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I think you also meant to say 8k-12khz.
Indeed.
I think you also meant to say 8k-12khz.
A lot of gear back then had tone controls. Useful.My recollection is that in the 1950s and 60s, audio markets were overwhelmingly domestic. Then at the start of the 1970s we all raised our heads and looked around. I remember the impression that e.g. the U.S., UK, Japanese and German markets had evolved toward different sounds. E.g. the Brits were mellow and midrange-y, the Americans were bassy, the Japanese were trebly, the Germans liked what was called boom-and-tizz, which now we would call a smiley EQ.
To some extent these impressions were absolutely true and absolutely measurable. LPs were overwhelming the majority source; LPs required RIAA de-emphasis and re-emphasis; the RIAA curve, despite the best of intentions, was never properly established as an international standard. At first, each record company used its own best guess; soon, de facto national standards emerged; but always each market was measurably different.
Thus a U.S.-cut LP played through a Japanese phono stage sounded different than if played through a Fisher. No illusion. Was the "national sound" demanded by local customers and hence supplied, or was it merely supplied and hence unthinkingly accepted? Impossible to say. But it wasn't until 1983 that the whole audio world was listening to the same thing.
Music is a human universal. But almost all the details are cultural. In that respect it's a lot like language. I'm personally attached to the idea that music and language machines of the brain share a lot of components.I'm not sure. I think neither musical appreciation nor certainly musical ability is sufficiently widespread or baked-in to represent an evolved survival behavior. Not like detection of motion in the peripheral vision, for instance. I think attraction to music is a common but fairly take-it-or-leave-it mutation.
On the other hand, I wonder if a certain 20th century cultural construct still influences us today. People first got home radios in the 1920s and 30s. It's easy to forget what a huge thing that was. Unlimited news, information and entertainment in the home! As always, the leap from nothing to something is the biggest and most important. People loved their radios. Their emotional involvement was immense.
Due to contemporary technology, radios sounded warm, chesty, and midrange-dominated. I think people instinctively internalized the feeling that radios should sound like that. My grandma was proud of hers. "A lovely tone," she would say. A generation later, my mother set up home, and despite (what we would call) better alternatives, she went for the same sound. "A lovely tone!"
It's as if most people think along two parallel tracks. Talking to a friend across the kitchen table sounds one way; listening to a guy on the radio sounds completely different. Most people think that's entirely natural and correct, because of some kind of longstanding cultural inheritance. I think it explains Bose's success, for instance. Bose tapped into that strand of warm, chesty familiarity. A lovely tone!
Matt, that simply isn't true. If your preference is to go birdwatching with rose-tinted binoculars, why would the ornithological community accept your reports of bird colors as meaningful? Your viewing might be pleasant to you, absolutely, but it represents no scientific currency. It would have to be accepted as an empirically observable "fact" that Mr. Hooper personally prefers to view birds through a chromatically distorted lens, but such an observation doesn't bless Mr. Hooper with the same scientific credibility as Mr. Audubon or a thousand others. Actually it rules it out completely. "Don't listen to old Hooper," the scientists would say. "He thinks everything is pink."
Some bird species have a language of song that evolves culturally and others have a language of dance. Have you seen the natural history docos that show how it's the boy bird with the best dance moves that gets the girl?That is a very nice question! Could be a very attractive and interesting theme for another Ph.D. theses...
You need to elaborate this proposition in more formal language in order for us to understand what it means.I don't like to speak for other people either, so let's postulate a theoretical Mr. X, who prefers a colored and inaccurate playback chain because overall he kinda likes the mellifluous and euphonic sound it makes. That's humanly valid, societally valid, possibly musically valid, possibly valid in many, many other different ways, but a deliberate and whimsical departure from accuracy can never be scientifically valid.
Your first para - no. It's the same as saying that someone who prefers a colored hi-fi system is abandoning scientific rigor and exiting the project, which is the unbiased interrogation of the master file presented. Which is fine, but a strange message for a science forum.
Your second para - sure, illogical choices can be studied by scientists, and reasons for them can be discovered, but understanding their derivations doesn't make the illogical choices themselves scientific.
You claimed that a preference for a colored or non-neutral sound can never be scientifically valid ... That is nonsense
Some bird species have a language of song that evolves culturally and others have a language of dance. Have you seen the natural history docos that show how it's the boy bird with the best dance moves that gets the girl?
Some bird species have a language of song that evolves culturally and others have a language of dance. Have you seen the natural history docos that show how it's the boy bird with the best dance moves that gets the girl?
Trust you to have the best youtube for that. Old low res. But that video is the balls.
Trust you to have the best youtube for that. Old low res. But that video is the balls.
Right. If it weren't for her and her lovely dancing it would be just another nat his doco.It's from a National Geographic episode.
The clip is just a pertinent part someone grabbed (at low res).
I like the nice lady narrating, too.
A lot of gear back then had tone controls. Useful.
Music is a human universal. But almost all the details are cultural. In that respect it's a lot like language. I'm personally attached to the idea that music and language machines of the brain share a lot of components.
A friend of mine years ago explained that the cello is the most compelling instrument because it has the register and tone of a patriarch. A lovely tone!
I have to laugh because one of the articles sited contains this quote:
(...) I also think that we can measure things to an extent that it doesn't matter (beyond our hearing capability) and also that there are things we can't yet measure that we can hear.
The bird was awesome. Could have done without her.Right. If it weren't for her and her lovely dancing it would be just another nat his doco.
I have yet to find an electronic component that measures well and sounds bad.
Uh-huh.Jds Labs Atom
But I suspect that all well-measuring device sounds terrible.
The huge negative feedback demolishes sound quality.