Slashdot Mirror
Aural Heaven -- iPod And Analog
Ant writes This Wired News article says there is aural magic in the combination of the very old with the very new: iPod through an old radio or tube-driven amplifier gives it a special warmth and atmosphere. '50-year-old Takeyuki Ishii insists the antique equipment creates an atmosphere that has been forgotten. The softer tones ease listeners and make them feel warm and relaxed.'"
It's the recordings that have gotten better in the past 50 years, not the speakers.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Why the heck is he using an FM transmitter to connect the iPod to his nice tube equipment. Its one thing to use nice tube amplifiers to get a warm analog sound from a digital source (even order harmonic distortion and all that jazz), but why limit the frequency responce to FM's 50-15,000 Hz?! Good sources (such as the iPod) and good output equipment (which would presumably be hooked up to quality tube amplifiers) would benefit greatly from a full 20-20,000 KHz frequency responce!!
Although I am a fan of the iPod (and Apple Computer) there is nothing new here: Some years ago (about 16) I spent a couple of days at Stevie Wonders studio (Wonderland) and was stunned to see a couple of CD players that had been custom built to have tubes hooked up to them. It was explained to me that this "new fangled CD technology" sounded too "crisp" and that playing the signal back through tubes warmed things up considerably. I never would have been able to tell the difference until they hooked them up to some seriously high end speakers and lo and behold, you really could tell a difference. Unfortunately I do not remember who build these CD players, but I seem to recall a $20k price tag.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I don't think that nostalgic audiophiles who prefer the old analog equipment could reliably pass blind listening tests comparing high-end audio from a digital source to an older tube (or whatever) based high-end analog system. All the flowery language used to describe that equipment smacks of pseudo-science. The idea of digital music being too sharp or rough (i.e. whatever the opposites of smooth etc are) stem from visualizing what a quantized sine wave looks like at 8 bits.
Nowadays you can simulate, in software, the effects of analog tape saturation, even-order harmonic distortion caused by tube amplifiers, or an older microphone that distorted the sound in some desirable way.
Maybe this is the new era of nostalgy fans?
They take old, nostalgic objects, and combine them with new technology to make the ULTIMATE ANTIQUE!
I think it should be possible to do the same change to the sound through a digital filter before converting it to analog. Or is there anything I'm missing?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
ESPECIALLY better than any compressed audio format. Just because you listen to everything through a crappy system instead of good studio monitors doesn't mean there isn't a difference.
...create an equalizer preset in iTunes (or Winamp or what have you) that mimics the distortion caused by tube amplifiers.
1. Make equalizer preset
2. Call it iTubes
3. ???
4. Profit.
Indeed. Aopen even went so far as to make a P4 motherboard with a tube in the circuit for the onboard audio. Crazy...
define "better".
If "better" means "more pleasant sound" then yes, they are.. because people just seem to like the twist that tubes put on their music.
If "better" means "more accurate" then no, they generally aren't.
Tubes introduce more coloration than your average solid state amp.
In general with audio, "warm" means stronger low frequencies in the sound and "bright" means stronger highs.
/.) that digital amps tend to reproduce even harmonics and acoustic (tube) tends to reproduce odd harmonics.
I've read somewhere (probably on
Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I have an old magnavox console stereo. I used to do this all the time with my ipod or whatever music playback device. The only thing was, that I had to open the back of it and look inside.
:)
TO my surprise I found aux line inputs. So with the proper cable, I was able to listen to all sorts of music through that thing. IT was great in the evening times.
Sadly, it finally blew and now just houses some old records, and is waiting for me to tear it apart and attempt to fix it.
Sound with even harmonic distortion is said to sound warm, that is 2f,4f,6f etc.
Sound with odd harmonic distortion sounds harsh to our ears, that is 3f,5f,7f etc.
Valves usually produce even harmonic distortion, transistors usually produce odd harmonic distortion.
Cheers
John
Perhaps the story should have been when Apple released Apple Lossless Encoder. That's the recent iPod news that makes the iPod better for audiophiles.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
..more particularly, it's the spectrum of the distortion. Tube amps usually display quite large amounts of added 2nd harmonic, which is euphonic, or 'warming' and musically concordant. However tube amps usually show far, far less odd harmonics than solid-state amps, and have a distortion spectrum that rarely extends beyond the 5th/6th harmonic at all. In contrast, solid state amps, esp. those with high negative feedback, can produce harmonics a lot further out, even though the total summed is less than the tube amp, the result has a different sound and many people can tell the two apart on this basis. BTW it is *not* due to simple differences in signal:noise ratio and the like. It appears the ear/brain hearing mechanism has a FFT component - check how the ear works, and look closely at what the cilia do. The bottom line really is that there's a *lot* the ear/brain hearing mechanism does that bald figures like 'hearing response' and 'THD' are inadequate to describe.
