When an enthusiast strives for the cleanest high end from his mains he's called an audiophile but when someone seeks the same result on the low end he's a "bass head" nutjob who spends "tons" of money and needs a nuclear power plant to juice his insane rig to 125dB at 3 Hz.
For frame of reference, the SW out comprises 5-1/2 octaves (3-120 Hz). Lopping it off at 25 Hz reduces that bandwidth to 2-1/4 octaves, or to less than 1/2. I wonder who would be taken seriously if he suggested lopping off the high end at 4000 Hz, citing examples of source %s, hearing curve BS, etc?
Regarding "all effects are fake", that's not exactly correct. Although effects are created (after all, how would one mic a dragon spewing fire?), they are created using very real sounds. Randy Thom on sound design for How To Train Your Dragon:
Quote:
Randy: The Toothless voice has some horse elements, whale elements and tiger elements in addition to vocalizations and breaths that Al and I did. The big cat stuff was useful for the aggressive Toothless; and the horses, whales, and human stuff was the “softer,” more sympathetic side of the character. Al, what about the “plasma gun”?
Some of the results of that particular work:
If you filter at 25 Hz, what are you missing? Technically, the simple answer is; more than 1/2 of the presentation of the summed low end of all channels of the soundtrack (the SW output).
Regarding these endless (and by now, one would think they would just be unanimously dismissed to the point where they might only be presented as a question and not an authoritative edict) Equal Loudness Curves references, Craig John gets it right (as he usually does). Infrasonics are not in the sonic range, so why are there so many who suggest the need to be able to so grossly distort the presentation as to make them equally audible with 1000 Hz? This is an irrelevant subject that needs to be put out to pasture for good. There are no pure sine tones in soundtracks, so referencing pure sine tone listening tests vs human hearing is like referencing taste tests to explain the color red.
Thigpen was asked these same sorts of questions while discussing an installation of his TRW in a church to augment its pipe organ and his reply is one I've used as a reference from a reliable source (because, for one trivial point, he's actually experience full bandwidth reference level soundtrack playback:
Quote:
Perhaps the biggest misconception is that very low frequency sound is all "feel". If you get 6-10Hz up to over 120dB then yes, you begin to feel it. But you can actually hear it long before you feel it. In fact with mixed tones as is the case with a pipe organ the audible thresholds for very low frequencies are much lower, about 6 to 10dB less than the pure tone thresholds. In other words, well before you feel the sound you will hear it. In the middle of the sanctuary the 32' and 64' sine wave stops sounded really good. 105dB is the sound level it took to make these tones below 20Hz audible. This became the reference level for these stops.
In researching this project it is apparent that pipes in these organs are not really very loud, and definitely not very efficient. The pressure in the organ manifold determines how loud they play. The recordings show that they do not produce a really good pure tone because of the non linear compressibility of the air in the pipe. Also some stops are not supposed to produce a pure tone.
brucet
While Fitz's claim that his horn crack concrete (what next?), true or not, that has nothing whatever to do with full BW reference level playback of a soundtrack. I heard a singer could break a glass by singing a note at the resonant frequency of the glass. That has just as much to do with soundtrack content as the cracked concrete claim.
Actually, in a room like mine, which is of a typical residential wood frame construction, you can feel <25 Hz in every soundtrack that has such content when played back at reference level.
Looking at the posted graphs of content in the 2 scenes from HTTYD, it's evident that the effects are complex sounds made up of many simultaneous frequencies. The total sound power of the sum of all frequencies at any given instant cannot exceed the limits of the format. That means that the <25 Hz portion simply cannot be 120dB. The reality is much closer to the 105dB Thigpen refers to as his experienced reference.
Many of us who have long ago decided that it was worth the effort to explore full bandwidth reference level playback of the SW output have posted many times on the benefits. The only conclusion that can be made when people question posted comments on the results is that they believe we are mentally incapable or liars. In 10 years on this forum I have not seen a single case of someone who upped his subwoofer system to include reference playback of <20 Hz content who reported back that he wasn't missing anything in the 30 Hz tuned ported or horn sub he upgraded from.
20 years into discrete, multichannel audio, there is no doubt that <25 Hz content exists in at least over 1,000 titles, that it is intentionally designed to be there and that inclusion of its playback in your HT is a whole new and very rewarding experience. Honestly, to those who still attempt to argue the polar opposite of those simple facts, I just have to wonder what's up with that?
