Sorry? Are we going to regret low resolution images?

[jankap]

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Regretting low resolution images. 

 

My father had an 8mm camera. The films were shown on a screen of 1 meter diagonal. Wonderful, Harold Loyd/Charly Chaplin, the Nieuw Amsterdam coming back from war service, myself in the park, etc.

One film is scanned now. The fascination does not come back, if I look at a monitor picture of 10 cm with 18 pictures per second and no sound.

 

Times change. But nature gave us some restrictions to the ear 20 - 20.000 Herz, to the eye red - blue.

Jan

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The Leica Q3 is available for pre-order at B&H Photo Video and Adorama

[jaapv]

The thing you miss is the rattling of the projector.

[pop]

You know what they say - the best music player is the one you have with you.

And as with cameras, a better music player won't necessarily give you more emotional response to the tunes.

I own some - let's call them - devices capable of playing sound files which I don't even bother to use for that purpose. If there's no alternative at hand, I'll do without playing any sound files. The laptop I'm writing this on is a case in point. A player which lets you hear more of the signal will certainly facilitate more emotional responses. I don't think that mere tunes will contribute to emotional responses.

[jankap]

Here is a link to high resolution. Today in Vienna.

 

Luxusbücher 

 

Jan

[Exodies]

What about singing in the shower? Almost drowned out by the white noise of the rushing water, forgotten words, bum notes, a medley of unrelated songs and yet makes you happy. Or a car radio heard with the engine and road noises; it doesn't just relieve the boredom, it can do all the things the purest notes heard in a live concert can.

[jankap]

Of course, phantasy is the other side of the medal. Our brain does not need the perfection.

Politicians and VW-managers know that too, by the way.

Jan

[pop]

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What about singing in the shower? Almost drowned out by the white noise of the rushing water, forgotten words, bum notes, a medley of unrelated songs and yet makes you happy. Or a car radio heard with the engine and road noises; it doesn't just relieve the boredom, it can do all the things the purest notes heard in a live concert can.

Making music or, indeed, "music", is not the same and has not the same effect as listening to same. Nearly listening to music has yet another set of effects on the person nearly doing the listening, which in turn has much to do with remembering.

[Peter H]

When I was young I was given a probably cheap tape recorder that someone no longer wanted.

 

I used to stick the microphone in front of the radio speaker to record the latest hits, and replay them to my friends.

 

You cannot imagine a lower sound quality, yet I've spent the rest of my life trying to recapture the pure joy that the music, or what could be heard of it, gave us.

 

Nostalgia?

 

Yes, of course. But then music isn't all about the ears, and photography isn't all about the eyes.

[Bill Livingston]

You know what they say - the best music player is the one you have with you.

And as with cameras, a better music player won't necessarily give you more emotional response to the tunes.

 

 

Actually, that isn't true. At all.

 

First, read a book called 'Music, the Brian and Ecstasy'... It's about the theory of music and how the brain responds to pitch and melody and the emotional responses we have to those sounds. Why for example, music in major chords sounds powerful and used to create a feeling of power or awe and why minor chords more often than not sound 'sad' to most people. Most people can tell whether a song is sad, or happy just by listening to the music... And very complicated emotions can be created just by the choices of mixes of key and individual notes made by the writer/composer. Pitch ends up being critical.

 

Play a sad piece of music on a piano or guitar (or any acoustic instrument for that matter) and have the piano slightly out of tune, and you will not have the same emotional response because your brain will try to correct the pitch of those notes as you hear them as it will always look for pattern so it can recognise and identify. You don't even need to know the melody in order to know the music is out of tune... and you don't need perfect pitch (which is exceedingly rare as it happens), what is interesting is that even the most tone deaf person can hear if a series of notes is out of tune... and you don't need many, three or four notes with just one of the either sharp or flat is more than enough.

 

In an audio system, all of them are slightly off... one of the reasons a HiFi system never conveys the emotional impact that the same tune played on a real instrument, perfectly in tune can manage. So it means that the pitch is always slightly different, literally not be note... So it's a bit like walking up the stairs in the dark. If all the steps are even, once you have registered how big the step actually is, you can walk up the stairs quite quickly without having to see... your brain has adapted very quickly... if all the steps are at different heights, your brain is never able to work out a repeatable action and you have to 'feel' for each step individually. 

