Seanheis, dude way way off.
The type of sound your prefer has nothing to do with your brain being analytical or not.
It has to do with taste and expectations as well as experience.
Why does one person love vanilla while another one likes chocolate?
In the case of sound, some people compare everything to the question of "how does it sound compared to the real experience of the instrument, this type of listener craves the life like experience and it is about being one with what is actually there. Unflavored, unfiltered, reality. If the recording sounds bad don't play it.
Vs.
The listener who feels that the experience has to be pleasing overall first, and if the recording is bad, they flavor their systems by choosing components that mirror their tastes. Reality isn't as important as being able to relax into the experience. Processing is less of an issue, it is about turning off the brain's processing and giving into the experience.
Think of it as having a really fine steak, listener A will relish the flavor of the steak maybe with a dash of salt and pepper, listner B will add Ketchup and A1 sauce to make an amalgem of flavors. Unmaked and unfiltered. Changing what is there to match personal tastes.
Not a dig at carnivores or how you like eating your steak it is to illustrate a point.
Fun thread.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor |
Here is the Doctor's perspective.
We tune for resolution with musicality, This is too say there is a way of creating detail and alive dynamics and still retain a sembalance of listenaiblity.
The high resolution school is the ability to hear a cymbol crash and for a drum to go twack and pressurize a room so it sounds real and believable.
If a speaker can't play loud without compression it could be considered a problem if you are trying to reproduce music accurately.
The arguement as put forth is not to make a system which only sounds good on certain recordings, but doesn't make all recordings sound good even bad ones. You have to choose and tune your components very carefully.
We came up with this analogy years ago we call it the Coffe drinkers guide to Audiology.
First start off with a high end coffee bean lets say from Sumatra and clean, cold water, and an appropriate coffe maker one that can extract the best possible flavor, here comes the analogy:
On one extreme is the guy who drinks hot black no cream, no sugar, this listener craves the maximium clarity and realisim he would be on one side of the scale,
In the middle a would be the guy who likes his coffee with a little cream or milk just to take the edge off, lets say he is -1
Lets say next you add a touch of sugar, just a pinch, you may now be -2
and as you start to add more milk to le6e say 1/3 the coffe you keep moving away -3 and more sugar -4.
till you are the opposite part of the scale where you can't taste the coffee at all but have created something that is delightful to your palate.
So if you understand what we tune for we strive for neutral with just the edge taken off as close to a neutral reference.
So in this reality camp speakers that have excellent dynamic range, are tonally accurate, and have great speed and clarity and can image well would be very desirable.
If you are in the more musical camp, imaging may not necessarily be as inportant than by having a very smooth sound, dyanmic range may also not be as important as perhaps this listener plays very softly or plays music like small ensembles.
Hope that adds a bit more fuel.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ
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Contuzzi, your basic understanding of the audio arts is justified by your comments about cabling, power conditioners and believing that people who buy these products after experiencing these products are hypnotizing themselves into believing that these differences exist when obviously they don't. Of course these products work companies like Cardas, Wireworld, Nordost, and many others wouldn't be able to grow to the size they are if these products were not effective and din't produce real results.
You also missed the post as written, we strive for our systems to have musicality and imaging as well as for a life like tonal quality. The reason for talking about imaging is for some people imaging isn't as important as tonality of course you can have both but certain types or designs may have excellent tonallity but may not image particularly well.
A good horn speaker will have incredible dynamics, most of them have a very pronounced honk in the midrange because of the horn loading, for some people that is not an issue for others it is.
The Wedding band analogy was to prove a point about how real instruments may sound, do you think we are investing thousands and thousands of dollars in matching equipment to make the Personas especially the 9H's sound great if it wasn't necessary?
We tune for reality, and tune the top end so the details and clarity are there without taking your head off. Cabling, power conditioning, roon tuning devices are just some of the tools that we use to make the systems sound the way we want it to sound like.
The point made was that in reality brass instruments like horns and trumpets can sound aggressive, if you tune your system with warm speakers, warm electronics, etc you may have a system which is very pleasent to listen to but fails to capture any of the realism that live music has.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ
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Seanheis,
Your statements are simmpy not true, a speaker system can't add or subtract information the information is there you are not able to hear it due to masking effects of the speaker due to either limitations of the drivers, crossover slopes, crossover implementation of both.
If a driver starts to roll off at 15khz you will not hear a 20khz tone or it will be reduced in amplitutude so it will be burried. You could call that speaker system musical because it has reduced energy in the high frequencies which will make you more aware of the upper midrange and lower treble frequencies.
