watchnerd
Grand Contributor
I'm quite happy being an audience member in a row near the stage, getting that intensity hit from the orchestral climaxes - it sounds impressive, but the actual SPLs are quite reasonable; it's the harmonic richness that does the job, to my ears.
You're not understanding the point:
Microphones are transducers, they are flawed like speakers. They all add color, they all have different radiation patterns, they all add distortion, they all have non-linear spots in their dynamic range, etc. They are not capturing what you experience live -- they're capturing a colored, flawed version of it.
I can go to any given point in the audience that you pick and use two different microphones and get two different results. Neither of which will be transparent to what you are hearing with your ears at that same location at that very moment.
This brings up several points:
1. The best thing most audiophiles could do, in terms of getting a more realistic perspective in what is achievable in sound reproduction, is to learn more about recording and sound engineering. Do field recordings, join the AES, etc.
2. We are trying to address the *science* of sound, not the personal epiphanies people may have as those are subjective and unmeasurable and thus of little to no help in advancing engineering solutions. The fact that a listener may reach a personal nirvana listening to "I Will Survive" on his waterproof clock radio in his shower because of "system synergy" doesn't do me much good when thinking about engineering solutions for living rooms or for other people.
3. Everything said so far about the brain and sound is well-known within the realm of psychoacoustics. It's useful knowledge, to be sure. But despite that knowledge, it has yet to be translated into technologies that break truly revolutionary ground and fool people into thinking reproduced sound is live.
4. What extreme audiophiles seek -- a home experience that is indistinguishable from live -- cannot be defined as a goal until we have objective metrics for what that even means. Throwing out the term "system synergy" is unquantifiable and thus is not a goal we can engineer towards.