<snip>"old timer" sound engineers. ( Studio B and Ryman Auditorium among others ).
They had some interesting stories about original masters being mangled by modern electronic " trickery " to enhance the sound and create a "new" track that could be sold as a new recording.</snip>
Interesting story, but isn't that really an example of something getting further away from the original rather than closer to it?
<snip>Some devotees were buying expensive equipment that claimed to be able to create stereo and quad replications of the studio environment from single track masters. Even when the master was recorded on a single microphone.</snip>
I'm aware of Quadrophonic but it's a little before my time. As for mono to stereo, that's more on the periphery of my knowledge.
I know that in jazz circles there was a sort of watershed point in the very early 60s where stereo recording sessions became the norm. My guess would be that this was driven by the consumer market with manufacturers pushing stereo as the 'new thing'.
Trying to create stereo out of an original mono studio recording is (or was) just pandering to a trend. It's bit like people insisting that they only watch the HD channels without realising that much of the content is SD just upscaled. Whatever it is or was in music though, I think that it's another example of getting further away from the original, so it's not the same as what Chord are trying to do.
More recently i knew the brains behind one of the UK's most acclaimed amplifiers, he had recognised the ( unethical ) hype that opportunists were spreading to encourage sales of snake oil audio equipment. I think it was him who told me about an approach to a manufacture from a snake oil company to produce a superlative amplifier. It would be the same valve circuit as the standard amplifier they produced but "enhanced" by among other things a gold plated chassis.
I can think if several British Hi-Fi amp manufacturers who could lay claim to being "
one of the UK's most acclaimed", but fewer that produced valve designs. Leak and Quad easily spring to mind. Of course, that presumes you're talking about Hi-Fi amps and not guitar or PA amps. Whatever it was though, that's obviously just dressing things up, and whilst I'm sure that does go on, I'm not so convinced that you could level the same accusation at Chord if that was what you were getting at.
Going back many years to my days with Multitone, before becoming known for inventing and developing radio paging Multitone made hearing aids. One way to improve a hearing aid is to "graphic equalise" the amplifier to invertly match the person's hearing loss. Would this apply to top end audio systems where graphic equalisation is used to trim the audio to create what the listener wants to hear ? How could the system cater for two people listening at the same time but with different perceptions of how the audio should sound,
I can't think of any top end audio systems that incorporate graphic EQs in the way you suggest. In fact, if you look at most high-end audio products you'll be hard pushed to find anything more than a volume control. You don't even need to go high-end for this. Rega, Cyrus, Creek, ARCAM and Denon all make Hi-Fi amps under £500 without tone controls.
My first true Hi-Fi amp was a Mission Cyrus One bought back in the mid-80s. This was the same time that Dixons were selling tower systems with lots of flashing lights and slidey controls. My Cyrus One eschewed all of that. No graphic EQ. No tone controls. No balance control, even. The purity of design went so far that it didn't even allow for muting of the speaker outputs when a headphone jack was inserted. The designers had listened and decided that having that contact point degraded the sound. If I wanted to use 'phones then I had to unplug the speakers.
Quad had its famous Tilt tone control feature, and Bel Canto continues that tradition with amps that have a purely digital pre-amp section.
What we do have with some amps is Room EQ. This is not tone controls. Instead, it's a way of measuring the in-room response of the speakers and then adjusting the sound to get as close to a flat frequency response as the tech will allow. The result is neutral sound for more people. The aim is to replicate a room with good acoustic characteristics. After all, we don't ask to EQ the musician's instruments when listening live. Shouldn't a decent stereo system replicate that?
This - Room EQ rather than Graphic EQ (glorified tone controls) - is about getting closer to the truth of what's on the disc or source file. That's heading in the same direction that Chord are trying to.
I guess I am also passionate about exposing rip off merchants,
Me too. However, just because something is expensive, or someone doesn't have experience of it, or hasn't the sort of system that can show up any difference, it doesn't mean that the product is without merit.
If any of you still reading remember watching Top Gear, the episode when Hamster tried to drive an F1 car, then this is a reasonable simile. As decent as he is as a road car driver, he just couldn't drive to the level required to get the F1 car to start working properly. Would we then conclude on the basis of that test that multi-million-Pound F1 cars are snake oil and rubbish and clearly a rip-off?