Tubes don't just sound subjectively differentm we can objectively measure the differences. Tubes distory the sound more than transistors, and in different ways. It gives a sound that is generally described as "warmer" and "smoother" and such. It's not as accurate, as least as compared to good transistor equipment, but that doesn't mean it's unplesant.
There is actually a DIY design for SoundBlaster Audigys (or maybe Audigy 2s, can't remember) to do a tube output stage. It is said (I've never heard it) to help smooth out harsh sound and mask some unplesantness like MP3 artifacts. Doesn't mean it makes teh sound objictevly more accurate, just subjectively more plesant.
Speaker design used to be as much art and voodoo as science. A company would ifnd something worked well, but not be able to explain WHY. That's really changed. Laser infermetroy was a big development, it gave the ability to analyze the dsitortion and refraction pattern on a driver, and witht hat optimise the material, crossover, etc. Better sources also allow for more accurate testing.
The advances in speakers are really quite striking taken in a 50 year timescale. New speakers sound significantly better than older ones, espically at a give price and size point.
Up to a point. As a guitarist, I have not yet seen such a device which converts my 100W, sterile, accurate MOSFET amp into a valve amp. As an engineer, I'm sure it's possible, but it's a LOT harder than just messing with EQ. Even the modelling preamps (which seem to be convolving the sound with the FIR response of whatever they're modelling) don't get the ringing clarity and touch-sensitive response.
You're entitled to your opinion, but the reality is that valves still sound better than solid state to a lot of people.
Jon.
Yes, but there are ways around that (and it's not just ozone, but oxides of nitrogen too). Here are four:
- Adjust temperature so that most of these break down.
- Cover the opening with a catalyst-coated grid.
- Use a fan or chimney effect to slowly draw air to an outside duct.
- Use burned natural gas (CO2); this is much cheaper than helium, and has the added advantage of preheating the gas without using more electricity (the gas/air must be preheated for reasons detailed in Hill's patent).
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
While I like the concept of what this guy is doing, the music will be missing some of its dynamic range by using the iTrip.
I have an iTrip. While it is a great device, the sound quality is much poorer using the iTrip than just using good head phones (not the crap that comes with the iPod).
I can only believe that the 'softness' of the old radios is masking the muted dynamic range of the iTrip.
People use analogue filters to make their music sound more seventies?
I don't know where you get this idea from...
Practically ALL electronic music uses analogue, or analogue style filters. It's a major part of the sound - in particular, the Acid House movement was practically built on the Roland TB303 'Bassline', an analogue synthesiser with big fat resonant filters. That 'Josh Wink' filter scream is all analogue, baby.
And where would HipHop be without the sound of Vinyl cracks & pops? It's an integral part of the sound (less so now, but definitely part of the Golden Age of artists like Tribe Called Quest).
In the last few years the Big Thing in synthesisers has been virtual modelling of classic equipment & sounds, but before that there was a big resurgance in new Analogue equipment - MIDI compatible keyboards that used real analogue circuitry to generate the sound (I myself own a Novation Bass Station, a MIDI-ed up clone of the TB303).
The idea that modern music is created on all-modern equipment is a fallacy - just go to the Sound On Sound forums and check out how heated the recent debates on Digital vs Analogue have been... even people who make full-on Techno are using tape-to-tape reels and claiming they sound better.
As for Tube technology - nearly every major pro-audio company has brought out a tube-based pre-amplifier in the last three years. I don't feel the need to listen back to music using tube amplifiers, but as any producer will tell you, digital modelling of Tube Distortion / hot amplification is nowhere near as good as the real thing.
Once the mainstream went to transistors, even with analog sources, something was lost.. Sure its a matter of distortion, but to a human ear its more appealing then the raw accuracy of a transistor... Even went and built a class A tube amp myself years ago just because of this ( and my fisher tuner/amp died ). I have heard several 'simulated tubes', but they never quite sound right, prolly since its an abstract 'feel', that is impossible to completely identify..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Further to getting that sound quality (based around colouration and distortion characteristics, guitar players choose speakers that colour the sound and depending on the music or the nature of guitar tone they seek will choose a speaker that breaks up earlier. The whole guitar rig is chosen with the intent of a desirable sound. You're not after a hi-fi reproduction of what comes from the amp. It's not pretty.