 

Music systems have have the same problem. The better ones have less difference between each 'step' and they are easier to listen to for much longer without becoming tiring to listen to... and you find you have the time to follow the music pretty easily and you will have a more natural response to it... Just as you would with a great instrument that is perfectly in tune, played by a great musician.

 

I, on the other hand, playing that same piano, with each note was slightly out of tune as nobody bothered to tune it up, would sound awful and you wouldn't listen after only half a dozen notes. You would have no emotional response at all... except annoyance!

 

Try getting a good musician to play an out of tune piano... 

 

So, although hard to understand, it's actually not about 'sound' though, not in the way many people understand it. It's about the music systems ability to accurately reproduce pitch... and not all do. And it rarely has anything to do with 'price'...

 

Suffice to say, the higher the resolution of the digital audio, the more accurate the source material pitch wise and therefore the better it sounds (garbage in, garbage out).

 

Ironically, analogue music sounds better, pitch wise, than digital because you actually have more 'samples' - it's literally down to particle size of the medium employed. The issue with analogue is its noisy and requires very expensive solutions as the signal is generated by a transducer which is in effect a mechanical measuring device that converts those measurements to an electrical signal. That requires real precision.

 

I spent the majority of my career in the recording industry, twenty years of it doing lectures all around the world including Japan, Ausralia and the USA, as well as all of Europe talking about this very point. It was a wonderful career and I have been very, very fortunate to have such an interesting life, getting paid to listen to music and talk about it.

 

We we have gone off topic enough... although this IS related to the original topic, however, for the sake of others who are not interested in this subject, if you want to discuss this further, feel free to PM me..., 

[Bill Livingston]

 Good post Peter... I use a very similar story in my lecture to illustrate that an emotional response has very little to do with how you respond to the sound of recorded music

 

(I get people to tell me the most emotionally connected they felt to music and what they listened to it on, obviously not allowing them to choose live music. Invariably they choose something from their childhood or youth, in HiFi terms, appears at first to not be good at all.

 

But then people unfortunately choose a HiFi based on the sound it makes and not how they respond emotionally to it... It seems a bizarre thing, but that's the way it is. They then wonder why it sounds different when they get it home. Then after a few weeks, when they get used to the sound, it appears to sound the same as it did in the shop or in their previous home... and it's either just as good, or just as bad as it always 'sounded'. 

 

It doesnt, of course, its just that it has the same ability to communicate the emotion of the music that it always had. You get used to changes in 'sound' very quickly. To get a real improvement, you need to get something that communicates the music more accurately, and that requires listening to the music itself when you make a choice, and asking yourself can you respond more naturally emotionally to it, not the sound the HiFi makes.

 

it sounds weird doesn't it? Well, it's fact. 

 

Unfortunately, it's fact also that the majority of the HiFi industry seems to ignore and then wonders why people don't find their products better than often very inexpensive solutions...

 

Most HiFi is 'emperors new clothes'... but all can be judged on how they reproduce 'music' rather than 'sound...'. And interestingly, in controlled tests, if you do that, most people choose the same thing... if you leave it to 'sound' everyone chooses something different as people have individual tastes if there isn't anything more compelling to distinguish one over the other.

 

(I should stop now )

[pico]

I had a motion picture editing instructor who said, "Sound is 50% of the picture."

[Bill Livingston]

Exactly...

 

Although I know a lot of recording engineers and directors who would say it is more. It's the sound, or absence of sound, that creates the atmosphere and therefore your emotional response to what you are seeing...

 

imagine the opening sequence of Dirty Harry, or Jaws, with the music from Laurel and Hardy!

[Peter H]

Exactly...

 

Although I know a lot of recording engineers and directors who would say it is more. It's the sound, or absence of sound, that creates the atmosphere and therefore your emotional response to what you are seeing...

 

imagine the opening sequence of Dirty Harry, or Jaws, with the music from Laurel and Hardy!

 

No doubt an improvement in the case of Dirty Harry..

[Bill Livingston]

[pico]

imagine the opening sequence of Dirty Harry, or Jaws, with the music from Laurel and Hardy!

