Plankton... and the ability to resolve properly

Discussion in 'General Audio Discussion' started by Mikoss, Sep 14, 2016.

  1. ipm

    ipm Acquaintance

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    I generally agree with this idea. A reference is need as a basis of comparison.
     
  2. k4rstar

    k4rstar Britney fan club president

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    If you are going to post in a year old thread, please at least add SOMETHING to the discussion.
     
  3. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Castle is a retard BTW. He was highly encouraged to go away.
     
  4. johnjen

    johnjen Doesn’t want to be here but keeps posting anyways

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    He is of a rare breed and one of two who have earned the unique distinction of being put on ignore.

    Life is too short for a known S/N reduction.

    But then I imagine I too am on a list or two as well.

    And so it goes. |\/|

    JJ
     
  5. TomHP

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    On timbre, a lot of good descriptions in this thread already, but one thing that always stood with me is the relation ship between (1) harmonics and (2) their indivual envelopes over time. It's the combination of those two that makes one instrument sound different from another.

    I remember in uni doing a project where we had to synthesize a piano sound and a trumpet. Sure enough, a little Matlab routine to generate harmonic sine tones with a specific envelope and you got something that sounded like those particular insturments... Kind off... More like fisher price version of it. Your brain could interpret it as that instrument but it sounded very "synthetic" *duh*.

    The FR and/or harmonic structure is one thing, but what makes something really "real" is how those harmonics/overtones decay over time. And that's where it becomes increasingly difficult to capture that in a meaningful measurement in my opinion.
     
  6. lac29

    lac29 Acquaintance

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    The term plankton in the audio context was created/coined from CS correct? I've never heard anyone out of this community use the term.
     
  7. ipm

    ipm Acquaintance

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    Interesting. Do you recall if the code had accounted for decay component such as this? I suppose that it must have.

    I did some Matlab-based projects recently that involved putting accelerometers on grinding equipment and looking at signals via an FFT and also using wavelets. The idea was to classify when the equipment was going to fail in some way via the frequency response in the vibrating equipment enclosure. This was a multivariate problem given the placement of several sensors.

    My point is that perhaps the decay could be captured as it progresses in time in some way via wavelets. This may make a signal reconstruction work better than looking for basis functions that ignore time.
     
  8. TomHP

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    The original assignment was just to use exponential decays and that sounded very fake, but still a piano was a piano and a trumpet was a trumpet. I went one step further and actually derived envelope functions from analysing real piano sounds. This is a long time ago, but what I remember was that I used a sliding FFT window over the piano sample and extracted the magnitude of the harmonics. I then used (I think) some kind of spline interpolation to be able to synthesise my own signals.
     
  9. Armaegis

    Armaegis Friend

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    Part of a piano's sound is also realizing that the three strings per note (and really the whole piano) are not all perfectly in sync/tune. If it were, it would sound very artificial. There's a bit of give and each string will be slightly off from the next.
     
  10. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Yeah. I borrowed it from Lampizator guy. Felt it was a more specific term than detail. There's detail, then there's plankton. For example, the Benchmark DAC1 is detailed, but doesn't reproduce much plankton.
     
  11. ipm

    ipm Acquaintance

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    Cool. Signal shaping is not easy.

    The main thing I do is data analysis for fault detection. My stuff establishes a set of basis functions of some kind and looks to determine how a fault provides a signature along the selected basis functions. The idea is to find how 'bad' is different than 'good'. You establish the 'good' first, then see when the input set of signals differs from this.

    The selection of the basis functions to reduce the dimensionality (number of necessary basis functions) of the data in a way that is still sensitive to faults is the thing. The point with this is not signal reconstruction since much of the signal is ignored in order to focus on the fault; however, the methods do provide a means to rebuild a signal as needed. You would simply keep the all the parts that you decomposed the signal into (minus the noise I suppose).

    The wavelets could provide something beneficial to this given that they not only account for signal shaping, but also provide a means of showing when the shape occurs in time.

    This may or may not work in this music example, but someone could try it at some point to see how it fairs in removing the 'unnaturalness' that you reported. It may work.

    All the best to you.
     
  12. ipm

    ipm Acquaintance

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    Its a nice instrument for sure. I have a few friends that play very well. I never got past one finger on each hand.

    I suppose that all of this signal processing talk leads to the conclusion that this can't be all that brutally complicated with the computing power that is available today. After all, a synth can emulates a piano fairly well. This means that even before Moog in the 1960's, people have understood how to do this signal simulation work to a good degree. The easiest thing may be find an open-source code that is used in a synth of some kind and to see how it provides the desired effect.

    Anyway, its an old thread but its interesting to me.
     
  13. TomHP

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    I respectfully disagree. I've yet to hear a really convincing emulation. The most popular and convincing virtual pianos used in music production still rely on sampling hundreds of individual real piano strikes recorded at different velocities.
     
  14. ipm

    ipm Acquaintance

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    No problem at all. I'm sure you are right. I just did not want to sound like I had all the answers with my previous posts about wavelets, etc. I hope you understand that I'm not trying to push a viewpoint on anyone at all. This is just friendly conversation for me that is no different than sitting and having a tea and chatting with someone.

