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In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: Simpson Microphones thread.
Post Subject: Is it you or me? A very interesting question....Posted by Andy Simpson on: 9/11/2008
 Paul S wrote:
Andy, I will say right away that I am not at all set up to "exploit" online music, but this comes across to me as "clean" and  "noise free", with some nice spacial effects, basically devoid of harmonics, and not much in the way of expresion.  Is this me or you?

Best regards,
Paul


Hi Paul,

This is by far the most sensible question I have heard in a long time. Also, thanks for listening.

I would ask by what do you judge the harmonic content/expression?

I would guess that by harmonics, you may possibly mean 'harmonic distortion'?

If, like Romy, you have developed an advanced reproduction system, and if like Romy, you 'tune' the system to suit your ear, you run the danger of developing a system specifically for the recordings you like.

For example, if you particularly favour the famous Mercury Living Presence recordings, to tune the system for 'ideal' performance according to these recordings would in no small part be in compensation for the fairly drastic time-domain distortion (diaphragm resonance) of the u47/c12/m49 type microphones popular at the time, which shows itself not only in spectral terms but more significantly in timbre. (This is to say nothing of the enormous harmonic distortion of the tube amps, transformers, tape, vinyl, etc).

While these old recordings have a lot in their favour, they should sound almost unlistenable at performance SPL due to the various distortion, especially on the 'ideal' horn system.

More specifically, you cannot avoid having tuned your system to the direct-radiator microphones, which are all that have been available until I began development a relatively short time ago.

I would assume that anybody in here is well familiar with the difference in sound quality between the direct-radiator and the horn-loaded speaker. To my ear this is a very obvious class difference.

Given speakers designed soley for flat frequency response (ie. not tuned by ear) the first thing I would expect you to notice is that my recordings can be differentiated from direct-radiator recordings in exactly the same way as with speakers - a feeling of dynamic freedom.

Given (horn) speakers tuned soley for 'ideal sound quality' on reproduction of direct-radiator recordings, I would expect a critically over-damped system, since the direct-radiator microphones are relatively critically 'under-damped'.

In the course of my work I have found that in the case of critically over-damped systems (especially direct-radiator with very stiff ferrofluid), the extra 'dynamic freedom' in the recordings actually causes the recordings to sound relatively 'muted', as the lack of distortion highlights the mechanical over-damping (which is suited to 'taming' mechanically resonant microphones).

Or, perhaps we are simply talking about equal loudness effects?

These recordings are calibrated for direct comparison with the source at same SPL - they were monitored that way. If we reduce the listening level 20dB we can expect a perceived loss of HF/detail/harmonic content/etc.

Did you try the recordings at realistic performance levels?

Andy

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