Accurate vs Musical

Accurate. By accurate I mean accurate to the musical signals layed down in the original recording. Accurate to what the microphone(s) heard. Musical to one may not be musical to another. If the speaker accurately plays back the original waveform recorded in frequency, amplitude and phase, that speaker will indeed be musical. While it's not that difficult to find speakers that do the first criteria (frequency response) well, the second criteria (amplitude) is much harder (live music can have a dynamic range of 120db) The last (Phase accuracy) is also very difficult as the vast majority of speakers destroy the phase/time relationships of the original waveform. While some might argue that time/phase is not important, ask any musician if one member of the band playing eighth notes instead of quarter notes will be audible. This has been my experience over the past 30 years, YMMV

For me its all about the fatigue factor.
I can tell you my Thors have never given me fatigue. This is what I'm after. They are not harsh/grainy/smokey/bright.
I'd say they are neutral. Neutral is not the same as bland. They reproduce the exact image that is transfered through the amp.
I have a Jadis Orch Refer. Its a 60 pound intergrated, has 4 out tubes and 2 preamp tubes. Though its one of the few small tube amps that can push this 4 ohm speaker, it still is not bringing out all the potential of these speakers.
Yet I;m happy at the moment with the results.
If I run into some $'s I'll get a big Cayin tube amp/imported from france. the MK500
Maybe the big Orch's big brotther the DA60 might do a bangup job.
Then the speakers will meet their match.
I say all this to let you know an amp can hold back the fullpotential of a speaker.

songwriter, of course the musician playing eighth notes while the others are playing quarters will be heard, since he is playing twice as many notes in the same time! Has nothing to do with phase or timing!

inpepinnovations,
what I was trying to say is that if you trow off the music's timing, especially like most speakers do delaying each frequency differently, you essentially destroy a portion of the musicality of the piece and make the brain work overtime trying to put things back into something intelligable. Thats how our brains are wired. Thanks for the correction.

I was having trouble with some new speakers that are very accurate. My wife and I both agreed that they were almost hard to listen to. The instruments and sounds were very seperate but did not blend into music.

I switched back to my more "musical/warm/textural" set up that frankly sounded amazing before getting the new monitors (don't ask me why I changed things).

Now that I had spent some time with accuracy, I noticed that things were nice and laid back with my old stuff but kind of muddled. Thanks to [email protected] I put the new speakers back in the mix and tried using the multi-channel approach. I ditched the "seperate two-channel" side and ran everything throught my Boston Acoustics AVR-7120 receiver in PLII. Wow, now I have an accurate AND musical set-up. Thanks for the help velocitydls!

I am going to try it all the way now so I am getting a center channel speaker that matches the new L & R's and a Meridian G68. I'll report in on the progress.