    Regarding the piano emulation, do you have any credible links on that, that I could look at? I like the data processing angle on things and this may be interesting reading/viewing. Algorithms and code would be even better. :)
     
  15. RobS

    RobS RobS? More like RobDiarrhea.

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    Sorry for bumping such an old thread but it was the closest I could find where I wanted to ask relevant questions regarding an old post purr1n had made that caught my attention:

    These questions aren't directed at purr1n, but open to anyone here for discussion.

    After reading threads and posts on "plankton", I think I understand what it means but I am sure I have never heard it. Or perhaps I am not listening closely enough or for a variety of reasons.

    So what is the entry point to enter in the 10% audiophile club who can hear plankton?

    Cause simply owning an HD650 to my ears doesn't seem like it's enough.

    The HD650s (along with the HD800s) have been well established by the community here as being the pinnacle for plankton, albeit they can be limited by the quality of amplifiers and DACs.

    An old spider plot chart made by purr1n had the Valhalla 2 amp's plankton rating a 9/10 (https://www.superbestaudiofriends.o...ompendium-guide-to-schiit-amps-headamps.3058/)

    I had the HD650 hooked up to a Valhalla 2 paired with a Schiit Bifrost Multibit A2 using USB...yet from all the descriptions I've read here on what "plankton" is, I still didn't hear it. Do you need to playback high resolution "audiophile-quality" recordings? Is it limited to certain genres, like classical and jazz?

    Unfortunately I didn't spend a lot of time with that rig because it gave me too much fatigue and I realized then that maybe I got the wrong transducers in the first place. I never understood why these cans were so lauded (except until recently where I have a much greater appreciation of them).

    With the Modi 3/Saga/Vidar/HE-6 rig, there were maybe two tracks I could say with some certainty did plankton. Those tracks presented subtle musical information that had this ebb and flow by the slightest gradations in volume that can only be described exactly like plankton swimming in a current inside the mouth of a baleen whale. I know that analogy is f'ing ridiculous but there was this strange satisfaction I got from these tracks compared to any of the systems I've heard before. Like purr1n said, you know it when you hear it. Or maybe what I heard was all just an illusion.

    Which leads me to another question. If around 10% of audiophiles have heard plankton, then what do we make of impressions/reviews of those that comment on it? Are audiophiles confusing fast transient response, decay and clarity for plankton?

    Where does one draw the line at what few sources/amps/headphones can reproduce plankton? Are those that are stuck in budget/mid-fi tier just shit outta luck?
     
  16. Biodegraded

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    This is a thread I've found useful (on plankton and on other terms in use here). See purr1n's post #9 for one suggested passage to listen for it:

    https://www.superbestaudiofriends.o...ology-subjective-terms-used-on-superbaf.3400/

    Edit: Also, search on 'plankton' in the Audio 101 thread:

    https://superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?threads/the-audio-101-thread.3214/
     
  17. ColtMrFire

    ColtMrFire Writes better fan fics than you

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    It's just low level information, cues that you are hearing a live thing and that's easy to recognize since we hear live things all the time. With Bifrost Multibit/Val2/650 you definitely heard it. I wouldn't think about it too much.
     
  18. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Need good recordings. Early ones with simple recording chains from microphones straight to multitrack tape recorders tend to have more plankton. Won't make a difference with most modern music. Even a lot of current Japanese special direct mic recordings don't have it on account of crappy AD conversion.

    Vidar is plankton limited in the overall scheme on amps. Aegir is much better, but probably only works with HE-5. HE-6 might need more power and gain than Aegir can provide.
     
    Last edited: Oct 14, 2019
  19. earnmyturns

    earnmyturns Smartest friend

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    Take this https://songlines.com/release/ejdeha/ which I'm revisiting now and listen for the roughness, stickiness, (sub)harmonics of physical strings, bows, hands, drum skin. All outside the main melodic line and main dynamics, just subtle cues about the physical properties of the instruments, the space they are in, and the way they are handled. Hands on string and drum skin especially have lots of texture that could easily be smoothed out in a different recording or reproduction chain. 96/24 FLAC > Yggdrasil A2 > EC Aficionado > ZMF Verité silkwood + Verité pads.
     
  20. RobS

    RobS RobS? More like RobDiarrhea.

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    Why not dual Aegirs in monoblock with an active pre that has a gain stage?

    The current HE-6 setup I have is: Convert2/Goldpoint/monoblock Vidars/HE-6

    The hot outputs from the Convert might eliminate the need for additional gain from a pre.

    I'll need to track down some old recordings and check out @earnmyturns album.

    EDIT: I mean I have plenty of albums before the digidesign/pro-tools era. Might have to track down better (re)masters though.

    Aegir monoblocks are sorta close to the power output into 50ohms of a stereo Vidar, which is plenty for the HE-6. If the Vidars are the bottleneck in my chain, I'll have to consider Aegirs down the road (Probably wait until Jason does that super powerful amp). Was looking to get the craziest amount of heft, slam, and bass quality from the HE-6 (and my speakers). I got all this gear for my speakers but it's nice I can slot an HE-6 in without purchasing anything additional.

    Need some more time with my current setup though.
     
    Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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