Sound Quality Problems with Contemporary High-End Audio @ Twitter Log 5

Pastel Piano @pastel_piano · Sep 14
One of the defining characteristics of modern high-end audio is that holographic, virtual-reality-like soundstage, combined with high-speed, delicate, ever-higher-resolution sound quality. (That’s actually the direction I’ve been pursuing as my main goal as well…) Across the board, the quality of the bass and the sense of physical substance in the image tend to become secondary concerns. I get the feeling that recordings and playback equipment built around that kind of spatial reproduction — that “constructed” world — are fundamentally incompatible with Hi-Fi systems and recordings built around the physical substance of the sound image. Though I also feel that, really, the two ought to be reconcilable.

Pastel Piano @pastel_piano · Sep 15
Ah, yes — from our exchanges so far I have a fairly good sense of the direction you’re after, so don’t worry. Being half a child of the digital age myself, I find appeal in both the old ways of recording and playback and the modern style. Precisely because it’s so hard to have both at once, I end up with multiple systems…

Pastel Piano @pastel_piano · Sep 15
Quite right. Soundstage and image ought fundamentally to be inseparable — they are, in practical terms, a matter of the relationship between direct sound and reflected sound, yes? In the analogue era, there was inherent strength in the recording and reproduction of direct sound, and even if the noise floor prevented everything from coming through, the natural reflected sound was riding along with it. When digital came along and the S/N ratio improved, reflected sound could be recorded and reproduced right down to the finest detail — but at the same time, the available bit depth was simply nowhere near sufficient to capture the full energy of both image and soundstage together. The result was a sound with plenty of reverberation, but a thin, insubstantial direct sound. That’s how I think about it, anyway.

Pastel Piano @pastel_piano · Sep 15
And that’s where hi-res sources like DSD come in. The thing is, when it comes to ordinary consumer Hi-Fi — whether a CD player fitted with a standard DAC can match the physical substance of direct sound from a turntable of equivalent or lower class on CD — I’m sorry to say I have yet to personally experience that. Ultra high-end players are another matter entirely, of course… On the other hand, a system where LP playback sounds no better than CD — or even worse, just noisier and thinner than CD — seems like it would be quite easy to put together.