Recording format

You sow what you plant pretty sums up everything in audio. Your attention to power and cabling will be highly rewarded in the quality of playback, most audiophiles will not go the extra mile after power and acoustics, they stop short at the media dynamic compression that hampers the joy of listening.

An uncompressed media is all worthwhile. I go afar that the reissue is a pain in the neck. If care is not taken to obtain the uncompressed media, you stand to lose the detail of the recording. No matter what you do, you will never recover what is lost in the signal. Burnt copy from an original copy is cheap but suffer a loss of detail, of course, if you care about the quality of playback. Thus, it is worth your effort to search for the uncompressed particularly those tracks you're emotionally connected to.

Often, I'm caught in a dilemma between performance and recording. On one hand, I wanted a good performance, but on the other hand, I wanted a clean and natural recording. But if push comes to shove, the performance will come on top. It's a love-hate thing. Granted, there are quite a significant number of good performance, poor recording particularly classical recordings in the early era.

Chinese recordings? Unnaturally equalised, with a noticeable boost in the lower treble to highlight presence and details. This has lent me to assume that this trick would work great on the low-resolution systems on the mediocre system, given their relatively low income per capita. However, this will throw off the balance of the sound and if you used these recording to tune your system, your system stands to go terribly wrong. The other issue I often encounter with the recordings, the western recordings are not excluded, are the phase issue. This is something the recording industry has to do a little more on standardizations, phase and loudness where some recordings are way over to top in loudness while others went to opposite polar. In addition, we, the listener is being screwed with the loudness war since the early 90s. Wiki explains that modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness, therefore, can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The extreme dynamic and details have been clipped. See the video below.

This is the ugly side of digitals. Take a look at http://dr.loudness-war.info, key in your search album. Take Michael Jackson's Thriller, for example, the world's best selling album by a far margin. It recorded 47.3 million copies sold worldwide. http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=michael+jackson&album=thriller shows that the list of reissues of horrible dynamic compression indicated with red and yellow ratings. Vinyl of the same title is superior. So, do your check before you buy even though some claimed that some remastered vinyl is better than first pressing vinyl.

The tone is all that much better if the digital recording is done with AAD or ADD, I could discern the difference. A is the acronym for Analog and D is digital. The first alphabet represents the master format, mixing format follows and the last is digital transfer. Modern recordings now are digitally recorded due to low cost and irony that we, the audiophiles on the receiving end trying to squeeze every musical information out from the recording.

In general, it is so easy to be misled that the same-titled CDs produce an identical sound, it is not. Just key in your favourite artist and album title, you will see the result. Ironically, see what Wiki says "Despite the lower dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratios a vinyl or tape record can achieve in theory (>60-80 dB versus 90-96 dB for CD recordings), vinyl records may still be preferred for their greater dynamic. 

We are being screwed for the promise of new technologies time and time again. The audio industry is constantly looking for new growth to reap a profit. Vinyl had returned, R2R has returned, CD transport has returned, what say you?

Close Encounter

My first ever ballet performance as an audience took place on Feb 2, 2018. I knew it will be spectacular to watch, I was prompted to buy the tickets in the early season to get good seats than stand to regret. Habitually, I set a reminder on my phone calendar once the ticket booked, the rest leave it to time to do its thing. Before long, the time has come.

Entering the majestic orchestra hall, what do I know. We were in the first row, they had removed 6 rows of seating to make way for the orchestra, ballet takes the main stage. How excited I was, one, imagine 3 feet close encounter with the playing members, I could have shaken hand with the co-principal cellist, Csaba Koros who was right in front of me. He's a Hungarian nationality with a macho look and a pony-tail styling, very artist-looking. You can't miss him. Secondly, we shared the same stage with the orchestra with only a row of seats as a barricade. Getting to hear the orchestra playing at ear level doesn't happen that often, on the same listening height as with my system. Hallelujah!

Ballet dance is the culture product of France and Russian. What do I know about ballet? Zero, I'll admit to that. From what I gathered from the brochure, Ballet of Armenia was founded 1933, is considered one of the best ballet from the former Soviet Union. They have performed quite intensively throughout European. A grand dancehall decorated the stage backdrop appeared before me, with a little help of the projector. The dancehall illustrated a noble European of fine and exquisite interior architectural. Visually appealing, raising up to the occasion. 

The familiarity of The Nutcracker tune opened the performance, the ballerinos and ballerinas took the stage. Scene after scene, dance repertoire after dance repertoire, colourful cultural costume, our eyes were glued to the stage. Lest not forget we're the audiophile, however, the music took the back seat. The burst of visual and aural information had my brain two minded of which I should sink in. 

How on earth the ballerina stands on her toes? Torturing ouch! The elegance of the dance was indescribable though they could work on the tidiness and timing a bit better. Then, I guess this is their first performance here and they may not get over the jitters. They will get better in the coming performances. The physics of the ballerinas and ballerinos are the perfect human specimen. They must have had at least ten years of training to be able to perform on stage on this scale. Their performing life is short, very physically demanding repertoire after the aerobatic. A serious injury would easily put out a performer's career. This is hard work, only relatively low income ex-Soviet Union would endeavour this art form. In terms of GDP per capita, Armenia achieves sub USD4,000, Malaysia sub USD10,000. Armenia is located in Asia, to the east border is Turkey, to the north is Georgia. 

The most memorable dance for me was the classic choreography of four little swans intertwined during The Sleeping Beauty. Excuse my ignorance. Needless to say, the ballet performance was an eye-opener to me because I haven't seen the world as much as some others do. I'm no much a dance guy.

The sound of the orchestra was thoroughly more oomph, more speed, more vigorous, more energetic than usual. I concluded coming down two factors, the distance and secondly they are on solid ground, cement floor. Pity that the orchestra has to cramp into a space constraint, with restricted movement. Picture this, timpani was situated in the left doorway. I occasionally bent slightly forward to grasp the tunes from the cello. This performance was identical to the highly rave and sought after RCA Victor titled The Royal Ballet conducted by Ernest Ansermet less the visual sensation. The last I heard, this LP price has soared to RM4000. So, what present before me is a big bargain.

Helplessly, no matter how hard I try to get rid of the mist, I always find the sound from our systems is inevitably covered by a thin mist, all systems regardless of any format of media at any price suffer the same setback. Just that some fare better than the rest. O please, spare me your look. Hindering the absolute transparency, the penetrative quality has been somewhat eluded from our system. Probably, planar speakers could fare slightly better due to lack of box colouration, provided narrow bandwidth isn't a concern. But they're not spared from the plague of sonic mist.

Forgive my bluntness, no systems on earth come close to the sound I hear from the live performance. Its naturalness strikes me squarely, no edge delineation, no pinpoint, no soundstage, no chestiness, no standing waves and what not. Listening experience in the hall is like taking a musical sabbatical immersion in a space and time of its own. Listening to music is a joy. The sound has the free-flowing and spontaneous quality that hard to copy in our playback. Naturally, I fervently seek for this quality in our playback. The quicker I sink into the music, the least wrongs the system inherits. Besides, the immediacy is also another signature even though it shouldn't pose much problem in modern equipment. Live performance is the better place to self-educate tone colour and purity, you need to reinforce the righteous tones on a periodical basis. Tonelogy is not what you can learn from your system, your friends' systems nor your friends' friends' systems, unfortunately.