Top speed and weird opening of RR 8.1.22

[Dave2002]

..
Time to dive into those Savall Beethoven Symphonies on SACD (I better not mention the name and model no. of the player.....what a scandal that could cause....), not that I'll be telling anyone here about them!
(Unless you ask very nicely, plying me with brandy and champagne....)...

Naughty ....

I'm possibly looking around for some sort of streaming device - so that I can use Tidal and Qobuz and possiblly divert some funds away from CDs, SACDs etc. I don't particularly want to use computers for that purpose, however there seem to be very many possibilities and a considerable divergence of types of kit. One might also ask "when is a streamer not a streamer?" and also "when is an amp not an amp?". For example it didn't occur to me till rather late in the day that one of my friends with seemingly more money than sense kept on asking about ethernet cabling and wireless links to his amplifier. I kept on asking - "but what are you using to feed all this into?", when it finally dawned on me that when he mentioned his "amp" he was referring to one of his exotic Lyngdorff models which also has bluteooth, ethernet etc. all built in. Some new "amps" have gone this way, while I also came across a recent compromise SACD player - I think from Panasonic - which also doubles up as a streamer.

Down at the cheaper end there are gadgets like the Chromecast audio, and some streamers such as those from Arylic which apparently have deficiencies in that they don't play tracks from streaming services gaplessly, which are therefore useless for listening to some works.

Other factors are whether the streaming devices use a remote unit or another devices such as a tablet or mobile phone as an interface. Overall it can get very confusing.

I quite liked the idea of an SACD unit which could function as a streamer for Tidal or Qobuz, but if I'm looking for really good quality to get the most out high quality services, then maybe paying more would be worthwhile. There are units from Marantz for example, which seem to do quite well. OTOH, maybe I'll just stick with what I've got - and keep buying CDS or occasionally SACDs.

[kea]

Now there's a thought.

Regarding tempo, the composer calls for minim=72.

Savall's tempo is also a little off—minim = 76 to 78 according to my metronome, hitting 80 at some points. But at this point that emendation is so common, even in historically informed performance, as to be unremarkable. (It's probably also preferable to play Beethoven too fast than too slow.)

[RichardB]

If the timps are as good in all the symphonies I’ll certainly be in the market for these CDs!

I can't yet access symphonies 6 to 9, but I did listen to no.5 last night and they are pretty thunderous there too. I wouldn't want to fixate on the timpani too much though. This is Beethoven the revolutionary, the guy who elbows aristocrats out of his way while leaving Goethe bowing and scraping in his wake, not Beethoven the apotheosised heroic genius of "classical music". It's the Beethoven I would prefer to hear.

[Ein Heldenleben]

I can't yet access symphonies 6 to 9, but I did listen to no.5 last night and they are pretty thunderous there too. I wouldn't want to fixate on the timpani too much though. This is Beethoven the revolutionary, the guy who elbows aristocrats out of his way while leaving Goethe bowing and scraping in his wake, not Beethoven the apotheosised heroic genius of "classical music". It's the Beethoven I would prefer to hear.

He did dedicate quite a lot of works to the Austrian (esp Viennese) aristocracy , gave them piano lessons , by all accounts was quite friendly with them and I think in later years they provided him with a modest allowance. I think they realised they had a genius in their midst and respected that. There was little of the antipathy or indifference that Mozart encountered.It helped that some were talented amateur musicians. However you are right LVB did not bow or scrape - but I don’t the Archduke Rudolph or Prince Lichnowsky would have expected him to. He did have a furious row with Lichnowsky though didn’t he ? - must have been around the same time as the 7th premiere . Wonder if it fired him up ?

[jayne lee wilson]

