response 25 of 41:

Dec 24 23:47 UTC 1991

Yes, and a crystal glass will vibrate when any frequency of sound wave
hits it, however, only one frequency range will cause it to shatter.

response 27 of 41:

Mar 11 00:46 UTC 1992

I guess it would both work or not work depending on the shape, and 'friction'
built into the glass.  Also the amount (amplitude) of the sound supplied
makes a difference, it has to be very stable (drift causes phase shifts,
sometimes desirable to get the effect) in a controlled way.

I have Steve Halpern's Crystal Suite, it sounds impressive, however,
I think I am hitting the limits of my stereo (which ain't bad by any rating)
and CD by design.  CDs are limited in the range of sounds they can reproduce
and music like this makes it show.  (All the fun interferences of higher
frequencies do get lost)

response 29 of 41:

Mar 11 04:57 UTC 1992

What I meant is the harmonics that come out when you replay the original
sound (not CD) by the way of mixing high frequencies (say 30-40 Khz) that
create audible interferences, which in turn depend on the room it is played
in.  The room features may absorb or reflect those higher frequencies, so
that if you have the real thing playing in your listening room, you would
get a different (sometimes much different) spectrum than when playing it
thru a CD player, since the CD player won't be able to reproduce those high
frequencies at all, therefore no audible interferences of those higher
frequencies.  Some do argue that the interferences are recorded on the CD as
well, but that is only the interferences created in the recording room.
Recording rooms usually do absorb everything, and mikes don't take those
higher frequencies in, and the signal passes thru filters to remove the
higher frequencies to prevent aliasing before it is sampled and converted
for the CD.  It is not what you would get if it was performed in your
listening room.

Of course, CD is the best thing available/affordable to the consumer.

As for record players, I believe there aren't any that can surpass 65-75 dB
noise ratio, I might not know enough about them.

Even if you get all that good equipment, your speakers will cost you a
fortune to give it as it is (!).  Sometimes I think it is all wasted money,
then again, I put something like the Crystal Suite on, and think it is not.
But figure out I have to spend more on my speakers to have it played as it
is.

response 31 of 41:

Mar 13 06:20 UTC 1992

A friend of mine was into music, was playing at bands while studying, and
he did some keyboard(synthesizer) designs himself.  We were studying
electonics (E-Technik in Germany), and this came up when we were discussing
a related issue in system theory.  Parts of it were also mentioned in the
acoustics class, and system theory class.  There is no reference I can make
for you to read that I know of, you may find it in books dealing with
acoustics and system theory, or you may never find it in any book, since
probably nobody cares about it.  Audiophile magazines may be a better source.

I was going to put something together offline, but one of the underlying
basic mechanisms is that when you mix two frequencies, you get the sum and
the difference.

Another thing chipping in is, that when you digitize signals, you have to
sample it with at least twice the max frequency you want to reproduce, and
you are not supposed to have anything in the signal that is greater than
your max frequency or else it will 'alias'.

Aliasing in simple words is creating frequencies in a special way which are
not in the original.  This happens when the math transformation screws up
because of the signal not being within the specs for which the
transformation was designed for.  Other frequencies beyond the max frequency
will appear in a modulo difference mirrored (? I forgot if they were
mirrored) way.

Now, filtering is always fun business in electronics, and you can *never*
filter a signal clean of something you don't want.  You can make it better
and better, and the better usually the complicated.

There are approaches that make the whole thing work like a filter without
even having one, but I am not very familiar with it, the main idea it deals
with is making anything that aliases outside of the max frequency range.  I
would not do it, and I keep believing hearing such stuff when I listen to
some CDs, it is just not natural to hear those, and if you ever listened to
alised stuff, you could tell.  Some can even tell how it was aliased :)

Some CD players have oversampling implemented to avoid aliasing, but I
don't think it would work if it was recorded that way.  It sounded like
baloney when the salesmen was explaining, I am sure it didn't work the way
he caimed.

Well so far, it only explains why you are not supposed to have anything more
than the max frequency coming into the CD and out, but in reality it does
come in, and creates impurity.  However, the not-life-here effect doesn't
have much to do with those impurities.  It has to do with the limited
bandwith with which the signal is recorded and replayed.  Think of a musical
instrument that created a bunch of frequencies, and harmonics of those (we
have a non-linear world).  When those soundwaves bounce off the walls,
furniture, etc, they hit nonlinear behaving substances, that bend and
reflect the waves in a different form than when they were coming in.  That
change in the waveform turns out as new frequencies being created.  (This
has nothing to do with mixing two frequncies which creates a sum and a
difference)

Some of the waves even get totaly aborbed or amplified at certain
frequencies if there are hollow structures behind the surfaces they are
hitting, some of them will create new frequencies (non-linear-behaviour
which is not the same mechanism as adding and substracting two frequencies)

Now finally to the life-here-effect.  My friend had told me that the relevant
stuff goes easily up to 50 kHz, I guess higher frequencies get almost totaly
absorbed.  Since you don't have this full spectrum with the replayed music,
you simply won't have all the byproducts of mixing and bouncing of the higher
frequncies not contained on the recording off the walls/furniture/carpeting
which would have created audible soundwaves.

response 33 of 41:

Dec 18 03:02 UTC 1992

   I agree about the "live albumns".  Yuck.  Live appearances are OK, except
that with pop music I get blasted with all the noise.  Of course, if you're
in an arena with 50,000 people there you can't have soft music.

response 35 of 41:

Jan 22 23:00 UTC 1993

  If you like improvisational live stuff, you just might love King Crimson,
especially the new "beat the boots"-type box set "Great Deceiver".  It's
probably a bit severe as an introduction to Crimson, but if you're interested
I can make some recommendations..

response 37 of 41:

Nov 22 05:06 UTC 1994

I only *really* like classical music live.  It never even sounds *close* to 
the original when it is reproduced by electronics.  And I don't have crappy
stuff.  On the other hand, I have loved *all* classical music that I have
heard live -- even really crappy stuff.  I just sit back and listen to all 
the pretty sounds when the score is bad.  

Then again, I only like reproduced rock music.  Live rock music not only goes
through the same electronic chain that distorts the studio performance, but
the noise and usually *terrible* accoustics of the live performances make 
them completely unacceptable to me.  Now, unamplified rock is another story....

response 39 of 41:

Dec 5 00:37 UTC 1994

Of course, there's always bootleg. *grin* 

response 41 of 41:

Dec 18 23:02 UTC 1994

Well personally I prefer live music. This is probably due to the fact
that most of the music I like is based around improvisation and
spontaniety (this is actually quite a good thing for a band as their
set list is then given much longer life). In the studio, it's a bit
difficult to capure this essense