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.
I have no problems with your take on dialing in audio systems. We all have our own approach.
But why do you continue to cling to obviously fallacious arguments like this:
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
. That is far from obvious! Astrologists, homeopaths, faith healers etc thrive with millions of subscribers to those and plenty of other dubious claims. The fact there is a market for something in no way established the truth of the pheneomenon in question.
Its clear many people will never familiarize themselves with the facts about the power of suggestion and bias, and just keep falling back on “but a lot of us swear it works!” arguments, spinning their epistemological wheels.
@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.
I’m sure audiotroy believes in the products he sells.
Its one thing to be a gullible audiophile, but once one starts extolling the virtues of a product in order to sell them, then high end audio salesmen become part of the rip-off business, IMO.
(Again, not knowingly fleecing people necessarily, but not doing some due skeptical diligence on your product before selling items for exorbitant prices).
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.
Such a narrow minded line of thought so if your into musicality your flawed if into type 1 your gold. Poster seems to not consider that those who may enjoy musicality might also like massive dynamics accuracy detail clarity or high SPL they also never use live music as a reference in his narrow view its one way or the highway. Post uses faulty logic and is
Splitting the inability to see the dichotomy of both positive and negative aspects of our thoughts, usually associated with how we think about people. Everything is either all good or all bad – there is no middle ...
Micro and macro detail imperative to get the emotion of reproduced sounds. What is musical to some, may not be musical to others. There have been so many great posts in this thread about that already.
A great speaker will give you all the detail that it is fed and it can still be highly 'musical' for lack of a better term. Why can't a speaker give you the emotions of a YoYo Ma playing Kol Nidrey while still being able to give you the bite of a horn section. I honestly have never had 'hurt ears' from a brass section. Honestly, live music shouldn't ever hurt your ears, unless it's over amplified rock or something like that.
I was a drummer before the MS and my ears never hurt after any session I can remember. Even the strike of a triangle shouldn't give anyone a headache when heard live.
Forget which poster said make a recording and play that back to see how the system sounds. I love that. We used to do that all the time in the studio with the Revox Reels.
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.
In this case I was speaking of amplifiers that strip out natural harmonics with too much negative feedback.
Negative feedback cannot strip harmonics and this can be easily measured. If anything, negative feedback widens bandwidth and lowers distortion. Improperly used can lead to Transient Intermodulation distortions (TIM), that add brightness to the sound (higher order odd harmonics).
On the other hand more distortions without feedback can make amp sound more vivid, pretty much the same way as distorted guitar (a lot of harmonics) sounds more dynamic than clean Jazz guitar at the same loudness. Sound that is "warmer" than neutral has even harmonics added by an amp. Adding even harmonics might sound nice but reduces clarity.
As an old philosopher once said, what you think great sound is is only as good as the best system you ever heard. (Apologies for the two is’s in a row.) Which of course begs the question, why is it so hard to find a really good sounding system these days, one to aspire to?
"If I hear a speaker that is putting out so much detail that I'm hearing things that I've never noticed before and that shouldn't be audible in the mix, it tells me that the speaker is doing something wrong...it's typically due to a boost in the area that I'm hearing too much of and a dip in other frequencies."
So, you sat in the studio to know what is supposed to be audible in the mix?
Actually, that’s kind of what happens as one tweaks his system. All that information “buried in the grooves” comes out. It’s like an archaeologist trying to extract the details buried in there with his little brushes and picks. Of course, I suppose there are still audiophiles out there who don’t treat their CDs or their systems. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
So, you sat in the studio to know what is supposed to be audible in the mix?
It's more like I know what's not supposed to be audible. If you want to hear some extra details, you can buy a speaker that is really hot at some frequencies or just buy a Schiit Loki and do the EQ adjustments.
