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<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C">Some Of The Collective Wisdom Of Lynn Olson</span></p>
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<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C0">Lynn Olson, to me, is a "renaissance man" of audio. An accomplished designer, a free
spirit, an innovative thinker; he portrays music as a meaningful experience in our
everyday lives.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">Here are some of his thoughts:</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C2">On Evaluating Audio Systems</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">"So - to get back to the point - I aim for vocal realism, first, last, and always.
The other virtues of tonal vividness, true-to-life dynamics, spatial realism (as
in realistically conveying the size of the recording venue) all come after that -
they're important, true, but the voice comes first - and is easiest to evaluate,
since we all know what voices sound like - and it ain't like a hifi, that's for sure.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">The HF driver gives the sense of excitement, sparkle, and dynamism, but the truth
of the midrange has to be there first. This is why table radios and really simple
systems usually sound more "right" than complex multiway systems.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">One test for overall system integration is simple - does it play quiet background
music better than a table radio? Most high-end systems - especially in the more than
$20,000 category - fail this test dismally. It's a simple test, too - carry on a
conversation with a friend while music is quietly playing in the background.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">If the hifi gets in the way and subtly annoys you, then it's not realistic at low
levels - real background music, played by real musicians, has a harmonious quality
that makes conversation more interesting and more entertaining. Much of Baroque music
was composed for background music at parties, after all.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">Much of high-end audio, to me, in a misguided attempt to be "exciting", is more annoying
than anything, and has little of the ingratiating quality and emotionally affecting
tonal beauty of live music. The replacement of LP's by CD's accelerated this trend
- what's missing from the low-resolution Red Book 44.1/16 CD is then artificially
added by doses of synthetic "accuracy" and "slam", taking 44.1/16 PCM even further
from anything like the beauty of live music.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">I suspect that few people even know what live music even sounds like anymore, a feeling
that is reinforced when I read of somebody preferring the sound of a hifi system
to a live concert - to me, that taste seems as depraved as preferring an inflatable
plastic doll to a human being. Then again, watching the latest TV news stories of
the low-life antics of US politicians, maybe I shouldn't be surprised after all.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">It was a revelation when I first heard Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" at the Seattle
Symphony Hall - which I think probably has some of the best acoustics in the USA.
I'd always thought it has a harsh-sounding piece whenever I heard it on record or
CD, no matter how good the hifi. But hearing it live, in a wood-panelled and wood-floored
symphony hall, I was stunned - literally at a loss for words - just how astonishingly
beautiful the whole piece was. Hard to play, yes, and incredibly dense, with the
music going in several directions all at once - but just beautiful throughout, in
a way I had never, ever heard on any hifi system, at any performance level.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">I've subsequently heard "modern" 20th-century classical music - a genre I've never
particularly liked before - in live performances, and suddenly "got" what they were
all about. In recordings, these pieces are harsh and brutal, downright repellent:
performed live, they are complex, fascinating, and engaging, nothing like the recordings
at all. It is an entire genre that simply doesn't come off well in recorded form
- that's all there is to it.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">This experience confirmed a feeling I've had for a long time that popular music is
shaped by the recording technology, more specifically, by the limitations of the
technology. When LP's, vacuum tubes, and simple loudspeakers were the standard during
the early Fifties through the mid-Sixties, the most popular music on the radio dial
and in the record stores was classical, popular singers like Sinatra, and for a few,
jazz. Rock-n-roll was actually confined to a small audience and a limited portion
of the AM dial.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">When high-powered transistor amps replaced tubes, the sound became harsher, faster,
and louder - partly because early quasi-complementary, high-crossover-distortion,
low-slew-rate, high-feedback transistor amps didn't "do" beauty, lyricism, or carry
off emotional shadings with any fidelity. So the music itself changed, to a harsher,
cruder, and more in-your-face sound, ending up with the heavy-metal style of the
early Seventies. Think about it: a Crown DC300 and Phase Linear 400 playing through
a JBL L200 is going to be a lot better at Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath than Frank
Sinatra or Doris Day (who was a very good singer).</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">This trend continued when low-resolution Red Book CD's replaced LP's (and Red Book
was retrograde - the established standard of the Seventies was the Soundstream/Denon
50/16 system with military-grade ADC's). Now the obvious difference between EMT reverb
plates and synthetic digital reverb was masked (which is easily heard on high-res
PCM, DSD, and analog), and a new disembodied style of performers collected from around
the world, playing to a click-track, and spliced together into single recording come
into vogue.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">When we lost the LP as a mass-market medium, I personally think that high-end audio
lost its way, and we entered the benighted era of "boutique" audio and the wretched
high-profile brands of the Eighties.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">Think about it - what is the collectible value of a Krell, Wilson, or Audio Research
model from the Eighties? Who wants a $7,000 late-Eighties CD player, or worse, set
of boutique cables? This was probably the lowest point in the entire history of audio.
