Re: Good capacitors

John Larkin wrote:

On 8 Mar 2006 09:24:33 -0800, "stickyfox@xxxxxxxxx"
<stickyfox@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


John Larkin wrote:
On 8 Mar 2006 08:00:47 -0800, "stickyfox@xxxxxxxxx"
<stickyfox@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 08 Mar 2006 04:08:06 GMT, David Harmon <source@xxxxxxxxxx>

The controls aren't supposed to be perfectly flat -- if they were
you wouldn't need it. I have one with a built-in noise generator
and spectrum display, comes with a microphone, so you can set the
result of the whole system flat (including your room furnishings.)

Flat where?

John

Everything in the room colors the sound. That's why the people who take
it way too seriously have anechoic listening rooms with acoustically
transparent furniture. (They're absolutely correct, in their theory at
least; the people being referred to as 'phools in this thread are a few
steps beyond that.)

So if you want to have actual real objects in your room, and arrange
your stereo around your decor instead of the other way around, your
room will favor some frequencies over others. You use the eq to pre- or
de-emphasize bands so that what reaches your ears is colored as little
as possible by the environment.

Not that many home listeners actually do this; most people I've
encountered with graphic eq's just tune them so that they "sound good,"
with "good" being pretty much anything imaginable. Sound reinforcement
regularly employs graphic eq, though.


If you sit in a concert hall, or a jazz club, or most anywhere, moving
to the next row or the next chair will greatly change the acoustics.
And small changes in microphone placement will radically change a
recording. And no two ears have anything like equal, much less flat,
frequency response. And some studio jock has already mixed and bent
the tracks to *his* satisfaction. So it's silly to sweat a dB or
three, or to sweep your "listening room" with microphones and spectrum
analyzers. Just listen to what you like, twist the controls the way
you like, and dump the snobbery and esoterica. And especially don't
clutter sci.electronics.design with meta-religious nonsense like
audio.

How's that?

John

It was actually pretty good for not having read my post at all. You
nearly guessed what I was trying to say.

Room acoustics actually do not change very much with small variations
in position as long as you don't get too close to walls. Three or four
people sitting on a sofa in the center of a home theater will all
experience pretty much the same image. So it makes sense to adjust the
controls to favor the locations where you're likely to be actively
listening. If you are in another room, it's not going to do you any
good, and if a hundred people come over to watch the game, some of them
are just going to have to deal with less-than-optimal conditions (and
the fact that a hundred other people are drowning out sound that's
already being drowned out by a crowd.)

A recording engineer actually does much more than tweak the sound to
his or her liking. Yes, I realize that pop music is crap to begin with,
and it's further crapified by the public's voracious apetite for bass
and vocoders, but you can't even begin to understand what goes into
mastering a recording. Most often it's a process involving two or three
people who have to understand what their choices will leave the next to
work with. I'll keep it short and tell you that there's a lot more
knobs in ProTools than there are on your car stereo. Don't confuse what
happens in the studio with what happens in the stereo aisle at
Wal-Mart.

If by "jock" you are more appropriately referring to a radio DJ, then
yes, you're absolutely right; although it's not entirely his fault.
Radio broadcast is compressed nearly (or sometimes completely) to
destruction, and EQ'ed to get that prized "two midgets in the back seat
wrasslin'" effect.

But you and I and audiophiles have entirely different listening
motives. While we might want a "good sounding stereo," audiophiles (all
the ones I've met anyway) generally listen to concert recordings, and
want the experience in their listening room to reflect the original
performance as precisely as possible. So maybe we don't need an EQ as
much as they do, fine.

You might resent the fact that some people are more demanding in their
listening than you are, who knows. But don't assume that I'm one of
those people. I listen to mp3's on my computer's built-in speakers most
of the time!

Although millions of frat boys around the world can thoroughly enjoy a
bottle of Cuervo Gold, you should not assume that it tastes exactly
like Reserva.

But even the angle that a violin is tilted at any instant will
radically change what a microphone gets. Musical instruments and
voices are not isotropic radiators and are not anything like
reproducible from performance to performance. Speakers are good if
they're flat to 10 dB and are full of funny bumps and dips. Ears
change from person to person and day to day. The actual noise floor,
by the time music is played in a real room, is up there. So to claim
that signal-path capacitors matter is plain silly.

I'd put money on the statement that nobody on the planet can, by
listening to music in a blind test, distinguish the cheapest Jameco
mylar coupling cap from the rarest Black Beauty or the most expensive
hand-wound silver-foil PTFE cap of the same value. Of course, lots of
people think they can hear the difference, but they're in the same
boat as ESP sensitives and tea leaf readers and wine critics when
confronted with a proper blind test. Gallo Hearty Burgundy wins over
Chateau Latour when the label's removed.

Some things matter; signal-path caps don't. I don't resent the people
who can hear the difference, I just know they're paying big bucks for
delusion.

John



Actually if does if they are defective. Well, broken parts usually do
matter. But there really is no difference between any honest functional
part, regardless of price. These audiophools are actually in a $pending
contest, not any kind of verifiable audio difference.
--
JosephKK
Gegen dummheit kampfen die Gotter Selbst, vergebens.
--Schiller
.

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