> A/B test by actually hiring a quartet
That's easy. The one with room echos, washed out highs, and missing bass is the live.
That's easy. The one with room echos, washed out highs, and missing bass is the live.
That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why?
What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment?
If you're talking about the experience itself of siting next to performers then I wholeheartedly agree, but that's the problem, it's no longer something that can be measured and objectivized.
And that's entirely fine, but I think there's a trend among some people (and especially the type of people who frequent this forum) that deem that if a feeling or emotion can't be objectivized then it's effectively worthless or irrational or something like that, so you see people grasping at straws to justify their emotions with a pseudo-scientific explanation. I find that frankly sad and quite toxic in a way.
Music is art, the enjoyment we derive from it can't be measured in kilobits per second. That doesn't mean that we need to make up pseudo-facts about acoustics to justify our preferences.
Disclaimer: I am definitely not an audiophile.
The low frequencies that we feel with/through our bodies feel entirely different at a non-electric live concert as compared to what we feel through speakers. No headphones can reproduce such effects. For sure, there are speakers that can reproduce such sounds faithfully, but how often do the audio production guys use such speakers, and how often do they try to control for the feeling in their bodies? Not often, I imagine.
Yes, but we're talking about 5 digit and up audio equipment and listening to the top operas of the world, which definitely do have guys that know how to record. Your 10$ (or 250$) headphones combined with a CD from a smaller producer will not get you all the way there, I agree, but once you're in the insane high-price audiophile world, this becomes possible.
But even this is simplifying things, because each instrument has a different body shape, different sound projection, which would need to be replicated by specialized speakers. Also, the room has an important effect on how the sound waves travel and hit you from different directions. At the end it is probably cheaper and easier to pay a ticket to have this live experience.
Admittedly in order to do this you need to have post-processing specific for every person since we don't process sound exactly the same depending on our physiology. I know that Sony attempted something like that with its "3D audio". I think it's a bit of a gimmick myself, but it's technically doable.
I agree that it is probably possible in theory, but aren't we talking about actual equipment and recordings that people can buy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function
During an interval I was sitting in a shitty corner up on some balcony, pretty far; but I could hear the voice and discern the words of a girl chatting down in the platea next to an entrance.
A single mouth, chatting, among hundreds other voices.
During the concert you could hear the individual performers’ instruments, the strings rubbing, the valves clicking. I was blown away
While most of us can't live in such a purpose-optimized room I think OP's point was that a bunch of high quality speakers in that very same auditorium might have yielded very similar results to your experience.
An orchestra is a large number of instruments spread across a wide stage. Each of those instruments is its own sound source. The audio cortex in the brain is highly tuned to understand things like the 3D location of sounds from cues generated by factors like the individual shape of our ears and how sounds bounce around and down into the ear canal.
Now I'm sure you'd agree that sitting in front of two speakers X metres apart, or with headphones on, no matter how good those speakers / headphones are is a different set of sound waves.
Some people are absolutely able to determine the difference between those sound sources. They're likely to have listened to a lot of music. I think these discussions get derailed by the blanket "people can" or "people can't" statements rather than thinking about who might be able to make those distinctions. It might be that the majority of people can't make that distinction. But that doesn't mean that no-one can.
tongue in cheek answer: nothing. It's your ears that are special.
Less tongue in cheek, while we have got pretty good at making microphones, they don't behave anything like human audio system; this makes it really difficult to reproduce what we experience when generated a different way (e.g. multichannel playback).
There is nothing "special" about classical music here either, it's just got a lot of complexity (from multiple instruments, and room dynamics) and dynamic range.
I see your point: if we could a) design microphones that capture everything going by them in a neutral way and b) design speakers that precisely reproduce everything they are sent in a neutral way, and c) set up a room to reproduce things in a neutral way for your particular position ... then this would work. We can't actually do any of those things.
By the time It was over I completely "got" it though. I was internally complaining that an actual fishing port at 5AM don't look like a Monet copy, not watered down, skewed, or idealized.