Real or Surreal. Do you throw accuracy out the window for "better" sound?

I find that a speaker’s frequency response should measure flat on axis under anechoic conditions, and follow a downward tilted curve at the listening position something close to the Harman curve to sound best overall to me. That seems to be one measurable metric and established standard I can count on to work for me. Of course it’s not all that matters, but it is important and works for me every time. Indeed, some surreal and interesting effect can happen with boosted treble. I’ve been working on some new speakers recently and have been down that rabbit’s hole again, adjusting levels up and down by ear on the treble, mid, and bass to see what happens. The initial goal is to do tiny adjustments but then I sometimes go hog wild with it and hear some beguiling things. Like the OP said, the boosted treble and bass can be good at low volumes, acting as a loudness curve. Overall I just prefer to let the midrange become naturally more prominent as the volume goes down.

 I estimate myself to be in the more "real" than "surreal" camp. Some recordings sound surreal no matter what you do, and that’s fine. I don’t want to add my own particular flavor of surreal to every recording.

Smoothness is a word that I use for systems with a very characteristic sound. One of the smoothest sounds I’ve ever heard came from an old VW van that some guy had restored and put a big sound system in. I was just walking by and he had the doors open and the music turned up. Somehow that system took the edge off everything without seeming to lose any detail. Not what I typically hear from real live acoustic instruments indoors, but very pleasant on account of sounding so, so, smooth! It may have had something to do with being outside. I’ve heard that same sweet smoothness from the US Marine band playing on the deck of the USS Nimitz with hundreds of us sailors standing around them. The trumpets were bright and clear, but there wasn’t a significant surface nearby for the sound to reflect off of, not even a reflection off the deck because our bodies were absorbing it all.

@mijostyn 

Expensive curse? I guess the expensive part depends on how well off you are, and how expensive your tastes are. The curse part depends on whether it ultimately makes you unhappy and unwell. 

If you're constantly moving heavy speakers and amplifiers in and out of the room, at least you're getting some exercise. 

Yes, certain music need a bite on edges, but it needs to be the right bite on the right edges.

Definitely a lot of recordings were not meant to sound real so there’s no way to get it to happen. Still, they can be quite enjoyable.

As for "good enough," I consider it good enough when the fundamental issues of the recording and playback method are the major constraint, and issues with things like max volume and frequency response are already beyond anything I want happening in a home setting. If I’m just doing 2 channel, 2 speaker stereo without some way of dealing with inter-aural crosstalk, I find that point of "good enough" happens pretty quickly. No point in trying to upgrade components when I’m just going to be heavily distracted by the crosstalk anyway. I know that not everybody is bothered by it. There are many ways for a system to sound good, and some people can filter out or psycho-acoustically hear through issues that I can’t.

I suspect that a lot of music lovers who aren’t audiophiles are exceptionally good at re-constructing what’s missing or distorted in the playback. They don’t even know they’re doing it, so they don’t get what all the audiophile fuss is about.

I can say for certain that I’m not the one you want adjusting photos or color grading video, or mixing and mastering audio for professional production work. I watch videos and read books on what’s supposed to look and sound good and what’s not, and I often can’t see or hear that anything has meaningfully improved. I usually prefer they just leave it all alone unless something is obviously off.

I do wonder about the effort put into mixing and mastering a lot of pop music. Does it really significantly increase sales?

@mahgister 

Gear obsession with no love or understanding for music nor for his  acoustics and psycho-acoustic embeddings    is a psychological disorder not a hobby ...

I agree, and it's a type of psychological disorder that's not uncommon. The equipment or whatever the object of desire becomes the ultimate end point in our minds when it is supposed to be a means to an end. The question to keep in mind is what do I really, really want? What are all the ways I might be able to get there? Are there ways to get there that are better than others, with fewer drawbacks and side effects? 

If I go down the rabbit hole too far I start to see that ultimately I really don't want anything. So I have to back off and settle with the notion that I want to be happy and physically well. I'm not really sure I even want that, but I'm sure I don't want to be unhappy and physically unwell. 

@mijostyn 

 

What I really want is a certain sound and image quality. 

Just for philosophical fun I'm going to challenge that statement. Is that what you really want, or is it how you expect that certain sound and image quality will make you feel? What if you could get that feeling without actually achieving that certain sound and image quality.

My own answer to that question is that it's the feeling I'm after, but there's also a feeling I get from pursuing it. There may be other things to pursue and achieve that would give me equally good feelings but I only have one lifespan to work with and I can't get to all of the good stuff, so this is a path I've gone down.

I'm impressed that you know what you are after. I generally know some of the things I'm after in terms of sound and image quality, but sometimes I discover things that I wasn't aware I wanted until I experienced them. And some things don't do for me what I expected when they are achieved. So for me, this hobby is still in an exploratory phase. 

@brev

My dad was a photographer. One year I was at the county fair looking at the photographs and saw one that looked like something my dad would do. Sure enough, it was his picture and it got some kind of award. The thing I mostly noticed was how he didn’t push any colors. He took the shot with film, but he liked more subtle films. It was a nature shot with mountains and lots of pine trees. Nothing vivid about it, but very pleasing to the eye and natural.

