Get real
December 30, 2006 | 12:00am
Many readers are asking why there’s a need to listen to live music just so they can appreciate the sound coming out of their respective stereo systems. Audio purists do it because they want to be assured that the music they hear from their sound equipment is the precise reproduction of the original.
Audiophiles need to have a reference so that they can compare a reproduction with the real thing. It’s not about watching a particular artist or a musical group, since it will be quite difficult for you to watch and hear the performances of your favorite foreign artists as often as you want to. It is about hearing what a particular instrument sounds like live. Sound, after all, is produced from air vibrations – whether it comes from the vocal cords of humans or animals, a musical instrument or the sound of nature. Once sound is reproduced, however, there could be variations in timbre and tones from the original. Not so with recorded music. Artists, producers, arrangers and sound engineers go to great lengths to make sure that the finished product will be the exact replica of the music they recorded in a studio. It will be now up to your system to churn out music the way these people intended it to sound. From your end, how could you possibly know if the music is faithful to the original? Audiophiles do this by constantly reaffirming that what they hear is the purest of audio.Physics tells us that natural sound is analog. Recorded sounds go through a lengthy process to make sure that what we hear is analog music. This explains why your CD player has to have an efficient digital-to-analog converter to reproduce recorded music. Is there such a thing as a digital sound? I’m afraid not, but almost all the recorded music we hear today has to be digitized and converted again to analog. So there’s no better way to hear analog music than by hearing it live or getting it from a system that can faithfully recreate analog sounds.This is where audiophiles draw the line. Instead of going digital, they choose an all-analog system, which up to now, remains supreme when it comes to high-fidelity music. Sound reproduction was already perfected in the mid-1960s, audiophiles argue, so there’s no compelling reason to reinvent the wheel. Those analog contraptions born at that time, such as turntables, vinyl records and vacuum tube amplifiers, among others, are making a grand comeback. They aptly call the phenomenon The Analog Renaissance.CDs pale in comparison with vinyl records because the latter recreates sound mechanically by engraving air vibrations directly to the disk. The grooves you see in it are the exact replica of the sound waves generated by the vibrating air caused by playing musical instruments or singing inside the studio.In digital recording, music has to be digitized in order to be recorded and played back on a CD. Sound engineers have determined that they can get an accurate analog waveform (through a process called Pulse Code Modulation) at 44.1 kHz (44,100 times-per-second sampling rate). They also decided to cut off frequencies higher than 20 kHz and those lower than 20 hertz since humans can’t hear sound waves higher, or lower than that.
Thus, for more than two decades, digital audio systems have used PCM, which sadly exposes the music to a "decimation" filter during recording and an "interpolation" filter during playback. This simply means that these filters can degrade sound quality by smearing and corrupting the sound stage, and thereby compromising the richness of live music.An analog system has accuracy, soundstage and ambience. It can precisely reproduce sounds so that a particular musical instrument will sound like it is: a guitar sounds like a guitar, a sax like a sax, a piano like a piano. More importantly, an analog system can let you discern minute details such as two violins, not just one, playing a harmonious line; a mallet hitting the skin of the drum, not just the boom of the drum; the sound of a guitar pick stirring the string, not just the sound of the note that was struck.
For comments or questions, please e-mail me at vphl@hotmail.com
Audiophiles need to have a reference so that they can compare a reproduction with the real thing. It’s not about watching a particular artist or a musical group, since it will be quite difficult for you to watch and hear the performances of your favorite foreign artists as often as you want to. It is about hearing what a particular instrument sounds like live. Sound, after all, is produced from air vibrations – whether it comes from the vocal cords of humans or animals, a musical instrument or the sound of nature. Once sound is reproduced, however, there could be variations in timbre and tones from the original. Not so with recorded music. Artists, producers, arrangers and sound engineers go to great lengths to make sure that the finished product will be the exact replica of the music they recorded in a studio. It will be now up to your system to churn out music the way these people intended it to sound. From your end, how could you possibly know if the music is faithful to the original? Audiophiles do this by constantly reaffirming that what they hear is the purest of audio.Physics tells us that natural sound is analog. Recorded sounds go through a lengthy process to make sure that what we hear is analog music. This explains why your CD player has to have an efficient digital-to-analog converter to reproduce recorded music. Is there such a thing as a digital sound? I’m afraid not, but almost all the recorded music we hear today has to be digitized and converted again to analog. So there’s no better way to hear analog music than by hearing it live or getting it from a system that can faithfully recreate analog sounds.This is where audiophiles draw the line. Instead of going digital, they choose an all-analog system, which up to now, remains supreme when it comes to high-fidelity music. Sound reproduction was already perfected in the mid-1960s, audiophiles argue, so there’s no compelling reason to reinvent the wheel. Those analog contraptions born at that time, such as turntables, vinyl records and vacuum tube amplifiers, among others, are making a grand comeback. They aptly call the phenomenon The Analog Renaissance.CDs pale in comparison with vinyl records because the latter recreates sound mechanically by engraving air vibrations directly to the disk. The grooves you see in it are the exact replica of the sound waves generated by the vibrating air caused by playing musical instruments or singing inside the studio.In digital recording, music has to be digitized in order to be recorded and played back on a CD. Sound engineers have determined that they can get an accurate analog waveform (through a process called Pulse Code Modulation) at 44.1 kHz (44,100 times-per-second sampling rate). They also decided to cut off frequencies higher than 20 kHz and those lower than 20 hertz since humans can’t hear sound waves higher, or lower than that.
Thus, for more than two decades, digital audio systems have used PCM, which sadly exposes the music to a "decimation" filter during recording and an "interpolation" filter during playback. This simply means that these filters can degrade sound quality by smearing and corrupting the sound stage, and thereby compromising the richness of live music.An analog system has accuracy, soundstage and ambience. It can precisely reproduce sounds so that a particular musical instrument will sound like it is: a guitar sounds like a guitar, a sax like a sax, a piano like a piano. More importantly, an analog system can let you discern minute details such as two violins, not just one, playing a harmonious line; a mallet hitting the skin of the drum, not just the boom of the drum; the sound of a guitar pick stirring the string, not just the sound of the note that was struck.
BrandSpace Articles
<
>
