Two Type of sound and listener preference are there more?


In our thirty years of professional audio system design and setup, we keep on running into two distinctly different types of sound and listeners.

Type One: Detail, clarity, soundstage, the high resolution/accuracy camp. People who fall into this camp are trying to reproduce the absolute sound and use live music as their guide.

Type Two: Musicality camp, who favors tone and listenability over the high resolution camp. Dynamics, spl capabilty, soundstaging are less important. The ability for a system to sound real is less important than the overall sound reproduced "sounds good."

Are there more then this as two distincly different camps?

We favor the real is good and not real is not good philosophy.

Some people who talk about Musicaility complain when a sytem sounds bright with bright music.

In our viewpoint if for example you go to a Wedding with a Live band full of brass instruments like horns, trumpts etc it hurts your ears, shouldn’t you want your system to sound like a mirror of what is really there? Isn’t the idea to bring you back to the recording itself?

Please discuss, you can cite examples of products or systems but keep to the topic of sound and nothing else.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ
128x128audiotroy

Showing 1 response by contuzzi

@audiotroy
In our viewpoint if for example you go to a Wedding with a Live band full of brass instruments like horns, trumpts etc it hurts your ears, shouldn’t you want your system to sound like a mirror of what is really there? Isn’t the idea to bring you back to the recording itself?
So the sound you’re going for is a wedding band playing live in a horrible acoustic environment?

This is the second time you mentioned this pretty sad analogy (almost as bad as your bad tires on a Ferrari being anything like using stock power cable instead of a high end power cable analogy). If your Personas sound AT ALL fatiguing/harsh/bright, maybe you’re not the audio "doctor" you claim to be.

You CAN have incredible holography and resolution without losing musicality. The fact that you think it’s one or the other is sad. I had confidence in your ears and knowledge somewhat up to this point (aside from your silly cable beliefs, which are completely and utterly ignorant to even the most basic understanding of human brain biases -- which I mentioned before and you completely ignored), but when you use a WEDDING BAND as a way to describe and as an excuse for a system sounding harsh/bright/fatiguing/etc -- you’ve lost me.  Those horns/cymbals/whatever will not sound the same in a proper venue/environment.  And that's how the speakers should sound.  Not like a trumpet in a bathroom. 

You use an example of the "musical" setup in the other thread as being "NOT fatiguing." NO good set up should be fatiguing at any point (as long as you’re at a reasonable volume). You’re doing it wrong, "doctor." :)