I argued a little with him abut this approach. I always liked his photographic look and style, but I didn’t feel that it necessarily portrayed the scene in a highly realistic way, although I wasn’t sure why. I knew he was correct about the color saturation, but the real scenes seem to have more impact. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s mostly brightness. The pictures are often viewed in-doors under relatively dim light compared to the brilliance of daylight. Also, print media does not have much dynamic range. We can correct for that somewhat mentally, but I think some amount of delicately pushing the saturation and curves can help in a way similar to a loudness curve on a stereo for low level listening.

I’ve recently updated my system to more efficient and bigger drivers, which can play a lot louder without strain because they are both more efficient and can easily handle more power. The result is that I end up turning it up more without really noticing. It doesn’t sound loud because I don’t hear the telltale signs of strain. Another thing this new setup does is use an open baffle configuration for the 200 to 2000 Hz range, which does something different to the how the room responds, so the room also seems to stay under control better. The resulting impression is a much more vivid and lifelike sound, with apparently much better dynamic punch. It sounds more lifelike and more pleasing at lifelike levels. Bass and treble comes through a lot better without having to be boosted. The clarity is amazing, but this only really reveals itself when the volume is up at a level where the old bookshelf speakers weren’t holding together too well. Those little things had some elevated treble, as some reviewers complained about, but they are also volume limited, so they work pretty well at the levels I ended up listening to them.

Back to photographs, if you haven’t tried it, it’s interesting to see your raw photos properly displayed on a newer HDR TV. I haven’t found an easy way to do it, having to import my raw photos into a film editing program where I would color grade them for 1000 nit HDR and export the resulting movie in a format my TV would properly recognize as 10 bit color encoded. It’s still not as bright and dynamic as daylight, but it really does add some impressive pop to colors just by giving them some extra dynamic range. The key is brightness, and the TV has to be able to do sustained brightness over a large area of the screen for outdoor daylight photographs, so OLED won’t cut it. If you shoot scenes that are darker with bright highlights, OLED should look amazing.

@mijostyn

I think I’m becoming a believer in dipoles. My setup isn’t even close to ideal yet and it’s already making me really happy. I’ve moved the crossover all the way up to 3500 Hz and it sounds amazing even though the mid is pretty beamy up there. The effect is to move the soundstage back. It sounds very natural, smooth and atmospheric, even at low volume. I stayed up too late last night because I could turn it down low enough not to bother anyone and it was sounding so sweet.

As you suggest, I do plan on getting some absorption behind the drivers once I get the baffle standing on it’s own so I can get rid of the old TV cabinet it’s leaning on. I’ve also ordered a ceiling TV bracket so the TV won’t have to be held up. It’s generally recommended to get open baffles 3 feet away from the back wall but I don’t have the space. I’m going to be pushing up against the wall as close I can get away with while maintaining the beautiful sound, so absorption will be critical. Fortunately I work at ASC so we have all kinds of absorbers on tap. BTW, ASC got started specifically on request to build an absorber to go behind a Magnepan that had to be close to the back wall.

I had an idea to use the TV as an extension of the baffle. I might experiment with that, but I have a feeling it won’t be good to make the baffle that much bigger. I fear that will just delay the dipole side cancellation, taking the edge of the baffle too close to the ceiling so it won’t kill the ceiling bounce as effectively. I left the bottom of the baffle open too to help kill some immediate floor bounce.

I consider myself fortunate to be able to appreciate and enjoy high quality audio and visual reproduction even though I don’t require it to enjoy content (although some content can be pretty rough on the ears if it isn't reproduced really well, or sometimes if it's reproduced too well.) I have magic moments listening to classical music on the cheap FM radio in the car, sometimes when it’s not coming in very well. I’ve been emotionally moved by pictures printed on cheap media, or movies watched on 20" CRT televisions. I think most audiophiles and videophiles are the same way. Maybe we need a term like mediaphile for people who are excited about all kinds of high quality audio/visual and perhaps even 3D printed reproduction, castings, fine scale modeling, etc.

@brev

Curious that you would use the word impact.

Maybe that’s not the best word. I just noticed that the effect of my father’s photos was indeed pleasing to the eye, but not the end-all in realism. The real scene seemed more colorful, but it wasn’t actually. It was, however more dynamic and bright, which is something that has to be dealt with through artful use of curves based on perceptual standards and taste. My dad’s approach was to use a particular established standard and a good one, but not the only good one. It was natural in a certain ways at the expense of seeming less natural in others. He appreciated more vibrant, punchy work done by other photographers but that wasn't what he preferred to create.

I once had the sun shining onto a calendar in my office in such a way that it just happened to be lighting up the sky in the picture and the higher mountains that had sunlight on them when the picture was taken. The lower hills in the foreground that were not in direct sunlight were not getting lit by sunlight in the office. The effect was excellent. It got me thinking about aligning projected light with print photos.

A sound can seem realistic even if it's not accurately being reproduced. It might have been intended to sound like it's being heard in a different listening context than it's coming across, but it's coming across in a way that sounds very realistic in a false context. For instance, the soundstage is the wrong size and the sense of acoustic space and ambience is wrong, but still plausibly realistic if you don't know that what you're perceiving isn't what was intended or what was originally recorded.