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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 5 responses by jon_5912

jon_5912
585 posts
 
I recently decided I wanted a new preamp.  I have a Bryston bp25 that I've had for 10+ years and a benchmark dac2 that I'm using directly into amps in another system.  After reading a ton the last few months I've re-concluded a decade later that the Bryston philosophy is pretty much the same as mine.  I think I'll probably end up getting a bp26 to put in the system that currently doesn't have a separate preamp.  I guess that puts me in camp 1.

I read a million reviews, comments, etc. and while I believe that other preamps are better in some ways, I decided that things like "greater soundstage depth" are most likely the result of colorations that will have negative aspects as well as positive.  I don't have the patience for trying to balance a variety of distortions/colorations to perfectly match my taste.  Just give me what's on the recording.  


jon_5912
585 posts
 
@Prof I think your point combined with "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?" demonstrates to all reasonable people that the audio doctor is only interested in extracting money from the gullible.  He's here to show us the one true way and that way just happens to require all our money.  How convenient.  
jon_5912
585 posts
 
This is illustrating why I'm in camp one.  I don't have the patience for all of the navel gazing and tail chasing that goes into trying to come up with my own personal definition of musical.  It's obviously subjective.  It's the perfect amount of HF roll-off the, perfect amount of even order harmonic distortion, the perfect frequency response that has the preferred inaccuracies.  

I have no problem with people having a preferred flavor but when they start to use their personal taste as a tool to belittle people who have different tastes they need to be called out on it.  Anybody who uses the phrase "truly musical" should be dismissed entirely. 
jon_5912
585 posts
 
This has been a stunning display of transparent nonsense.  It boils down to a sales pitch similar to "all the cool kids are smoking lucky strikes, you should too."  We have right-brained vs. left-brained and musical vs. amusical.  People have to describe sound how he wants it described.  good grief.  

I've noticed that small manufacturers are frequently arbitrary and a bit nutty.  This is no exception.  It doesn't mean their products are bad but it's funny to find out where they're coming from. 
jon_5912
585 posts
 

So, yes it's obvious there is a heavy amount of subjectivity in this hobby. But I don't think it is entirely insurmountable subjectivity
This ambiguity surrounding what is subjective/objective and how people react to it makes this hobby great for people watching.  There's no getting around the possibility that you are imagining something or that you'll find out that you were wrong about something.  For those of us that are just hobbyists this isn't usually such a big problem.  I think for those in the industry whose livelihood depends on it, it can be a big stressor.

You've got those who try to take advantage of it by selling snake oil.  What we've got here I think is someone who is very personally invested and who just can't handle the ambiguity so he pretends it isn't there.  
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