When Jaws opened in downtown Chicago I could swear that audience screams were in the soundtrack.

[jankap]

Ironically, analogue music sounds better, pitch wise, than digital because you actually have more 'samples' - it's literally down to particle size of the medium employed. 

Is that so? 

 

I agree, that the standard written in the white book of the CD could have been better. The sampling rate and the number of steps could have been higher. 

But apart of this, analogue or digital is just the transporting method of the information. Otherwise the broadcasting of a record against direct playing a record could/would differ in quality.

 

I am always somewhat amused when I see, that amplifiers with valves are preferred by the hifi experts. The same with preferring gramophone records. 

 

Jan

[Bill Livingston]

Broadcasting of a record DOES sound different from direct playing of a record. Most broadcast studios use a lot of compression so they can get the levels higher. 

 

A lot of pop records are actually cut (in the old days, on acetates, which were the 'master' from which the molds were produced), were often cut with quite a lot of bass lift and a little treble lift.

 

I was in The Townhouse when the Trevor Horn produced 'Slave to the Rhythm (Grace Jones) album arrived for cutting.

 

They were cutting the 12 inch single (on a Neumann lathe) and the cutting engineer listened to it for literally a few seconds and added a little bass and treble lift (which I thought sounded worse) and then cut it. When I questioned him, he said the record company would reject the cut otherwise, because they want it to sound good on a car or portable radio as thats were most people would listen to it... Bass lift would emphasise the beat and treble lift would make it sound more dynamic once the compression applied at most FM stations was on... 

 

Trevor Horn spent ages getting the sound he wanted... and it was changed in seconds in the cutting room.

 

And by the way... only old fashioned audiophiles prefer valve amps because they think they sound better. In my opinion it is simply a colouration they seem to like. Most audiophiles today much prefer hires digital and solid state. (Although solid state amps have issues too.. Nothing is perfect).

 

Me... I'm certainly a hires digital/switch mode power supply, solid state person myself... I wouldn't have a domestic audiophile valve amp in the house.

 

Analogue does work really well, and I can see why so many prefer analogue to digital, but it is very hard to get it noise free and then get a consistent replay quality. Digital is far easier (and cheaper) to get right and as long as you understand that the RED book CD standard isn't actually as 'perfect' as Sony and Philips first made out, all is fine.

 

(For those interested, red book CD standard was 44.1Khz sample rate at 16 bits. Current HiRes digital from a studio master is normally 96Khz and 24 bit and quite a lot is now done at 192Khz and 24Bit. There are higher digital standards, but they are rare and not standard practice).

 

A bit like digital photography today, actually (to return to the original topic).

 

At the end of the day, hires is worth it for archival reasons because no-one really knows what the 'standard' standard will be in a few years time. 

 

With film, you basically had grain and that was a 'soft' limit as people actually quite like the noise it adds and its understandable in a very organic way. Digital can give far cleaner results and is much more manageable for most people (play with Lightroom and then think back to how difficult a lot of what we do was in the 'darkroom ages...").

 

The fact is though... when you get really big, you end up with pixellation which looks pretty awful. 

 

From my point of view, it doesn't matter that much because if you want something THAT big where pixellation becomes an issue at normal viewing distance, you would use a larger format. Same answer as with film years ago.

 

Very high res digital will probably mean there is no need for medium or large format in the future though... so its a matter of what ends up being the standard. However, I know MUCH less about digital photography than I do about recording music, so a lot of what I have just said about digital photography may be extremely naive, if not total nonsense...

 

No doubt they will pick a standard thought to be 'good enough' and it will be nowhere near good enough... they usually do...

 

Me? I'm happy with 24mp from my M. For normal prints at normal distances, I think its good enough as it stands... but thats what I think now.. who knows what I will think in even a couple of years

[pierovitch]

The younger generation will need equipment to give them the Beats and Subwoofer bass from the mp3 soundtrack of their youth, if they have any hearing left. Pixellated games and selfies will become the retro cool.

The thought of surviving selfies with celebrities verified by digital archivist going for serious bitcoin on ebay. [emoji52]

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Hallo,

Look here: Interesting Leica gear

[pop]

Actually, that isn't true. At all.