I choose different tubes for my guitar amp depending on the EQ and break up characteristics that I want. A change in tubes changes my sound. An EL-34 has a different sound than a 6CA7 or a 6550 or a 6L6. One step further, there's a variance between the manufacturers of the "same" tube. Many guitar players (some referred to as "cork sniffers") seek out NOS (New Old Stock) tubes for the specific sounds they are after.
Through the guitar, effects, amp and speaker cabinet combination, I seek a desirable tone. Each element a piece that impacts my sound in a way that is desirable to me. Once I have that, I depend on the PA system (solid state) for an accurate reproduction of that tone
Try putting one of these between the digital out of your computer/cd player/what-have-you and your amplification system. Aha!
And yes, I'm a tube guy when it comes to instrument amps. My crackling, hissing 1961 blackface Fender Showman-Amp makes any speaker sound like a whole 'nother ball game. No master volume on this so it won't distort without making your ears bleed.
And yes, audiophiles do quite a bit of blind testing. Or at least scientist audiophiles do.
If you can really tell the difference in a double blind test, you could probably win a million dollars from the Randi Foundation. Their mission is partly to debunk unscientific claims, which I'm pretty sure includes (for them) being able to distinguish sound differences from different "power supplies, power cords, interconnect cables, and speaker cables". One interesting take on 'sound improvement' is here. An interesting followup directly related to supposed cable differences is here.)
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
What a bunch of nonsense!
Yeah. I thought so too until I heard the difference -- in my own house with my stereo.
Just because it is an electric current does not mean that there are not physical and chemical changes taking place.
Also not everyone is capable of hearing the difference. Can you hear falling snow when it lands on your shoulder? I can. Sometimes I wish I couldn't hear it. It would save me a lot of money on sound equipment.......
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the interconnects that come with most consumer-grade components are crap. I replaced the interconnects that came with my CD player (Denon DCD-620) with a $15 set and could actually hear the difference. I then tried with a (rich!) friend's $100 interconnects and didn't notice a difference.
I think that interconnect performance is an asymptotic curve, and it rises pretty steeply at the low end.
Just junk food for thought...
I even fooled myself once...
I am a semi-professional musician/producer/whatever. During a recording, we didn't like the vocals sound, so we scheduled a day to only tweak the vocals' sound. We prepared the recording, brought a few new microphones, effects, etc. and started to change the sound and record different takes. By the way, I was singing. After each take, we listened to the recorded track and discussed (we were 3 persons) what was not right, tweaked the sound just a little bit, recorded it again, and so on.
After a few hours of this, we were starting to be satisfied with the sound. I tweak just a little bit more the settings, try one last time, and I completely miss the take. But we decide to listen to the sound of it anyway to validate our last changes, and then we'll do the recording of the whole song. We listen to the track and... my mistake is not there! During all those hours, the recording equipment was put in "monitoring" mode, which meant that we had never recorded anything, and we just heard the *exact* same track over and over again, convinced each time it sounded a little bit better or worse!!!
And we were all musicians, used to record and to listen to music on high quality equipment...
i have records here that still play fine from the 1930's -- that's
about 70 years, and the quality hasn't significantly changed for
that amount of time -- i would like to see an ipod hard drive
that is still spining in 70 years.
you will say that you should transfer your data
from the one hard drive to another before that --
but then we were talking about the record lasting longer
than your ipod...
btw -- i did play some stereolab through the old
Kuba Tube FM Stereo console using an iPod and
a small FM transmitter -- works great!
it was a wonderful moment of nostalgia for me,
since i remember listening to that radio when i was
four years old (back in 1971), and it was already
an antique then. this brought the old and the new together!
best regards,
j
You're onto some excellent points. Really excellent.
First, when it comes to double-blind tests, that's a near-infinite mine field. If you'd like to discuss it (a potentially lengthy exchange), just say so and I'll dive in. My short take on double-blind tests for audio reproduction quality is that every one I've ever seen was so poorly structured that the results were meaningless. Deciding if there's a subtle problem in the way an audio system sounds takes a great deal of time that I've never seen anyone invest when using a double-blind method. Most testers want to do a "Listen to this, and this, and this. Any difference?" sort of test that can be wrapped up in an afternoon. That just won't fly when it comes to judging audio.
