Brilliant US Classical Composers

Borg Refinery

Borg Refinery

Active member
Korngold, Barber, Gershwin.

Barber is my favourite (one of my all time favourites actually). It always brings a tear to my eye when I listen to these two -



I think adagio for strings was originally 1938 (he redid it for choir in 67) and Violin Concerto was 39.
 
I'm not a purist about it. But if I'm going classical music I tend to stick with Beethoven, Vivaldi, Brahms, Haydn, etc.
I also like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, etc., but that's kind of a hybrid of aesthetic, nostalgia, and adolescent rejection, etc.

Kudos to those that can afford $10's of $Thousands on a sound studio. For those that can't, a fabulous set of headphones like Sony's MDR-V6 are about impossible to beat.

And those that need something to plug the headphones into can check here:

www.crutchfield.com

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Astell&Kern A&norma SR25 MKII​

High-resolution portable music player with Wi-Fi® and Bluetooth®
Item #: 838SR25II
  • dual high-performance Cirrus Logic DACs (one each for left and right channels)
  • supports PCM files up to 32-bit/384kHz and DSD files up to 11.2MHz
  • built-in rechargeable battery lasts up to 20 hours
That's not an endorsement. I haven't researched the market. My intended point is, there's more available than the simple MP3 players that inflict compressed music on listeners, not so much for them to listen to music, but as a tenuous reminder of what it would be like if they did.
 
I had Tidal for a while which was 24 bit 192khz (streamed over the internet) with 'master' recordings of great classical pieces. It sounded nice on good headphones but actually a 320khz VBR MP3 is more than sufficient in many cases.

I also love the Beatles, LZ and Brahms. :)
 
Borg Refinery said:
I also love the Beatles
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Harrison's pointless demise is tragic. But Sir Paul is a global treasure.

I'm stunned by the artistic evolution, from I Wanna Hold Your Hand through later works like the double "white album". Probably about the best argument for cannabis I can think of.

An audio equipment salesman cornered me back in 1975 and tried to sell me electrostatic headphones. Until then I'd been using simpler dynamic headphones. He had me A / B compare them. He called attention to the clarity of the high frequencies, including the drummer's cymbal. I bought the headphones. BUT !!

Sony MDR-V6 are about the best I've tried, still have a few rattling around the house. mm, a posting member from Northern Ireland has pointed out to me that at my age (nearly 70) my hearing's pretty well shot. BUT:

I used to be an audiophile. I had an open reel 3 head tape-deck, and a 3 head Nakamichi cassette deck. I know I've got a dead spot in the frequency spectrum, possibly around 1 kHz or so. Even if it's placebo, I still prefer high res audio, and still fully appreciate high res. graphics, both stills & vids.
 
You can spend anything on audio equipment nowdays, from West Hollywood studio stuff and levels of money (Westlake/Eastlake speakers for £100k) to the new Sennheiser or top AKG range headphones (I've foud I prefer AKG - going in the price range of £1k at the top level).

A lot of audio people try to get completely flat sounding speakers and relatively flat headphones so they don't colour the sound, obviously with speakers you need room treatment to make that the case. But yeah it'[s complex.


[ I was doing some mixing of my own tracks before using Logic and stuff which was really hard - especially on headphones. They actually have a few recreations of Abbey Rd stuff in some of the collections I had - some sounded really nice -

Abbey-Road-Studios-Brilliance-Pack_GUI.jpg


The 'Brilliance Pack' ]

This is completely unfinished and I think sounds it - and it's unmixed - but it's one of the things I've been doing recently - vocals were lifted from a Beijing opera piece which I love. Hopefully you can't make out the words or the opera it comes from too closely. :D
 
Borg Refinery said:
A lot of audio people try to get completely flat sounding speakers and relatively flat headphones so they don't colour the sound, obviously with speakers you need room treatment to make that the case. But yeah it'[s complex.
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I'm OK with linear loudness. Seems silly, to outright painful for some frequencies to be ear-piercing, while others in the audible frequency spectrum too quiet to decipher.

