Hey all. This topic I'm posting is more for a bit of fun discussion than really trying to seriously tackle this topic. So don't get too hot under the collar, ok?
Basically, I take a gander at the video side of the home theater equation and notice all sorts of industry standards. Primary color points are well defined. The exact color of white is well defined. Grey scale, gamma, secondary colors, color decoders: all are well defined.
So as long as your display is calibrated and capable of meeting these well defined standards, you can be quite sure that you are seeing the images on screen more or less exactly as intended and more or less exactly as they were seen on a professional monitor right in front of the editor. There could still be slight differences in peak brightness, absolute black level and contrast. But by and large, having these industry standards means that it is possible to get extremely close to replicating identical images on (theoretically) every screen that shows those images.
But when it comes to sound, there seem to be so few industry standards. Other than Sound Pressure Level, almost nothing else is standardized.
My desire isn't to literally recreate lifelike sound. My desire isn't to have sound that is "better" than real life. My only desire is to hear what I am
supposed to hear, and to have industry standards that would allow me to know whether or not I am achieving that desire.
Go from studio to studio and there can be a vast variety of different speakers and audio equipment being used by the mixer and recording engineer. Go from movie editor to movie editor and the video will look the same on their industry standardized monitors. But their audio setups could potentially be vastly different!
I ask - Why is that? Why is it that we can accept the need for industry standardization in video, but not in audio?
In order to perfectly recreate any given recording exactly as the makers of that recording heard it, I would literally have to build an identical room, have identical speakers driven by identical gear placed identically in my room. And I could do that, if there were a standard for all of that! But there isn't!
I just think it's weird and silly and I'm wondering how other people feel about it. What really irks me is that I could put together a really really good audio system. Really great speakers, driven by really great gear in a really well designed accoustic environment. I could have all of this great stuff, but I would
still have zero assurance that I am actually hearing what I am
supposed to hear. I could potentially be hearing a totally different sound to what the recording artists had in mind. And that just seems whack to me!
Thoughts?