I use reference to live instruments— that’s how they should sound on my system. Need perfect dynamic head room and tonal balance. Soundstage and speaker disappearance is VERY GOOD and WIDE POWER enough to reproduce live tuba lowest note clean and precise (tested with spl meter vs real $9k worth tuba!). Uncompressed piano recording must sound clean throughout entire keyboard at its natural volume
If it’s on the recording it got there somehow. It’s ‘supposed to be there’. Go listen to older jazz like the Swedish Jazz at the Pawn Shop. Audiophile recording. You here the glasses clicking and can almost smell the smoke in your room. Musical as heck and on a great system just fun to listen to. Musical and accurate and detailed can and should all be in the same camp. Even great speakers and systems that have a different flavor can give you all of it and should. Jmho
You're forgetting the other side of the 'fun' camp. The V curve. Not about warmth and relaxing but energy and dynamics. For us guys who like the separation and shimmer of analytical systems but our music isn't up to the microscope treatment
V would be the Wilson gear. Very fun with the new tweeter. The IEM folks LOVE the various fun curves as they can afford to won a few different sounding ones. Heck, Empire Ears www.empireears.com has two new full lines making it three lines of all price ranges that have totally different types of sounds. That's like Wilson, Vandersteen, B&W and Magico all having three totally different lines of speakers in all price ranges from 1k to 100k adn they all have different curves to them. Where would one keep all of them?
Pretty obvious that with so many posts, there are so many types of sound folks like. Great thread.
@lwal22 Beautifully represented. And a really important distinction.
"an expression of...and a communication of that perception"
....Finally understanding that, for me, it is a photograph I’m creating, not a record of what was in front of me at the the time. but rather an expression of my perception of that reality. And a communication of that perception. i find the reproduction of music very similar. In the end it is an interpretation of the performance we hear....
I think it boils down to speakers. The Benchmark DAC sounds perfect on neutral accurate speakers. Lots of really rich harmonic detail far more than other syrupy gear that tends just to sound like warm mush and where masking from all that warmth hides real instrumental harmonics and timbre.
My speakers have been used for three decades to produce a large portion of the music available - sought after for accuracy in conveying the mix or master at all volumes. They match well with Benchmark clean neutral sound.
The opposite of the above would be Marantz paired with say Dynaudio speakers or drivers. These are both dark sounding brands - prized for being warm, smooth and musical.
I’m with the third camp that rejects the distinction of two camps. There is no pure real sound of music because the venue is always a factor. The exact same performance could sound "musical" in one hall or venue or like crap in another. The same live performance might sound great (musical) in one seat and bad in another. If amplification is used in the original performance more variables are introduced. Again, there is no one real.
Simply put, if the nature of the sound produced by your system doesn’t cause a positive emotional response, it really doesn’t matter what camp you are in. My system allows me an emotional connection with the music, if it didn’t I’d make changes till it did. I guess that is my definition of ‘musical’.
@markmendenhall "Simply put, if the nature of the sound produced by your system doesn’t cause a positive emotional response, it really doesn’t matter what camp you are in. My system allows me an emotional connection with the music, if it didn’t I’d make changes till it did. I guess that is my definition of ‘musical’. "
Indeed, sir! I've heard a lot of live music which sounded terrible because the acoustics of the location were terrible. I've heard a lot of live music which sounded glorious because the acoustics of the venue were at least decent.
With regard to my home audio system, let me say that I'm in the happy camp.
The question is why the gear that is praised by the studio people as closest sounding to life performance, like Benchmark, is called analytical or sterile. I think that we learned to listen to particular sound that carry certain amount of distortion, noise and coloration while sound closest to life performance is not to our liking. We like it there, at the venue, but we expect something different at home. I've read audiogoner's complaint that gear is too resolving and that instruments should not be separated but sounding "together" like a sound blob. Sure, sound with some distortion and noise can sound more, as you call it, "musical", but shouldn't we learn to listen? It took me a while to get used to how clean the Benchmark is, but now I think it is very emotionally involving.
