Issue 232   April 2013
Sins of Commission, Sins of Omission
Editorial By Robert Harley

   

  A few weeks ago I was listening to an audiophile-label recording of a big band on SACD. The sound was, in certain objective ways, spectacular. The dynamics were off the chart, the frequency extremes were extended and highly defined, image focus was razor-sharp, and the sound had a clarity and verve that were remarkable. The next piece of music I happened to play was a recent pressing of an old mono LP, Swing's the Thing, by Illinois Jacquet. The contrast between this 56-year-old recording and the modern audiophile-label SACD couldn't have been starker. The LP, being mono, had no left-right spatial cues that would place images across the soundstage. The bass was soft and not particularly defined, and the treble obviously rolled off prematurely. Dynamics were muted, and the sound had an obvious "vintage" character. And yet...

I ended up listening to both LP sides with the lights off. When the second side concluded I was startled by how completely immersed I had been in the music. In my mind I had been transported through time and space to that recording session. Despite the profound difference in technical quality between the big-band SACD and this flawed mono LP, the vintage recording had some ineffable magic missing from the "objectively" superior modern presentation. I was also struck in that moment by the irony that this powerful experience was delivered by a mono LP, played back through a single-ended triode amplifier fitted with tubes manufactured in 1943 (the Absolare Passion preamp and Passion 845 SET amplifiers) through modern loudspeakers (Magico Q7s) of impeccable sophistication.

Both recordings departed from fidelity to the original musical event, but in opposite directions. The SACD was brighter and more forward than life, the LP softer and more laid-back. The modern recording added components to the signal — brightness and a bit of glare, while the old record subtracted bass and treble along with dynamic contrast. By any objective standard, the LP had vastly more distortion than the SACD. So why should the old LP be more involving?

A fundamental audiophile tenet holds that "sins of commission" are worse than "sins of omission" — that is, something added to an audio signal is far more objectionable than something removed from that signal. I wrote about this phenomenon more than twenty years ago, but my recent experience with the SACD and LP, coupled with a chance encounter at CES with Michael Børresen of Raidho Acoustics, crystallized the concept for me.

At CES Børresen demonstrated for me his Raidho D-1 loudspeaker. The D-1 is a small two-way that is identical in every way to the C 1.1 (reviewed by Jonathan Valin in Issue 224) except that a thin layer of diamond has been applied to the woofer diaphragm. The diamond layer makes the cone stiffer and thus better behaved. The D-1 seemed to go much deeper in the bass, and with wider dynamics. The two loudspeakers have exactly the same measured low-frequency cutoff point, yet a stiffer woofer diaphragm that provides superior midbass performance somehow confers the illusion of another half-octave of bass extension.

Børresen's explanation of this phenomenon at CES, reiterated in this issue's Designer Roundtable, instantly brought back my experience with the modern SACD and the vintage LP. The two phenomena — cleaner bass conferring the illusion of greater extension, and an obviously distorted recording sounding more involving than a virtually technically perfect one — are at their root, identical.

As Børresen explained, "when we look at human psychoacoustic capabilities, we see that misinformation takes twice the brain power to comprehend and remove, whereas an absence of misinformation coupled with the more accurate reproduction of harmonics allows our ear/brain to recreate fundamentals not really there."

The type of distortion in the SACD, however small objectively, is Børresen's "misinformation" — the old "sins of commission." The objectively greater distortion in the Illinois Jacquet record is simply a reduction in the amount of information — "sins of omission." My brain was more adept at filling in what was missing from Illinois Jacquet than at removing what was added to the SACD.

Those who attempt to remove human "subjectivity" from audio engineering forget that the listener isn't a passive observer, but a fully active, engaged, and even creative participant. From nothing but patterns of varying air pressure, we conjure in our minds living and breathing musicians. The traditional yardsticks of sound quality are meaningless without recognizing the vital role our imaginations play in music listening.

 

 

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