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The focus and air lie

There always have been some kind of fashion in the way a system sounds and since a few years it seems that more and more people are looking for details, air and pinpoint focus / soundstaging.
There's a lot of components, accessories and speakers designed to fill full that demand... Halcro, dCS, Esoteric, Nordost, BW, GamuT are some examples.

This sound does NOT exist in real life, when you're at a concert the sound is full not airy, the soundstage exist of course but it's definitely not as focused as many of the systems you can hear in the hifi shops, it just fill the room.

To get that focus and air hifi components cheats, it's all in the meds and high meds, a bit less meds, a bit more high meds and you get the details, the air, the focus BUT you loose timbral accuracy, fullness.
It's evident for someone accustomed to unamplified concert that a lot of systems are lean and far from sounding real.

Those systems are also very picky about recordings : good recordings will be ok but everything else will be more difficult...
That's a shame because a hifi system should be able to trasmit music soul even on bad recording.
In 2008 this is a very rare quality.

So why does this happened ?

Did audiophiles stopped to listen unamplified music and lost contact with the real thing ?

Is it easier for shops to sell components that sounds so "detailled and impressive" during their 30mins or 1 hour demo ?
ndeslions

Showing 2 responses by musicnoise

musicnoise
377 posts
 
Ndeslions: I agree that the sound of most systems is not the same as a live concert. I would extend that proposition to include all systems. Listening to reproduced music in private is not the same thing as listening to live music in a concert hall for a host of reasons - acoustic as well as psychological.

If one wants to hear live music in a concert hall, one must listen to live music in a concert hall. Included in that experience is the person next to you rusting his or her program from time to time and the guy behind you coughing every now and then - all part of the sound. Not to mention the spontanaity of the event. There are advantages and disadvantages in both reproduced sound experienced with no distractions at user controlled volumes that can be listened to repetitively, and a live performance - but these two ways of enjoying music are fundamentally different.

As to sound "quality" of a recording - that is only a part of experiencing music. Some of the recordings that I find to be the best interpretations of a piece were made from radio broadcasts in the 1940's and 50's or otherwise poor recordings- the sound quality is not great but the interpretation can be heard regardless. For example - Beethoven's 9 by Vanska recently released- great sound, dead interpretation; Beethoven's 9 by Furtwangler in Berlin during the war - poor sound, great interpretation. Each has its place.
musicnoise
377 posts
 
What this discussion demonstrates is that there are a lot of ways to appreciate music and what is listened to in music depends on the listener. Resolving every detail will require different system specs than hearing the artists interpretation of a piece but lack of those resolving aspects will not prevent one from appreciating that interpretation. System accuracy is a high priority for some. Others prefer to listen to systems that themselves change the music and thus participate in the creation of art - hence the popularity of tube amps ( that statement is not intended as a negative judgment as to tube amps, but merely to be taken at face value).
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