It took me a while to get used to how clean the Benchmark is, but now I think it is very emotionally involving.
I don't think that I have ever left a concert at a music hall and thought about how clean the music sounded or how every instrument seemed to separate from the ensemble. To me, that just sounds unnatural and colored...music without the harmonics...the meat stripped from the bone.
Why would I want to listen to a system live, bright or whatever, which makes me wince and my ears bleed?
All I want is, like my system, to have music which sounds alive, "present" yet with a "natural" tone as I call it. Like my TungSol 1958 5687 in my line stage: dark and juicy, unlike a 6H30P which sounds hard and bright. There's the piano, there's the drum, there's the upright bass, there's the lead singer of the Cowboy Junkies. Ahhhh. So rich and full and melodic, and I don't care that I didn't hear the guitarist pass wind.
Yes, listening to a brass band makes me wince which is why I don't listen to a lot of music with brass instruments. Equally, I don't want Joni Mitchell's voice and piano playing to sound thin and bright.
From the technical stand point an amplifier cannot strip harmonics, unless its bandwidth is very limited. It might not add additional harmonics, that make sound warm or dynamic. Warm, cold or natural - there is no right or wrong either way.
rnabokov, sure, avoid it, if the harsh metal dome tweeter makes your ears bleed, but we are not talking about overly bright sound at all. Benchmark is not bright at all, but it will allow you to to hear in the background, instruments that were just the "sounds" before.
A bit perplexed at the OP's presumption that those who prefer a musical sounding system, don't also appreciate a large deep and accurate sound stage, dynamics and musical detail, or that their systems are, somehow, lacking those qualities. One of my favorite speakers was my Quad ESL63s. In my home, with a fairly large listening room, they just made good recordings of live acoustic music and vocals, sound more real and enjoyable than most everything else I compared them to. Regardless of how much one likes detail and dynamics, a trumpet doesn't have to blast in your ear to sound like a trumpet and a drum doesn't have to crack in your face to sound like a drum and Live Music, as I have heard and I've heard allot, sounds full, rich and harmonic, with an abundance of texture and ambiance. I don't believe I've ever heard a live acoustic performance that sounded lean or sterile. For the most, they just sounded, well - "Musical"...just sayn...Jim
Although my preference us for pinpoint accuracy and separation of instruments in space, I have a switchable choice: Using pairs of identical amps and preamps to drive my physically time aligned mains and subs, my double pole double throw sub switch removes the sub crossover from the circuit. This adds rich harmonics for lousy recordings. Most of my non-audiophile friends would never listen any other way, but great recordings deserve to be heard as the enginerrs intended. The other benefit of my separate sub electronics is that I can add or subtract bass with absolutely no phasing issues from tone controls. LP''s benefit immensly, and for truly stale recordings, I still have my DPDT harmonics switch. The best sound for my ears is often with no electronic crossover, but cones of foam attached inside the sub grills for higher frequency removal. These grills snap out for some recordings, but I no longer play around and change back and forth during recordings. After all, It is about the music, not the equipment.
All I know is that years ago, I owned Muse Model 300 monoblocks and Thiel 3.6's; I'd put on a DDD recording by DGG, and I'd have to take if off again 2 minutes later. I want a system that at the least renders most recordings listenable.
Can somebody explain to me how you depart from musicality by embracing detail and high resolution. Isn’t that the very definition of musicality? If it doesn’t sound very clear and detailed, how can it be either musical or high fidelity. "High fidelity", folks. That’s what this is all about. I don’t understand what these tone people are chasing after or what "listenability" is supposed to mean. By definition, if your stereo isn’t conveying a high degree of clarity, it isn’t "high fidelity". It’s something else.
They’re not mutually exclusive, but I think most here are referring to sacrificing just a smidge of resolution for ease of listening. Maybe the sort of difference one might find between ATCs and Vandersteens. Another factor is that many speakers have a tipped-up treble response that creates a false sense of clarity.