As for your question "Are you saying science has found no way to build equipment that has superior audio sensitivity compared to the human ear?", you're striking right at the heart of the matter. I'm not saying that, exactly. What I'm saying is that, in general, science builds equipment that has superior audio sensitivity compared to the human ear ONLY AFTER being led to what needs to be measured by people listening with those ears.
Take jitter, for instance. The people who used their ears said "This stuff sounds bad." That wasn't good enough for the scientists who knew it all, knew their measurements were perfect, knew their instruments had superior audio sensitivity compared to the human ear, and had all sorts of charts and graphs to back it up. The people who relied on their ears, who believed their ears were more sensitive to some thus-far unquantified problem that the lab equipment THEN EXTANT did not measure, were dismissed as cranks and romantic fools. But they persisted. They made up all sorts of romantic, foolish language to discuss what they were hearing. They made vague, almost mystical allusions to "time errors" and "soundstaging anomalies." They continued to be dismissed for a long while. A few researchers, though, thought that they just might be hearing something wrong, too. So they started looking for problems that weren't measured by their current instruments. They found jitter and a host of other problems, they found ways to measure them, and, sure enough, when they started designing circuits with the new measurements in mind, the cranks and romantic fools who relied on their ears started to say "Yeah, that's the ticket; that's improved." The new measuring equipment that results from this process is far more sensitive than the human ear but that equipment would never come into existence without people who were first willing to trust their ears.
Yet, despite the lessons of history, whenever someone claims to hear a problem that doesn't show up on a spec sheet they get ignored and belittled. So my answer to your original question is yes and no. Yes, ears are more sensitive than testing equipment when it comes to identifying when *something* is wrong, that being something that the engineers and psychoacouticians are not yet measuring. And no, once a few engineers have taken the time to listen to their ears and figure out what to measure and design equipment to do that measuring, human ears are not more sensitive than that new equipment.
Of course, now that you've solved some problems, ever-more-subtle ones that were previously masked by the more gross errors just corrected will be revealed. Human ears will hear those new problems long before science comes up with equipment to measure them. The people that hear those problems will be dismissed as fools for a while. Finally, scientists will trust their ears and come up with equipment to measure the new phenomena. Corrections will be made and the cycle will start over.
Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum.
This is quite right. THD is a meaningless number in reality. When I was very young and started to get into hi fi (mid 70s), we pored over catalogues comparing these sorts of figures. Fights would break out between those who fancied the Akai over the Technics. We were all wrong, and never bothered to actually LISTEN to any of the equipment. THD is TOTAL harmonic distortion, it tells you nothing about the frequencies of the distortion components. In general even harmonics will be tolerated to far higher levels than odd harmonics, and, in general, valve amps generate distortion with even harmonics and transistors generate odd ones.
The argument about feedback is also interesting, valves are large and expensive, transistors small and cheap. So valve equipment tends to carefully extract maximum performance from each stage, rather than taking the "op amp" approach. What I think is interesting though is that most equipment used to process audio signals these days is chock full of op-amps, so by the time you hear it, it has been through hundreds of such stages between the musician's instrument and your ears. It's lots of negative feedback all the way. The fact that the last "few yards" is through a valve stage is kind of irrelevant - yes that stage can contribute a change in the sound, but it can't magically improve it except subjectively by inserting MORE distortion of the even kind. It can sound better, because your ear and brain likes the distortion. So ignore THD!
One reason transistors create odd harmonics is because when they hit saturation they clip hard. Valves tend to round out rather than clip hard. However any clipping is a Bad Thing - so don't overdrive your amps so they clip. That's why any decent quality amp (regardless of whether it's tube or tranny) with lots of power and a really decent power supply will sound better even at low volume than a smaller one that's straining. In fact the power supply is extremely important - sadly much commercial domestic equipment is a joke in this area, even though the audio components might be OK. A 50W+50W power amplifier should have more than a 4700 uF capacitor on its power supply rails, which is what you typically see. That'll barely get rid of the ripple let alone hold the rail up when a musical transient needs to be delivered, the resulting lack of delivery at the crucial moment can cause the output stage to clip momentarily and sound bloody apalling. Sine wave measurements might look great though! (Who listens to steady sinewaves?). This also has a bearing on valve sound - many power amps are class A and have enormous power supplies to cope with the inherent inefficiency; where push-pull stages are used the softer characteristics of the crossover and clipping will mask or "ride out" the transient distortion as well.