Most well designed loudspeakers strive for a relatively flat frequency response no engineer strips out "natural harmonicss," the fact that "natural harmonics would be an integral part of the signal it would be impossible to strip anything out.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ |
Mabokov, the idea isn't to wince when playing the system, that is called tuning. However, the point I was trying to convey is that there are some people who like systems which when we talk about being musical may not mean balanced, but deliberately rolled off.
So in our minds and system tunning we are trying to capture the energy and liveness of music with realistic treble.
There are good speakers that have shelved treble response, if you remember the Spica TC 50, it was so listenable, huge soundstage great imaging.
We had a totally different response to the Quad's then JHillis, we had Quad ESL 63 US Monitors which we were using with dual Entec subs.
The Quads were very musical but never had the dynamic impact of the Wilson Watt Puppy 5 which proceeded the Quads.
Long story short the Wilson's captured the energy and excitement of live music while the Quads just sounded "beautiful" just not realitic.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ |
Roy you might be missing our point. When we mean musical it is a system which to many will sound warm, pleasent, non-fatiguing.
Imagine a well prepared dish at a good resturant, take a great steak, one guy might add a dash of pepper and salt, and one guy drowns the the steak with kitchup and A1.
The issue sure is of course not what tastes good to you but to understand that there are extremes.
In our view a system which is tuned so that everything sounds good including bad recordings, you know you are going to have a system which has rolled off top end and perhaps a slightly fat midrange.
VS.
A system which makes things sound real and life like, if the recording is not good so will be the sound, but of course a good recording will be glorious.
So of course each person's system is going to mirror their tastes.
If you understand the context of the original question, it will help you understand our point.
Yes we tune our systems to sound natural and we feel that natural is musical, but in this context it means accurate without being unrealistically bright vs a system which is deliberatly tuned as mentioned above.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ
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D2girls nothing wrong here. Many brass instruments can have an aggressive sound, do trumpets played in an open space sound melodic vs a harp
How about cymbols, high hats?
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Interesting Roy, but wrong, ask a lot of people who have heard some of the Thiel speakers which are time and phase aligned would disagree with that premise that because a speaker is time and phase aligned it is going to sound smooth or musical.
I am willing to bet there are people here who have heard Thiels and were not finding them to sound musical.
There have been plenty of Thiel systems that we heard in fact , sold Thiels for years, and did find combinations of electronics which made them sing, at the time a set of CS 2.3 or CS 2.4 on a Vac PA 100, Bat VK3i made an amazing sound
If you have a recording which captures live music in its rawest form, or the recording is not a good one, some of the earliest Telarc discs for example on a system which has good high frequency extension is going to sound bright, if it is on the recording, however, if you have a system that rolls off the top end you are going to experience that recording in a totally different light.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ
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Roy,
A good sound system's job is to accurately reproduce the recording which in itself is a snapshot in time.
You have absolutetly no idea what the original recording sounded like you can only imagine what it would sound like if you were there.
As to deeper meaning there isn't any. If the reproduced sound moves you then it has deeper meaning for you.
One personas nirvanaha is another persons hell.
Everyone responds to stimuli differently, if you are in a good mood that system could sound wonderful if you are in a poor one you may not respond favorably. Art and beauty and meaning are all open to interpretation.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ |
Yes if Royj was at the session then he can use that session as a barometer.
The reality is we have no idea of what a John Coltrane performance was actually sounding like unless we were there.
Many mastering engineers can alter tonal balance, add echo and reverb and change the actual taped performance to make a recording sound good as a finished product.
Not all recording and mastering engineers belive in a more hands off approach.
Again if that particular performance moved Royj great for Royj that doesn't mean another listener will find that same sound to be as good.
We set up a Naim system with ATC SCM 40 on a Naim NAC 272, 250dr, XPS system with Isotek power conditioning, all high performance cabling, and the sound was very realistic, with an excellent sense of image width depth, clarity and dynamics. The top end was very clear.
We played Beatles a Hard Days Night and it sounded like a great 60's recording, with a tad bit of brittleness on top, went to Black Sabath and it was spooky. Played some more modern recordings and the sound was more refined.
The point is the Beatles recording sounded like a recording from its time, the slight hardness was in the recording. and the system accurately conveyed that, if you don't like reality a system such as this one might not be to your tastes, YMMV
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ
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