That’s the $64K question what is better, detail and resolution or musicality. Exhibit A the humble audio cassette. No doubt cassettes lack the detail and resolution of Red Book CD. But CD EVEN AT HIGH DATA RATES cannot compete with the warmth, presence and tone of cassettes. And cassettes escaped the compression campaign that has plagued CDs for twenty years and now plagues LPs and SACDs and even hi res downloads.
Interesting conversation.... I think about being in a church service several years back, our pianist was excellent, really enjoyed listening to this guy play, he was a professional and played with several theater groups around town. Soon we had a guest pianist that sat in at the request of another. This guy was relatively know jazz pianist and played in the best clubs around the Midwest.... Equally good, but my goodness, these 2 guys attacked the keys totally differently from each other, they paused differently and flowed differently. So If I listened to both of them on a system without knowing them so well, how would that translate in front of my in my system. Can you get the same emotion and feel from these 2 very different performances? To me, That explains musical. When I sit down, I normally start simultaneously listening for tonal balance and sound stage, I quickly get to imaging, dynamics, resolution, detail and frequency extremes. If I don't come across any glaring problems, I can normally kick back and enjoy the music without much more thought about it and just enjoy the music. If I notice a problem, It'll drive me crazy, I need to address it. I'm not sure which camp that puts me in.
Recordings come in all flavors, bad/ugly to excellent/lovely.
Some people have low tolerance for bad/ugly and try to filter it out at all costs. I’m not one of them but so be it. I want to hear whats there, warts and all. Its a personal preference, not a choice between right versus wrong. That's why filters were invented I suspect.
Toss in that bad/ugly is largely a judgement call and its not hard to understand why things are what they are.
Different strokes, different folks, and all that...
With regard to to the subject of what is "musical," let me paraphrase Sir Kenneth Clark (art historian, TV presenter, museum director, and crashing bore): I don't know what "musical" is, but I know when I'm in its presence. (He said this about Civilisation, and I'm using his own spelling of the word here).
To be clear, I fall into the audiophile camp that wants it ALL: realistic imaging, well-resolved detail, dynamics, balance, and I want it in a package that is pleasing to hear. I guess I'd have to define "musical" as just that: pleasant to listen to. Because our ears are all different and our tastes individual, trying to divide the audiophile world into two separate camps is, IMO, a fruitless exercise.
"To be clear, I fall into the audiophile camp that wants it ALL: realistic imaging, well-resolved detail, dynamics, balance, and I want it in a package that is pleasing to hear. I guess I'd have to define "musical" as just that: pleasant to listen to. Because our ears are all different and our tastes individual, trying to divide the audiophile world into two separate camps is, IMO, a fruitless exercise."
Overall that's pretty much where I'm at (and have been for some time). AFA the OP goes, we might as well be asking to sign up for a class at our local community college called: "How To Build A Mediocre Audio System At Any Price Level".
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.
How many on here listen to their music in pure mode? I can’t stand that sound. I have auditioned some speakers and the pre-amps that were being used had NO tone controls.! That’s the first thing I head for, is the thump and the sizzle. And nothing blaring in the middle. I guess that’s why I never use audyssey for music . It converts everything to flat. Flat sounds .....flat. But I bet lots of folk on here like it that way ..
If I listened to both of them on a system without knowing them so well, how would that translate in front of my in my system. Can you get the same emotion and feel from these 2 very different performances? To me, That explains musical.
After a few decades of demonstration, I have no doubt there can be a strong left-brain/right-brain difference among listeners, and some listeners are in the middle, who eventually make emotional and physical connections to their music- their wives certainly did, right away! All this does assume the system is musical in the first place.
When I was in high school, the left-brained ran the A/V dept, getting out the film projectors, running them for class. A few years later, that became TVs and VCRs. I observed that none could or would dance. None played instruments, sang, nor was interested in any of the arts. No one can deny that many of these technical fellows became audio designers (and reviewers, and magazine editors).