It took the renaissance of tubes, triodes, and the DIY era in the early Nineties
for things to find their way back to reality and the reason for quality artisan audio
to exist in the first place.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">At live concerts, of course, it's easy to sense a sort of invisible energy surging
between the performer and the audience, when both start to get inspired (using the
word in the archaic sense) and the performance spirals up and up and up, leaving
everyone exhilarated at the end. Something unseen, great, and powerful is happening
here, and it's a gift of being human - people have experienced this performer/audience
transformation of consciousness since the dawn of time.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">No matter what this phenomenon is, or what you call it, the job of a hifi system
is to get out of the way, and not impede its passage. That's why there are intangible,
impossible-to-describe aspects to music - because music invokes the deepest and most
primal aspects of human consciousness - and consciousness is the great "Terra Incognita"
of science and philosophy."</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C2">On Music Systems</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">"Ah! I think we come to the heart of the matter here.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">By now it should be evident we hear - or at least, expect to hear - reproduced music
in different ways. Speaking only for myself, I find all hifi systems not very close
to the real thing - which for me, is live, un-amplified symphonic and choral music.
When I go to a concert, it's at least a couple of days before I can stand to turn
the hifi on again, it sounds so grossly artificial. Once I re-adapt, there is always
at least some suspension of disbelief when listening to mechanical sound reproducers
- and I use the word "mechanical" quite deliberately, since that's exactly what's
wrong with hifi in general - a mechanical, "canned" quality that is always there.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">This isn't to say all hifi sounds the same - hardly. Some, and a lot of the very
expensive mainstream systems, are completely unacceptable and artificial sounding,
with timbres and tone colors that don't sound like any acoustic instrument at all.
I can tolerate these for no more than a few minutes, fighting an urgent desire to
leave the exhibition room immediately, while right next to me, an audiophile (or
magazine reviewer) is grinning from ear to ear.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">What can I say? There's no accounting for taste. Since I find even the very finest
systems removed from reality to a fairly obvious degree, I prefer systems that have
colorations that land in the "musical" direction, as opposed to metallic, sizzly,
grainy, flat-sounding, or other "electronic" or "mechanical" sounding colorations.
In presence of obvious and hard-to-ignore colorations - which, again, I find in all
systems compared to the real thing - the whole discussion of "transparency" doesn't
seem as relevant.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">Oddly enough, when it comes to amplifiers - where colorations aren't as gross and
severe - then transparency as a desideratum becomes more relevant. In my limited
experience, I find bigger transparency differences amongst amplifiers, which really
can have a sort of remarkable MP3-like ability to erase fine detail and subtleties
of musical expression.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">In technical terms, though, not so surprising. Speaker drivers add distortion and
resonances - lots of them - but don't have the ability to actually erase resolution.
Electronics can perform this feat, thanks to Class AB-transition crossover distortion,
nonmonotonicity in ADC and DAC conversion, digital jitter, and assorted low-level
signal bending mechanisms that just don't exist in passive electroacoustic transducers.
</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">Measurements confirm this - in most electronics with Class AB and/or quasi-complementary
elements (this includes nearly all op-amps), distortion (not just noise!) starts
to rise at low levels, while this is not seen in electracoustic transducers, where
distortion falls monotonically with level (and of course there is no addition of
noise, either).</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">I respect what you hear - our perceptions are our own, the deepest and most intimate
part of personal reality. What you hear exists, and is real.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">The whole symphony vs jazz discussion can get lost in the weeds of personal musical
preferences, and is a diversion from a more important point that bears on what we've
all been talking about. A jazz group has a much sparser spectra than a full-scale
symphony orchestra, and the reverb time is much shorter as well.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">This means the symphonic spectra superficially looks as dense as noise, but in reality
is highly correlated with itself and the hall reflections. Any perturbation to the
fine spectral and time structure does enormous violence to the performance, since
so much is going on all at once - indeed, the sheer density, complexity, and fleeting
spatial relationships are an integral part of the composer's and conductor's intentions.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">Music with many fewer instruments has a much simpler and sparser spectrum, and is
more about the vivid and pulsing tone colors of the individual instruments - the
whole point of the trademark jazz solo. It's all about expression and tone colors.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">The requirements of the two types of music for the hifi system are quite different.
Even tiny amounts of IM distortion have a ruinous effect on a dense spectrum, creating
all kinds of inharmonic sidebands that clash with the tone-colors of the ensemble.