Quite a few since you ask and not just on stream rates but on all sorts of other audio comparisons. But they are all meaningless unless done on a double blind basis. That is neither the person making the comparison nor the person selecting the stream rate knows what it is . You would be amazed at how even people with so called “golden ears” have difficulty detecting basic things like out of phase speakers let alone the difference between CD quality and WAV. The problem is the ear has little memory and can only really detect these differences if they are instantaneous and there are absolutely no other differences including ,crucially, audio levels. That’s why listening to gear in a hifi sales room is pretty much a waste of time. You are much better off taking the gear home and asking yourself whether you like it.
One thing I will say the audio output of my Mac is way better than my iphone. I engineered a partially blinded test and could tell the difference every time. I’ve also convinced myself that the dac connection on my iPad produces better sound that the earphone socket though this test wasn’t partially blinded.
Many years ago in analogue days we did a series of fun tests on fellow professional audio engineers. Few could tell the difference between analogue recorded sound and digitally recorded or between live sound out of the desk and digitally recorded . Some couldn’t hear the difference between sound off tape (at 15 ips ) and desk out. We came to the conclusion it was partly years of ear damage! These were people some of whom who could tell you whether a note was a quarter tone flat or could ident all the chords in a pop tune and transcribe it.
Thankfully everyone could tell mono from stereo and recognised out of phase speakers though after 30 secs or so even that was difficult because the ear adjusts and thinks it’s normal. The whole interaction between the ear and the brain is very complex and it’s some thing that the audio industry exploits to its advantage . Hence the existence of £10,000 speaker cables. It’s the same with fine wine and people “drinking the label.”

One of the oddest yet most familiar tropes in my hifi life is the figure of the hardbitten old engineer, here to tell me (for my poor naive enlightenment) that my perception of fine distinctions in media or equipment is all self-willed or imaginary, and why do I waste my time on it? Listen to us, we know what we’re talking about!
It seems never to occur them that they are simply demonstrating their own very subjective prejudices in such opinions - a species of groupthink, myside bias at its most obvious.
(I was given a contemptuous telling-off via email by an engineer attached to the ATC company once; his boss phoned the next day to apologise... still, I got a generous discount out of it...)

*****
As for personal choices - apologies for saying this yet again to others here, but almost everything in my current system was bought after a home trial of at least 7 days (often longer), ex-dem or 2ndhand, from friendly specialist dealers who were usually happy to allow it. I simply paid for carriage if I chose to return it, stay with the current set-up or try again. It was an exciting time as those hefty boxes of middle-to-high-end exotica arrived, to be wrestled into place on the stand (usually with some muscular help…) way beyond my budget at retail prices, and I learnt a great deal auditioning them - sending more back than I kept, of course….you don’t always hear what you want (or hope) to hear. Of course you don’t.

*****
Our old friend double-blind testing is another tired and dated concept. The problem is: too many variables.

Will the subjects be in a familiar setting with their own equipment, or in an unfamiliar one? Will the music be a random selection, familiar to them or unfamiliar? Will they be grouped in a room or isolated? Speakers or headphones? What if, like me, they have spent very little time with ‘phones and are then presented with them?
With music, the more you switch & repeat, the more familiar the brain becomes with the unfamiliar; or less interested (even bored) with the familiar. Obviously affecting perception either way, especially if asked to note specific SQ differences, and the A/B or A/B/X is carried out rapidly across brief excerpts.

The human computer in our heads has evolved to learn and perceive with experience, time and concentration, in short - “training”, allowing memory to process the data perceived… only with such time and reflection can it improve in the ability to perceive what is before it.
(Double)-Blind or not, whenever subjected to such rapid comparisons all I ever got out of it was a headache. I grew quickly tired and bored with the same brief musical excerpts and my perception declined, so different to the rewards of longterm attention to music. Especially symphonic structures (where most listeners improve in their ability to grasp them, then the differences between different recordings of the same piece, the more often they hear them).

*****
My usual approach to audition of equipment was to set the familiar system up with the new component, listen for a few days, and then make the switch back to the previous well-known arrangement. Only after that would I try some shorter comparisons, but always of complete movements with plenty of contrast within them, and time between each replay. Haydn minuets or Telemann Suites have been very useful!

This can still be difficult in a domestic context, if you cannot have everything connected at the same time, the equipment is heavy and takes time to change out… so it is not infallible - no approach is, and I occasionally regretted a purchase a few weeks later. Part of the learning curve....
C'est La Vie. You have to try to stay positive, not giving in to cynicism, sweeping generalisation or dismissal.

[Ein Heldenleben]

One of the oddest yet most familiar tropes in my hifi life is the figure of the hardbitten old engineer, here to tell me (for my poor naive enlightenment) that my perception of fine distinctions in media or equipment is all self-willed or imaginary, and why do I waste my time on it? Listen to us, we know what we’re talking about!
It seems never to occur them that they are simply demonstrating their own very subjective prejudices in such opinions - a species of groupthink, myside bias at its most obvious.