I have watched countless individuals, including reviewers, clearly not hear when one system at a show was exceedingly musical compared to many other systems nearby.
Most reviews start off with observations on 'detail', 'imaging', 'impact', and so on. Few begin with 'musicality' and 'engagement' or 'involvement'. Perhaps this is reflective of those reviewers and even of how poorly their room is setup, more so than the gear. But if some piece of kit was truly musical by a large margin, you'd think an experienced reviewer would hear this right away and report on it. So, I take this to mean that most gear is not musical. Which has been my experience.
Regular CDs can be extraordinarily musical yet lacking no details, even on solid-state systems. The trouble seems to be with playback, not with their recording, and I have the recording background to back up this observation.
But I have only ever heard this four times since the advent of the CD, and neither system complexity nor price were necessarily why.
How do we know what to hear from a recording when we were not in the studio? We know it when we hear it, again, assuming we are wired to respond to musicality. As those are who also sing, play instruments, dance, and appreciate the arts.
I have heard several times some gear combinations come together in their flaws to become truly musical, while still lacking many details of the recordings. Best to leave this as fortuitous luck!
The problem I have with your use of the term "musical," and the use of that term in general, is that it is so subjective as to be essentially uninformative.
One person's sterile/analytical is another person's "musical." One person's rich and rolled off system is "musical"and to another "boring and un-engaging."
We've all gone through plenty of systems/speakers that at first were "musical" to us, but which we later abandoned.
There have been many polls along the lines of "what speaker got you off the merry-go-round/which speaker is your life-time speaker?" and the answers for the speaker that finally gave musical satisfaction are all over the map, representing every design approach. Some people find Wilson the bees-knees, others have thought them the antithesis of what they are looking for in music reproduction.
So when you tell me you find something "musical" all I can gather is that you like it. The fact some other people didn't "recognize" something as musical like yourself isn't an objective failing on their part, anymore as your failure to find their choice to be musical.
When you write "One person’s sterile/analytical is another person’s "musical." One person’s rich and rolled off system is "musical"and to another "boring and un-engaging.", those are exactly my points, about how the non-musical listeners just do not get ’it’, over and over. It is indeed as you write, prof!
It is important to always examine what is engaging you, what is attracting YOUR attention. Is it detail, image, tone balance, richness and rolloff? Or is it the band having one hell of a joyous time?
When one cannot hear the latter, for whatever reason, this leaves of course only the former as the experience to be taken away.
Again, no criticism is intended. This is just my experience and of very many others with professional (also meaning ’daily’ across many years), high-end experience. The point from this discussion I think is not to make labels or set up challenges, but simply to work harder at finding the truly musical gear. I have found it is always best to do so by reliance upon recordings of world-class, one-in-a-billion artists, not the second-tier ones signed to audiophile labels. The musicality, the beauty of the top artists will come through regardless of the recording quality, if the system allows it AND the listener is wired to appreciate that. Those who are not wired in this manner do not understand my point and can seldom be ’trained’.
Also, experienced (and famous) recording engineers always say, "It is never the quality of the gear, but the band being on fire that makes the difference."
I recommend Tape Op Magazine -- a studio magazine not beholding to advertisers, with all articles by working pros. It is free and at least one article in each issue seems useful to us audiophiles, about what these men and women hear! By the way, when you write,
"The fact some other people didn’t "recognize" something as musical like yourself isn’t an objective failing on their part, anymore as your failure to find their choice to be musical."
this is wrong. It is indeed an objective failing on their part because I and many others can easily point out the many non-musical differences. Granted, this can take a very long time to do for someone not used to listening for musicality, which is why the world-class artists represent one’s best chance at learning about musicality. Also, read the CD reviews on Amazon, about which performances of an artist to purchase, which ones captured best their special magic.
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