The effects of IM distortion (and driver resonances) are especially destructive to
the subtle shimmering interplays of harmonic decay structures among different instruments.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">This, I submit, is why symphonic and jazz fans tend to prefer different kinds of
hifi systems. The spectral and dynamic requirements are dissimilar, with low dynamic
IM distortion being especially important to classical music. Solid-state electronics
typically have very low steady-state distortion, but can degrade by many orders of
magnitude under fast transient conditions (memory effects in transistors causing
on-chip thermal lags and transient mis-biasing). Similarly, the whole concept of
dithering relies on a large number of samples to obtain the required distortion improvement
in the LSB region - with fewer samples (shorter intervals), the benefits of dithering
are greatly reduced.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">I like the wide-open spatial presentation very much, but my enthusiasm stops about
there. Very low efficiency and requires 1 kW amplifiers which pretty much rules out
delicacy and beauty. It sounds like the low-efficiency speaker it is - stressed and
working very hard at most dynamic levels, with a pretty noticeable look-at-me "hifi"
quality to the presentation.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">That also describes the overall sound of nearly all low-efficiency audiophile speakers.
Take away the spacious MBL imaging, replace it with paper-thin cookie-cutter image
quality, and you've got your famous-name Brand W with their prismatic-shaped "giant
robot" cabinets right there. Fake images, fake dynamics, plenty of cone coloration,
and big big prices. Good reviews, though.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">The true charm of high-efficiency - if it isn't grossly colored like a vintage PA
system - is the relaxed and effortless dynamic quality. This is such a wonderful
change from 84~87 dB/metre systems, which sound much more stressed at all levels,
and definitely unhappy at transient-peak levels more than 95 dB."</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C2">On Modern Speaker Systems</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">"I feel modern designs have gone astray in focussing on dispersion vs frequency compared
to the basic sound of the drivers themselves. Considering how grossly colored I find
contemporary "audiophile" drivers - I keep being surprised how people are able to
ignore such basic colorations while looking at all those pretty-looking polar graphs.
I have to be direct here, folks - I really dislike the sound and philosophy of modern
high-end audio, sorry. Please look elsewhere if you find the sound of modern high-end
even a little bit palatable.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">I should warn readers, like I did for the Ariels, that my designs do not follow contemporary
trends in speaker design. I optimize for natural sound on solo voice and choirs,
followed by naturalistic qualities on other instruments (symphonic), followed by
natural spatial qualities (not imaging per se) and realistic dynamics - in about
that order. I make no claims for the "best" or "ultimate", but choose to address
problems I see ignored in other approaches.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">Um, I listened the Triangle speakers, and they didn't leave a strong impression.
But they're hardly alone - the current fad for audiophile qualities like "fast" and
"slam" has led not to lower distortion and more efficiency (which sure would have
been nice), but drivers with poorer self-damping, only slightly more efficiency,
and ever-more-harsh sound with very rough response at the upper edge of the band.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">It seems that modern designers are reacting to these problematic drivers in two ways:
the "minimalists" are going for lots of excitement and thrills, using the rock-bottom
simplest crossovers possible (but with very expensive parts), and letting the peaks
sail right through. Unsophisticated listeners - and worse, reviewers - interpret
the peaks and harshness as "speed" and "accuracy".</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">There's a lower-profile school that believes in extensive computer simulation and
using crossovers of almost unlimited complexity. This "objective" school of designers
tend to discount esoterica like audibility of capacitor coloration - or even believe
it doesn't exist - so has no problem with complex op-amp circuits, multiple transistor
amps, or high-parts-count crossovers with extensive notch filters and shaping networks.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">I'm not in either school. I don't want to use drivers with problematic responses
- too much work for too little return. I still remember the bad old days of KEF and
Audax Bextrene drivers, with their characteristic qualities of lumpy midrange, and
dreadfully low efficiencies (85 dB/metre typical). Now, audiophile efficiencies have
crept up to 90~93 dB/metre (with a tailwind), but the drivers have gotten really
peaky, and in ways that are very hard to correct - the worst peaks are typically
directional, making a crossover correction useless.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">I think one difference between us is that I'm no longer interested in SEAS, Vifa
Peerless, ScanSpeak, etc. They've had 15 years to respond to the vacuum-tube subculture
and the constantly-expressed demand for substantially higher efficiency, and have
done their best to ignore it and hope it would go away. Well, it hasn't, there's
only been a trivial 1~2 dB change in efficiency in more than a decade, and to me,
the mainstream audiophile drivers sound worse than what they were making 15 years
ago. That's why I'm looking at different vendors than the usual mainstream candidates.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">I'm surprised that you haven't seen drivers depart from minimum phase. This is one
of the most direct indicators of cone breakup, and it's gotten much worse with the
popularity of very rigid Kevlar, carbon-fiber, composite, ceramic, and metal cones.