But even with linear loudness as an objective, that varies with overall loudness:

The Fletcher Munson Curve is a graph that illustrates as the actual loudness changes, the perceived loudness varies from one frequency to another.
- At low listening volumes – mid range frequencies sound more prominent, while the low and high frequency ranges seem to fall into the background.
- At high listening volumes – the lows and highs sound more prominent, while the mid range seems comparatively softer.
Yet in reality, the overall tonal balance (equalization) of the sound remains the same regardless of listening volume.

I haven't seen a piece of equipment like you've pictured in #5 since the previous millennium. - ahhh, the good ol' days ... -

A pet peeve of mine, audio dynamic range compression not an option. I just finished watching from DVD MGM's The Time Machine starring Rod Taylor and Alan Young.
So I had to do manual volume control.
I hadn't seen it in over half a century. Quite a blast from the past.
 
3-4khz is the 'ear piercing' hurting range that nature uses to alert us to danger - tigers and other dangerous animals roar around these frequencies and they are 'turned up'in our hearing. And low frequencies can sound out of time in songs as th soudn waves travel slower, so you have to compensate for that too quite often.



I know what you mean about compression. You could actually fix that by putting a compressor on your computer 's audio outptu (or your tv if it goes through your comptuer). I was being really ridiculous and using a program called audio hijack pro that lets you put VSTs (those are the plugins Cubase etc uses) or AUss (the plugins Logic uses) to apply to the computer's audio output then putting my favourite compressors on that to mix tracks I was listeing to in realtime. :D

BTW, VLC has a built in Compressor.
 
Borg Refinery said:
And low frequencies can sound out of time in songs as th soudn waves travel slower, so you have to compensate for that too quite often.
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?
Count me a skeptic. "Frequency" and "velocity" are not synonyms. I suspect FM radio wouldn't work as it does if different frequencies traveled at different speeds.
As you know sound doesn't travel through a vacuum, only through a material medium, such as air, water, or railroad track. But the higher audio frequencies are more easily blocked (line of sight). Low frequency bass seems omnidirectional.

On the broader issue of sensitivity, we use red for important stuff like stop lights, stop signs, etc. Some have suggested this is based upon our animal reaction to the sight of blood. But that drifts off to the retinal rods / cones thing, & ambient light intensity.

Thanks totally for letting me know about the VLC compressor. I had no idea that was there. What puzzles me is, I imagine lots of people, particularly old people manually compress audio volume when watching TV, & perhaps while driving.
Dynamic range compression built in, and easily adjustable would solve that problem for them. Add an equalizer and we're good to go. I consider it impossible that manufacturers don't know this. So I deduce they omit it for a reason, perhaps they think they couldn't teach it.
Before the digital revolution it might not have mattered as much, as the analog medium had its own intrinsic dynamic range limits. Engineers seem to go poly-orgasmic about broad dynamic range. But it's best reserved for sound affects records, etc.

PS
I occasionally use: https://www.ask.com/?
as a search engine because it allows queries in complete sentences. It never happened to me before, but my query was: "Are some sound frequencies faster?"
I tried it multiple times, got zero response, not even an acknowledgement. BUT !! I suspect frequency may affect directionality, but not speed.
 
True, very poorly termed on my part perhaps. They do all travel at the same speed so what I wrote was flatly wrong.
But like I said bass frequencies (especially subharmonic ones) can sound out of time very easily, given the lower frequencies. But yes, badly termed on my part.

The guys on this audio forum adequately address it.

I never even knew Ask Jeeves still existed.
 
Borg Refinery said:
But like I said bass frequencies (especially subharmonic ones) can sound out of time very easily, given the lower frequencies.
Click to expand...
Speed of sound - Wikipedia
"The speed of sound is the distance travelled per unit of time by a sound wave as it propagates through an elastic medium."

This source says the speed of sound varies with the medium, from 340 m/s to 6,000 m/s.
 
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