*****
As for personal choices - apologies for saying this yet again to others here, but almost everything in my current system was bought after a home trial of at least 7 days (often longer), ex-dem or 2ndhand, from friendly specialist dealers who were usually happy to allow it. I simply paid for carriage if I chose to return it, stay with the current set-up or try again. It was an exciting time as those hefty boxes of middle-to-high-end exotica arrived, to be wrestled into place on the stand (usually with some muscular help…) way beyond my budget at retail prices, and I learnt a great deal auditioning them - sending more back than I kept, of course….you don’t always hear what you want (or hope) to hear. Of course you don’t.

*****
Our old friend double-blind testing is another tired and dated concept. The problem is: too many variables.

Will the subjects be in a familiar setting with their own equipment, or in an unfamiliar one? Will the music be a random selection, familiar to them or unfamiliar? Will they be grouped in a room or isolated? Speakers or headphones? What if, like me, they have spent very little time with ‘phones and are then presented with them?
With music, the more you switch & repeat, the more familiar the brain becomes with the unfamiliar; or less interested (even bored) with the familiar. Obviously affecting perception either way, especially if asked to note specific SQ differences, and the A/B or A/B/X is carried out rapidly across brief excerpts.

The human computer in our heads has evolved to learn and perceive with experience, time and concentration, in short - “training”, allowing memory to process the data perceived… only with such time and reflection can it improve in the ability to perceive what is before it.
(Double)-Blind or not, whenever subjected to such rapid comparisons all I ever got out of it was a headache. I grew quickly tired and bored with the same brief musical excerpts and my perception declined, so different to the rewards of longterm attention to music. Especially symphonic structures (where most listeners improve in their ability to grasp them, then the differences between different recordings of the same piece, the more often they hear them).

*****
My usual approach to audition of equipment was to set the familiar system up with the new component, listen for a few days, and then make the switch back to the previous well-known arrangement. Only after that would I try some shorter comparisons, but always of complete movements with plenty of contrast within them, and time between each replay. Haydn minuets or Telemann Suites have been very useful!

This can still be difficult in a domestic context, if you cannot have everything connected at the same time, the equipment is heavy and takes time to change out… so it is not infallible - no approach is, and I occasionally regretted a purchase a few weeks later. Part of the learning curve....
C'est La Vie. You have to try to stay positive, not giving in to cynicism, sweeping generalisation or dismissal.

I’m not an old engineer - hard bitten or otherwise . If your comments are aimed at me they are simply inaccurate. Sounds to me your way of trying out hifi gear is exactly what I suggested in my earlier post - trying it out at home. Double blind testing doesn’t work for assessing hifi gear I agree but it is a better way for working out whether people can really tell the difference between streaming rates and codecs than a purely subjective one. They are certainly not a way of assessing whether one speaker is better than another for all the reasons you suggest. If you read my earlier post carefully you will see that I advocated double blind testing only in relation to very specific things - stream rates, mono/stereo , in phase / out of phase - it just doesn’t work with the total systems.

[oddoneout]

Regardless of the quality and quantity of equipment involved in capturing and subsequently hearing sound - in this case music- isn't there always going to be the weak (perhaps more accurately contentious?) point which is the human doing the recording/listening?
Several people sitting beside each other in a venue listening to a concert will all be hearing different things according to what their ears pick up and what their perceptions are of the performance they are hearing. Those perceptions are the result of preference, experience, knowledge and a whole raft of other factors which will affect the way the brain interprets the sounds. A top of the range equipment array will give the possibility of hearing all the available detail - but the hearing experience is down to the human not the machine so can never be completely objective I would have thought?
In the context of the timps in the 7th I wonder how much a negative reaction is due to decades of hearing a particular balance and sound so that something very different is a bit of a surprise, and if it seems too prominent then becomes an unwelcome one?

[Serial_Apologist]

This is Beethoven the revolutionary, the guy who elbows aristocrats out of his way while leaving Goethe bowing and scraping in his wake.

And the Beethoven said to have shaken his fist at a thunderstorm from his death bed. Terrible ego issues, Beethoven had...

[RichardB]

He did dedicate quite a lot of works to the Austrian (esp Viennese) aristocracy , gave them piano lessons , by all accounts was quite friendly with them and I think in later years they provided him with a modest allowance. I think they realised they had a genius in their midst and respected that.

Indeed. They had money, which he was often in need of, and they would put up with him for the sake of associating with such a great artist. And of course Goethe not only belonged to a previous generation but was also an employee of the Weimar court.