When a cone no longer moves as unit and enters the breakup region, there are multiple,
asynchronous centers of radiation all over the cone. This is a clear indication of
a "no-go" zone, and indirectly shows a requirement for an aggressive high-slope crossover
to avoid gross coloration.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">The drivers that are most interesting - to me - are the ones that don't require aggressive
equalization to avoid harsh sound, and are characterized by smooth, well-controlled
rolloff regions that retain their minimum-phase character to very high frequencies.
Since the prosound manufacturers can't be bothered to supply either impulse or complete
FR/phase data information, I'll be finding this out the hard ($$$) way - I'm not
expecting any free loans from 18Sound, JBL, or Fertin.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">A subtle downside to high-headroom truly efficient drivers is they reveal the truth
about high-power transistor amplifiers - they don't sound all that good in the milliwatt
region. In the pro world, it doesn't matter that much, since we're talking about
kilowatts anyway, and in the audiophile world, the "exotic" speakers are such power
sponges the amp never gets into the low-power region for long. The dramatically lower
distortion of high-efficiency speakers reveals a lot more about amplifier sonics.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">Back in my Audionics days, I designed speakers around drivers that I had mixed feelings
about. Although I was reasonably successful removing the colorations I didn't like,
it greatly extended the design cycle, and I usually didn't really like the finished
product all that much. That's why I avoid carbon-fiber, Kevlar, or metal-cone midbass
drivers, or JBL compression drivers, for example - it's just not a sound that I like,
and going to enormous lengths to remove that sonic "character" results in a wishy-washy
end result that is neither fish nor fowl, something nobody likes.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">Rather than trying to remove coloration entirely, which I don't think is possible
at the present state of the art, I'd rather get coloration down to low-to-moderate
levels, and aim for a musically consonant and pleasing character for what's left.
This is a different goal than other designers, and I'm OK with that."</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C2">On Music Perception</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">"I may have heard the same phonograph some time in the early Seventies, when I was
visiting my retired parents in Berkeley. I was idly strolling along Telegraph Avenue,
and heard a really good opera singer inside a small arcade. Drawn off the busy street
by the sound, I walked inside, turned a corner and was astonished to find a big Edison
acoustic phonograph playing a thick, blue-colored (must have vertical-cut) 12" disk.
I stood and listened to the whole length of the record - it really was a good approximation
of a somebody stranding right there and singing, and singing damn good classical
opera.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">Was it hifi? No. But it did some things hifi systems don't - in important ways, it
sounded real. No "electronic" colorations at all, and the mechanical colorations
had somehow been ingeniously concealed for the human voice. The orchestral backing
was pretty funky-sounding, but there wasn't much of it, which was just as well.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">This was a truly educational experience - I was already indoctrinated into high-end
audio, having subscribed to J. Gordon Holt's early Stereophile for several years
at that time, owned exotica like a Thorens TD-125, Rabco SL-8E, and a Stanton 681A
cartridge, and persuaded my sister to buy Fulton FMI-80 speakers (which I think she
still owns - good speakers).</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">But that top-of-the-line Edison gramophone made me think about a lot of unquestioned
assumptions I'd made about audio. It wasn't all about frequency response, impulse
response, and freedom from resonance. There's a very direct and immediate perception
of realness - so strong it brought me off the never-ending circus of Telegraph Avenue
on a summer's day - into a secluded courtyard, and to a revelatory experience I never
would have expected.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">This openness to the unexpected has a been a gift, one of the deepest and most essential
parts of the human spiritual endowment, and I am absolutely sure we are all born
with it. I am afraid, though, that culture, and worse, education, beats it out of
many of us, leaving room for only small deviations from the "known" and "true". I
am also afraid that perception itself is strongly affected by prior experience, shutting
off entire worlds of perception if we "already know" that certain things are impossible.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">The problem of "realism" in audio goes much deeper than the simpler and better-understood
mechanisms of color balance in vision. When it's right, we feel "yeah, that's good",
and feel a mood elevation if we like the music. When it's close-but-no-cigar, the
feelings are more complex, but musical satisfaction (an emotion) is decreased or
entirely removed. When the error is gross, we're actively repelled, and want to leave.
This is primarily an emotional percept with an after-the-fact attempted interpretation
and rationalization of the sonic quality.</span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1"> </span></p>
<p class="Wp-Normal-P"><span class="Normal-C-C1">This isn't as simple as turning the gamma or H&D curve knobs for RGB, YUV, or CMYK
colorspaces - we aren't even sure which knobs to turn, or worse, maybe they don't
exist yet!"</span></p>
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