What is the closest to real live sound that you have heard from a system "&", what was it?

Peter Breuninger said:
YG Sonjas with AudioNet Max amps, and Audio Note M10 Signature linestage. Source: AudioNet DNC, Triangle Art Signature table.
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I believe I heard YG Sonjas with Audionet Max amps at RMAF, where the source was a Kronos Pro table. And indeed that was the most realistic sound I've ever heard. Second place were rigs featuring big Soulution monoblocks, one driving the new Magico S7s, another driving some massive Focal speakers.
 
What is the closest to real live sound that you have heard from a system "&",...

Sounds like mine then. LS 3/5A. Great speakers. However the price has been gone up in the market now. :)


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One of the key factors is that the system has to be able to go loud, cleanly. Decades ago this was quite hard, most setups were nowhere in the race, but things have much improved; it's much easier now to drive a rig to the right SPLs without the artifacts from the playback chain being so obvious - of course, the remaining, lower level artifacts are then that much easier to notice at the higher volumes, so the system may still struggle to sound 'real' ...
 
interesting point here. what is the real loudness of music? and at what position in the music hall?

i guess the conductors place or close to the pig timpani can in fact be loud - but for the audience?

well, what i'm surprised by everytime i'm sitting in front a big orchestra - is the fact that although it sound huge, on my iPhone dB app even on the loudest passages (and i'm sitting mostly in the middle of row 5-10) the max. sound level is only about 80-82 dB! and normal playing sound level is between 35-75 dB. in fact when there is complete silence it there is still about 20-25 dB "noise" of the hall (which actualy sounds quite natural).

so soundlevels are nowhere close the 100 dB you read sometimes in magazines, when audio equipment is tested.

if fact at home i try to listen to sound levels that sound "natural" to me too. a jazz band is not that loud too - same dB oberservations here (45-75 dB about 2,50 m in front of the speakers)

(ok last year i went to slayer in vienna - it was in fact a lot louder than 85 dB... :snicker: )
 
Yes, that is quite valid to say ... however, it's a very easy way to "measure" a system's competence by testing whether one can raise the volume without the sound appearing to falter. A simple one: find someone playing a real piano, competently, and move closer and further away to the instrument while it's being played, to within a few feet of it; try and retain a picture of how the sound impacts while doing this. Then, play a similar style piece of piano on one's system, up the volume to match being a certain distance from the real thing - does it reasonably match? You can try further experiments of increasing the volume to mimic getting closer, or in fact just physically move nearer to the speakers - does that match the "real thing"?

A complication is that the psychoacoustics of hearing can make playback come across, subjectively, as being softer or louder, without touching the volume control! The ear adjusts, depending on how comfortable it is taking in what it's receiving - which is why sound sometimes is very "big", yet is not measurably loud ...
 
Various combinations of gear that I've played with over the years - I'm an inveterate tweaker of relatively low cost items, trying to see what's possible. My goal is always to get a degree of convincing sound happening, within the limitations of the components' raw capabilities. Currently, it's a combination of some older, standard NAD gear, driving cheap bookshelf speakers. No deep bass, but it's up to a reasonable level so far, by my standards - does the piano thing pretty well if I pull out all the stops.

Recently I started a blog going, keeping track of where I'm up to: http://artofaudioconjuring.blogspot.com. Here I describe the machinery, and the sort of things I worry about ...
 
fas42-are you the same guy that used to post on WBF and you had some sort of Phillips boom box that you had tweaked out and hard-wired straight into your wall and claimed you were getting 3D sound from it all over your house when it was "on song?"
 
You've got it, Mark! The Philips "died" some time ago, a power opamp decided it wanted to have a long, long rest - I could have fixed it, but haven't been in the mood since.

Just recently I was inspired to aim a bit higher, I had some NAD units that had been sitting around for ages and decided to give them a go. I was pleasantly impressed with the beasts, the raw sound showed lots of promise - so went to work. The interesting thing was that it was relatively easy to get acceptable sound on material that was recorded at high average levels, but soft, high ambience recorded passages were coming across quite flat and unmusical - think symphonic works with a ppp string section passage.

It's in pretty decent shape at this point in time, but plenty more can be done to raise its performance - it shows that the basic engineering of reasonable quality components does keep improving, so less has to be done to compensate for the shortcomings.

I'm also very pleased that I now have a reasonably good microphone setup, so can better capture examples of what's going on ...
 
mep said:
fas42-are you the same guy that used to post on WBF and you had some sort of Phillips boom box that you had tweaked out and hard-wired straight into your wall and claimed you were getting 3D sound from it all over your house when it was "on song?"
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Ah, ok.
 
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