TAVES Day 1
It was raining yesterday morning when Todd, Jack, and I drove the car over to the Sheraton Hotel. We had to unload the suitcases and boxes from the car, find our allotted location in the hotel, and setup the tables by 11 am for the first day of the show. And I had to drive the rental car back to place we’re staying and make my way back to the hotel…with Todd’s umbrella. It’s only about a mile and everything worked out fine. I managed to stay dry. By the opening hour, the tables were laid out with the AIX catalog and the playback system was ready to go.
The TAVES show changed locations this year. The past few years, the event was held at the King Edward Hotel a couple of miles away. It’s an old and very elegant hotel with lots of marble and fancy drapes. I’m guessing the organizers felt they needed to grow and thus the move to the Sheraton, which is a modern, high tech, open, high rise, with a series of levels and hallways that makes it difficult to find your way around. Todd of MA Recordings and I are located on the mezzanine. In order to find us, visitors have to take the escalator to the second floor and then a stairway down to the mezzanine level. They might miss us if they turn right to the elevators. Thankfully, Simon and Suave have lots of helpful associates directing traffic.
And the traffic was pretty good yesterday. I met a number of people that read this blog. One person got up early and drove an hour in order to make it in time to attend my twelve o’clock session “2014: Is this the Year of High-Resolution Audio?” Two other guys from Rochester, New York drove 3 hours to come to the show and pick up some titles before I ran out of the most popular discs. Rob cam back from last year on the first day as well. I remembered him from last year. He took the sampler home on Saturday and took careful inventory of what he liked and came back on Sunday to purchase a bunch of discs. Sadly, most of them were sold out. He stocked up this year and left with smile on his face.
My session opened the seminar series. The room was practically full as I powered up the projector and plugged in my Mac laptop. I tried my best to be upbeat about the topic of high-resolution audio. I explained some of the behind the scenes efforts, the production realities, and the idea of provenance. There were lots of questions and some very open exchanges. The reaction was very positive. A number of people came up to me and expressed their thanks that someone finally gave them the straight story. It seems all they want is honest answers and reasonable explanations and they feel empowered. Why the labels, artists, and organizations behind much of the misinformation and spin can’t figure this out continues to amaze me.
I had a couple of memorable interactions yesterday. An elderly gentleman with a cane came by the table. I gave my usual introductory speech and eventually ended up discussing the differences between professional studios and home audiophile systems. He insisted the sound is better at home than in the studio. “The very best sound is only available using audiophile equipment. Studio monitors are decidedly second rate,” he asserted. I responded politely that I, as a studio owner and professional engineer for over 35 years, believed the opposite…but he was having no part in it.
And then a lovely woman drifted by the table and started looking through my collection of Blu-rays. She had recently acquired a few Blu-ray Pure Audio titles and was looking for a specific artist. I told her that these weren’t Pure Audio Blu-rays but actually had video of the performances as well. She didn’t seem to grasp that a Blu-ray Pure Audio disc is not a specific format but a way of handling navigation etc. When I started explaining about provenance and fidelity, she pushed back, “Pure Audio Blu-ray discs use higher specifications and therefore the fidelity is much better.” I politely smiled and began to explain the facts and she walked away with the words, “I don’t want to know the facts…I don’t need you to teach me about Blu-ray Pure Audio.”
She was living proof that marketing works.
Hi Mark. It was very nice to meet you at the TAVES show. Yes marketing terms and such does pollute many minds. I have some of your HiRes discs which are the real thing as they were recorded with the right equipment from the start and processed with the right equipment. I also own a few Blu-ray Pure Audio DVD. With the exception of one of them, the are not HiRez audio. I bought them because they had be remastered and in a way that is better or a nice compilation.
Pretty soon 2 + 2 will equal 7.
Andrew
Thanks for coming by Andrew…it’s been a very pleasant show.
You have my sympathy, I worked many shows over the years first in high performance auto accessories market later in motorcycle accessories. Many days I went hope feeling like I spent the day in a KGB mind reprogramming interrogation. Painful days indeed.
I attended the show on Friday and also had the privilege of attending Mark’s seminar. What a treat and a true revelation: Finally a member of the audio/video industry that has the stones to be honest and forthcoming re the so-called “High Res” audio conundrum. When a company like HDTracks sells a 24/192 download of an album that was recorded in the 1970’s to analog tape – how can this be considered High res? I doubt that HDTracks or a company of that ilk has the ability to obtain the original master tapes or even pay to obtain them. So these digital transfers are from possibly 2nd or 3rd genration analog transfers. High res? I think not. What a total waste of money. You want High res? Buy Mark’s products! One of the only true High res sources in the world today!
If one defines High Res audio as being recorded at 24/96 as a minumum and then transferred accordingly then Mark is one of the few engineers who is doing so.
Mark: if you read this: regarding the old guy with the cane: was he wearing a nice hat and did he have a European accent?
Sam…thanks for coming to the session and kind words. HDtracks and the other licensees get their files from the studio’s mastering rooms. They get what they get. It’s all in the marketing and identifying the provenance where the spin starts.
Music is a highly dynamic, sharply transient time-domain phenomenon. What’s important (to us as listeners) for those cymbals and drums is not their spectral content, but the sharpness of the rise in sound intensity as a function of time. Now, it is true that electrical engineers learn in college/university that such an intensity-vs-time signal can be transformed into an amplitude-vs-frequency graph giving its spectral content, using the Fourier Transform. But the Fourier Transform is truly correct only for continuous signals that have the same waveform repetitively over an infinite time period. It is only approximately true for signals that are “continuous and have the same waveform repetitively” over a time interval that is very long compared to the period of the lowest “frequency” (repetition) of the signal. Neither of these is true for those dynamic transient cymbal sounds, so the Fourier Transform does not accurately relate the “spectral content” of those cymbal sounds to their actual time-domain existence.
What this means is that the human listener can hear the complete dynamic transient characteristics of those cymbal sounds, even though a frequency-domain analysis of human hearing suggests that the “spectral content” of those sounds includes frequencies that the human ear is unable to respond to—the human ear simply isn’t hearing those sounds in the frequency domain!
The original CD sampling rate of 44.1kHz is too low for the proper reproduction of those transient sounds from drums, cymbals, etc.
Zero evidence supports your claims, Jay. It is dangerous to fall prey to one’s own internal logic, with no reference to evidence. There are many websites where you can learn more about human hearing, and about the mathematical representation of waves, and a little about their overlap.
Digital music can sound naturally only if recorded at a sample rate of no lower than 1 MHz .
I am sorry, but this nonsensical comment needs to be called. I call.
Hi Mark, this article by a leading researcher on the psychology of human wrongness might help explain why there is so much misinformation about high resolution audio among the labels, artists and audiophiles:
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/confident-idiots-92793/
I found this article to be very enlightening. Thanks.
If that is correct, you’d need a speaker system capable of 1 meg as well.