[RichardB]

In the context of the timps in the 7th I wonder how much a negative reaction is due to decades of hearing a particular balance and sound so that something very different is a bit of a surprise, and if it seems too prominent then becomes an unwelcome one?

Exactly. It really doesn't have anything to do with sound reproduction equipment and I wonder why people here often get so hot under the collar about such matters. Anyway the fact is that no domestic system, no matter how exotic, is going to give you the amount of nuance that you can hear in a well designed and purpose built studio control room with the kind of professional gear you'll find in recording and broadcast studios, not just because of the gear but also how it's installed in a space conceived from the ground up for the most detailed possible listening perspective. And when it comes to how to listen to that detail, I've learned more about this from engineers than from anyone else!

[Braunschlag]

Exactly. It really doesn't have anything to do with sound reproduction equipment and I wonder why people here often get so hot under the collar about such matters. Anyway the fact is that no domestic system, no matter how exotic, is going to give you the amount of nuance that you can hear in a well designed and purpose built studio control room with the kind of professional gear you'll find in recording and broadcast studios, not just because of the gear but also how it's installed in a space conceived from the ground up for the most detailed possible listening perspective. And when it comes to how to listen to that detail, I've learned more about this from engineers than from anyone else!

Thank you for a voice of reason, this makes more sense than much of the oft-repeated hi-fi nonsense regurgitated as nauseam.

[MickyD]

Thank you for a voice of reason, this makes more sense than much of the oft-repeated hi-fi nonsense regurgitated as nauseam.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Exactly. It really doesn't have anything to do with sound reproduction equipment and I wonder why people here often get so hot under the collar about such matters. Anyway the fact is that no domestic system, no matter how exotic, is going to give you the amount of nuance that you can hear in a well designed and purpose built studio control room with the kind of professional gear you'll find in recording and broadcast studios, not just because of the gear but also how it's installed in a space conceived from the ground up for the most detailed possible listening perspective. And when it comes to how to listen to that detail, I've learned more about this from engineers than from anyone else!

Absolutely right . All I would say is that those who can’t afford to spend £150,000 on a professional system and another £150,000 on acoustic treatment shouldn’t worry that it’s 300 t8mes better than their £1,000 hifi or 30 t8mes better than a £ 10,000 one. I don’t think they are.

The loudness of the timps in relation to the rest of the Band is a matter of personal taste. I just don’t believe that the relative loudness will be that different on a reasonable hifi system or a high end one. Nor do I think the stream rate will have much bearing on it.
The level you at listen at might affect the perception of relative loudness and that will more tolerable on a high end system. And that’s where I think the problems come in. The engineers listen at high levels at which point it becomes difficult to judge the relative loudness of elements of the total sound. That’s partly why there are so many complaints about music being too loud on tv dramas and documentaries. So much so broadcasters now insist on relative loudness levels being monitored on a meter with very tight parameters on acceptable levels of music against speech.

[rauschwerk]

The loudness of the timps in relation to the rest of the Band is a matter of personal taste.

No, I think there's more to it than that. This discussion has sent me to the score. In bars 52-62 of the finale there is a modulating passage in which the cellos and basses play a descending scale covering nearly an octave. Sometimes the timpani notes coincide with this bass line, sometimes with other notes in the harmony, sometimes they are silent. If the timps are too loud, the audible bass line makes no real sense. Charles Mackerras, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, knew exactly how to balance this passage so that the bass line is clear. Not for nothing was this version a BaL winner.

[Ein Heldenleben]

No, I think there's more to it than that. This discussion has sent me to the score. In bars 52-62 of the finale there is a modulating passage in which the cellos and basses play a descending scale covering nearly an octave. Sometimes the timpani notes coincide with this bass line, sometimes with other notes in the harmony, sometimes they are silent. If the timps are too loud, the audible bass line makes no real sense. Charles Mackerras, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, knew exactly how to balance this passage so that the bass line is clear. Not for nothing was this version a BaL winner.

Good point - I was in conciliation mode . I think I’ve had enough of this one . Personally I’ll stick with Kleiber and the VPO .

Let’s face it the Savall recording was done live in echoey acoustic : there was a limit to how much control the engineers could exercise over the timps . Its a miracle it was as good a recording as it was . Some think they are too loud (including me and you) , others don’t. In the final analysis what does it matter ? Meanwhile in the real world…..actually the real world is weirder ….$499 for a top ticket to the Music Man on Broadway and a real music man Mozart died a pauper ……