 

First, read a book called 'Music, the Brian and Ecstasy'... It's about the theory of music and how the brain responds to pitch and melody and the emotional responses we have to those sounds. Why for example, music in major chords sounds powerful and used to create a feeling of power or awe and why minor chords more often than not sound 'sad' to most people. Most people can tell whether a song is sad, or happy just by listening to the music... And very complicated emotions can be created just by the choices of mixes of key and individual notes made by the writer/composer. Pitch ends up being critical.

 

Play a sad piece of music on a piano or guitar (or any acoustic instrument for that matter) and have the piano slightly out of tune, and you will not have the same emotional response because your brain will try to correct the pitch of those notes as you hear them as it will always look for pattern so it can recognise and identify. You don't even need to know the melody in order to know the music is out of tune... and you don't need perfect pitch (which is exceedingly rare as it happens), what is interesting is that even the most tone deaf person can hear if a series of notes is out of tune... and you don't need many, three or four notes with just one of the either sharp or flat is more than enough.

 

In an audio system, all of them are slightly off... 

There appears to be a slight confusion.

 

The tune (or, as it is called sometimes) and also the mood of a music mostly relies on the ratios of the frequencies of the notes played in sequence or simultaneously. A ratio that can be expressed with small integers is experienced as "harmonious" or "pleasant". The larger the integers grow the more dis-harmonious if not to say unpleasant the interval becomes to listen to.

 

Hence, the most harmonious "progression" consists of the ratio 1/1, i.e. the same note being played twice in a row or simultaneously by several instrument or voices. The fifth, the third and all of those intervals are formed by such "pleasant" ratios. That was known to the ancient Greeks. 

 

This is the place where a mistuned piano or a poorly intoning fiddle player succeeds best at annoying the audience: by not playing the intervals at their proper ratios. The absolute pitch does not matter much. It matters most to people suffering from perfect pitch.

 

The moods ascribed to certain tonalities is a western thing, mostly. Oriental music uses quite different tonal systems, so do Asian or South-Eastern Asian ones, and all can transport Joy, Sorrow, Bereavement, Puzzlement equally well for those trained in listening to the respective kinds of music.

 

In Bach's and Silbermann's times people started noticing that the ratios of the notes within a scale could be varied to a considerable degree without the resulting music or the audience becoming disturbed. That's when they started tuning their keyboards to "equal temperaments". 

 

In the late nineteenth century (I believe) they even tuned the soloists' instrument a bit higher than the orchestra. It then was clearly out of tune but it sounded much more brilliant. I don't think there were any reports of musicians or listeners cringing from the resulting "disharmony". Rather, women in the audience seem to have fainted by the score.

 

Absolute pitch of the entire piece of music is another story. They say that Herbert von Karayan used to have the whole orchestra tune their instruments higher by about 4Hz. I don't know whether this altered the mood of the music.

[Bill Livingston]

There clearly is a little misunderstanding, although I found your reply both interesting and informative.

 

Of course, I am referring to relative pitch, for want of a better term. It is that relationship rather than absolute pitch that is important... as you quite rightly say, unless you have perfect pitch, no-one is really going to know or care whether the middle C on your piano is at 256Hz or a little sharp at 260 or so...

 

The fact is, its actually the relative pitch that is distorted by hifi systems and as it various across the frequency range and the errors are all uneven, it makes for a very difficult listening experience...  sing along to a piece of music in your head simultaneously and you will find that although your brain can 'play in tune' (regardless of how out of tune your natural voice is!), the system you are listening to will be unpredictable and literally out of tune.

 

It's called 'silent sound repetition' and is an interesting thing to just try sometime. Do it with live (acoustic) musicians, even on music that is unfamiliar, and you will find it relatively easy. Try it on a hifi system and most of the time it will be nearly impossible!

 

I had heard about Karajan tuning his orchestra a touch sharp... In the end, as relative pitch is all that is needed for everyone to remain in tune and for the audience to follow the music, in itself, its fine... But it will make the music sound a tiny, almost imperceptibly, a little more powerful, perhaps bombastic is too strong a word, but it explains, to a degree anyway, his reputation...