In article ,
Richard Crowley wrote:
Vinyl *adds* realism to anything. Magic it
may be but how and why they don't care.
Nominated for r.a.t ridiculous statement of the year.
"Adds realism"? Do they read this stuff before posting it?
Or are they using a different definintion of "real" than the
rest of us?
I think that a valid distinction can be made between "accuracy" (a
term I use here to denote an objective relationship between source and
playback) and "realism" (which term I use to indicate a _subjective_
perception).
It's well known, for example, that adding some amount of delayed,
out-of-phase signal components to a piece of music can create a sense
of "air" or "ambience" that makes the playback seem more like
listening to the music as it might be when played in a live venue.
Multi-channel playback systems such as the venerable Dynaquad, or the
various digital-delay ambience-synthesis systems such as Yamaha and
a/d/s have made, have been used to good advantage for this for decades.
Although such systems tend to work best with additional loudspeakers,
they can have a subjective benefit even when used with a stereo
playback system.
In particular, multi-miked studio recordings are often largely or
completely free of realistic performance-room ambience, and the
injection of some (artificial) delayed and phase-incoherent components
into the music can "open up" such recordings and make them sound more
pleasant to many listeners.
Such modification of the signal is artifical. The resulting signal is
less accurate (in the objective sense). It may, on the other hand, be
more "realistic", in the sense that the music sounds more like it
might if the musicians were actually present in the listening room,
performing the music in a real live venue.
I believe that a very similar phenomenon can and does occur with LP
playback. There are a couple of physical mechanisms which can cause
an LP playback to include delayed, non-phase-coherent copies of the
music signal which were not present in the original recording (master
tape, direct-to-disk signal, or whatever). Acoustic feedback to the
LP, from the music playing from the speakers, is one such... this will
create delayed sound on the order of tens of milliseconds. Direct
"ringing" of sound impulses in the vinyl LP itself is another...
sound waves radiate outwards in the platter from the point of contact
of the stylus (action/reaction) and ring around the platter in various
ways.
It's probably not a coincidence that those turntables which had/have a
reputation for "extracting" the most "air" and "ambience" from an LP
recording, are those which tended to use hard mats, or discrete
multi-point support systems for the LP itself (and thus have a minimal
amount of physical damping of the platter). The Linn turntable was
perhaps the exemplar of this class. Turntables which use soft,
sticky, well-damped platter mats (e.g. the original Oracle) had a
reputation for sounding more "dry".
These delayed-signal artifacts of the LP playback process (created
through purely mechanical mechanisms rather than through digital
delay) are, once again, inaccuracies almost by definition. However, I
believe that they can make many recordings sound more subjectively
pleasant and "realistic" than otherwise.
--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Hosting the Jade Warrior home page:
http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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Independent View Of LP versus CD
Hybrid Mode
