The mono versions of landmark pop/rock recordings can be very costly.  Look at the prices for a good condition Sgt. Pepper, Bee Gees’  First or early Bob Dylan LPs or Miles’ Kind of Blue (1959).

Here is something Michael posted on my thread in November 2012 about mono reproduction after I remarked that the soundfield of mono playback on my system is not tiny or pinpoint focused, in fact quasi-stereo like.

Michael he say:

“Mono, stereo and multi-channel are ways to seperate the signal, and ways to create the soundstage illusion. Their all fun in their own way and allow the engineers to play a lot of games, but all of them are what they are and the audiophile system is what it is. If people have a system that is blocked it will shrink the size of the soundstage. Now how many times do you hear me say this? Here's a fact, I mean it. Not many folks out there that I have seen who call themselves the authority have done to their setups what you have, and their systems are blocked and unless they are doing something else to make up for their smallness their systems are going to play a small mono stage just like their small stereo and multi stage. The mono stage though is not small. The audiophile community at large still doesn't understand air pressure.

You (Sonic) shouldn't be alarmed that your mono is playing big and full. I know people think how can this be? The microphone only knows pressure. It's not a shotgun mic only fixed on a small area. It's a microphone that is vibrated by what it is being fed, and it hasn't been fed by a laser beam, it has been fed by a whole room of energy.

This whole room stays on the recorded storage just like stereo or any other pick up device. So (and here's the key) when it is "amplified" on a good setup it should play back the space it recorded base on a mono mic or mics. I've heard these setups and have completely forgotten that they are mono. To me they are reproducing what they captured and my well setup playback is playing that recorded energy.

I did a mono recording at the Sound Lounge in Detroit of a Les Paul where we did a bunch of effects. When I took the recording home and played it, it imaged all over the place. Honestly it freaked me out some I got the engineers over and they all sat there with their mouths open.

They said this is no mono recording. I told them I swear it is. The next night we went down and did the same thing only with acoustical instruments. We did several takes with different mics ranging from very narrow pickups to very wide and what we heard was freaky if nothing else. I swear the omni's were picking up the whole room and when we played it back on a single 60 what we heard was something even I don't talk much about.

So if you hear something freaky and unusual I want to know     . Cause what we heard was far from a dime we heard a room full of instruments. Now I'm a stereo man but I can't deny what I heard.”

Sonic: from Sound Practices – yeah, spin them mono records!



Michael – if the members of a jazz big band stood round a single, mono Omni Microphone and played, how will they image when played back on a tunable loudspeaker in a tuned room?  Will they for instance image in a circle round the listener’s head?

Sonic

Hi Sonic

"Michael – if the members of a jazz big band stood round a single, mono Omni Microphone and played, how will they image when played back on a tunable loudspeaker in a tuned room?  Will they for instance image in a circle round the listener’s head?"

mg

It depends on how well the pressure zones respond to the combo. I usually have listened to mono with my two speakers but I have also done the below design, which is very interesting.  



In the recording process the omni microphone was hung.

It's surprising that Omni recordings and Omni playback didn't become more popular. Stereo came on so strong that Omni playback never had a chance. I don't really consider setting up a single mono speaker at the end of a room completely legitimate. However if you do recordings "mono correct" and play them back "mono correct" the results are fairly amazing.

A mono loudspeaker overhead…..who would have thought of that? Wow

The Rooze Report – 3

Day 12

The Rooze experiment ends. Sonic hears the room effect now. And there are three components that chracterise the sound of my room:

A.
I can hear a narrow band ringing effect, a stealthy thing indeed. A ring in somewhere in the midrange that is not activated with much of the music and drama Sonic listens to. On some notes from instruments like violin or woodwind, human voices in a particular range, there is this “hard stone colouration” that pops up and it characterizes the brick wall sound completely. Pretty nasty when you hear it, a “sting” that sticks in the brain and doesn’t go away.

With loudspeakers placed conventionally, this “room sound” is mostly covered by the direct sound from the loudspeakers reaching the ear first and the precedence/Haas effect separates out the later sound that reach the ear later from the floor, walls and ceiling reflection. With the Rooze it is much easier to spot.

B.
Then there is a sterile sound underlying things. There are some who might think this sound characteristic is analytical and colourless. This characteristic pervades the sound much of the time.

C.
With the Rooze set up there is something that tips the sound towards a “There” as opposed to “Here” presentation. The reduction/absence of direct sound with the Rooze set up makes this an effect that stays with every recording played, an effect leading to boredom and reduced emotional involvement in what is being played on the audio system. With the exception of a failed tune using foam, the "There" sound has not been a factor in the sound of Sonic's room.

We conclude this here. Good thing that Sonic marks my speaker positions on the floor so I can go back quickly.

Sonic

Hi Sonic

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