How can a system be judged with highly processed, non acoustic music?

For me yes....

Metallica is like a very good detailed " white and black" drawing...At best....

A lute piece very well recorded is like a color oil paintings...Or a rendition of Chopin or Listz at the piano....

The sonic "cues" are way more subtle and evoke way more subtle mix of emotions...For me....

i like the group "Nightwatch" for example but i listen to only the albums with their first female singer.... The voice add to the group something more poetic and more natural....a unique set of colors.... She was a classical singer educated....


 Amplified or electronically amplified  instruments for me sound more "white /black" pixellation...And natural acoustical sound more like oil paintings...

So like I said hard to explain. But I think we are trying to listen for those patterns that are "true" to the whatever it was, and then do something very demanding. We have to somehow put aside all the many different aspects that came before our system, because we can do nothing about them. But then focus on the aspects that come after, because that is our system and that we can do something about.

Learning to sort those out. One of the bigger keys to the kingdom

i agree...

My only added point is our brain data base is heavily programmed to recognized timbre voices from all origin in closed or open space... Survival mode....

My experience is the same as frogman..

My experience has been that building a system that best reproduces unprocessed acoustic music allows processed music to sound best.

On the first Stereophile Test CD they have a track where JG Holt reads from a Stereophile and is recorded in mono by about 15 different microphones including Shures, AKGs, Neumans, Telefunkens, etc. It’s not hard to tell when the microphone changes.

So I would say that what you are doing is making your system sound most natural to you. It may not sound most natural to someone else who uses different minimalist acoustic recordings to determine natural.

What you just said about mic is right but you miss the important point about what is the difference between natural non electrically amplified instrument and voices timbre recognition in the database set of our brain species...

Natural human voice listening is the better test for an audio system....unamplified piano is good...Because of the sum of all the subtle cues there is associated with them...

Electronic music is the worst choice to determine more objectively if a system is good or not in a comparison implicating many people...

We dont speak about OUR  taste here we speak  acoustic...

 Anybody could prefer moog electronical music over opera singing for sure....Saying that is saying nothing....

People have no idea generally of the weight of acoustic on audiophile experience....

They listen to their gear, compare it to other, without knowing that no gear has a sound of its own ONLY but must be embedded mechanically, electrically and acoustically especially to shine by itself...

Especially many reviewers are there to sell, not to explain how to create audio experience at no cost...

No acoustician use electronica FIRST AND ONLY to asssess a Hall or a room....Hall or musical room are designed for centuries FIRST for natural human voices and natural non electrified instruments...This is the point about "timbre " perception...

But Who dont want to understand will not.... 😁😊

Too much work to understand anyway....

It takes me 2 years full time listening experiments in my room to figure out acoustic for audio, i will not try to convince someone to do that...

If you had money anyway you will buy ready made passive treatment and think the job is done.... Most of the times the job is not done especially in small audio complex room... It takes me active mechanical control devices to ADAPT the room to the speakers system....Passive treatment was not enough at all here...
Anyway....

My best to all...

One of my go-to tests for fidelity is whether I can discern the brand of acoustic guitar(s) being played. Gibsons and Martins sound very different in real life. Other quality brands occupy the middle ground between them.

Thanks for your very good suggested  examples...

timbre is altered with the very first microphone choice…

For sure, it is a common place in acoustic that the choice of microphones type, their numbers and their location CHANGE the PERSPECTIVAL perception of timbre...

It is the reason why if you read attentively my post i spoke of RECREATION of the timbre experience not of his alleged perfect REPRODUCTION...

A natural event is not a recorded event and a recorded event cannot be a natural event....It is always a "translation" with something lost in the process...

Our own listener history in life is the sum of all the perspectival aspects of the human voice perceived  in different natural settings... Our body/memory treat the new timbre perceptive event, from a recording or from a natural voice, with this background of past perceptive events in different natural settings...This past experience made our brain more apt to RECREATE the timbre experience meaning and aspects...

It is a very good question mglik and one I have thought about a lot and first wrote about going back to the early 90’s. It is nowhere near easy with synth, but neither is it all that simple even with all minimalist recorded and classical acoustic instruments. Not even solo human voice. All these no matter how carefully recorded are altered and colored all kinds of ways by the recording venue itself. There really is no Rosetta Stone, no silver bullet, nothing we can grab hold of. Probably because there is nothing there to begin with, but that is another subject for another time.

All we can do is listen to a lot of different stuff, and the more the better, and try and look for patterns. We can’t say what is "bright" or "harsh" or "lush" or anything based on any one recording, other than relative to another, because we can never know for sure if it is indeed the recording. With records we cannot even know that much, because it may well indeed be the individual pressing copy and nothing to do with the recording! We must at all times keep an open mind.

There is something that is missing here....

Of course if we compared audio system to other audio systems," We can’t say nothing absolute based on any one recording, other than relative to one another, because we can never know for sure if it is indeed IN the "original" recording or not. We then speak about our own system and taste, and sure we want it more "bright" or more "lush" or less "harsh"...

Of course....

But for a musician and for an acoustician, there is no "bright" "harsh or "lush" vocabulary FIRST AND MOSTLY inherited from audio gear market and from audiophiles...

Acoustic use concept like "timbre" experience and perception, and if we dont know how a specific "original" recording of a piano is supposed to sound,all audio system being different, we already know how natural voice and piano are supposed to sound...It is the reason why the best way to fine tune a system acoustically is with non amplified natural instrument...

I fine tuned in the past 2 years all my room listening piano and voices...Because i feel how they sound naturally better than a moog synthetizer...They give me more natural and way more subtle "cues" about my system S.Q. anyway than electrical guitar...This does not means that we cannot use electrified instrument to fine tune our system.... Yes we can, and we must, BUT NOT TO BEGIN WITH AT ALL in the first steps...It will be an error...


The so called "inexistant" meter exist it is the natural timbre experience in acoustic...We dont pretend here to retrieve the "original" recorded event at all, it will be an illusion, we claim only that a natural and optimal RECREATION (not reproduction) of it through our own audio system/room acoustic is possible...In spite of all limitations coming from each audio system /room acoustic for sure... We must create a synergy where our room complement our specific audio system....We cannot REPRODUCE the original recording... We can only recreate it in our room....

Then when we used electrical, and mechanical and acoustical controls of our gear we dont fine tuned ANYTHING to be more "bright" or more "lush", FIRST AND MOSTLY, INSTEAD we fine tune the audio system to mimic more a natural "timbre" of instrument or a natural voice which we know of already to begin with...We dont fine tune to retrieve the "original" recording event through a specific "vinyl" or digital file, this would be a deceptive illusion...We fine tune to recreate a natural timbre for our ears in our room...It is the best we can do....

Remember that no audio system sound the same in different room with his content and geometry, it is because of that that acoustic is very important and a room must be dedicated to a specific audio system when it is possible...

After being audiophile and after picking the right gear for us and our room we must become acoustician to fine tune them all right....And the vocabulary of audio market is not the acoustician or musician vocabulary....

Any music lover must take 2 hats on his head: audiophile hat and acoustician hat.... Otherwise frustration without end  even with costly gear....

Before upgrading anything we must embed it rightfully....

It is my experience....

The OP question is this:

How can a system be judged with highly processed, non acoustic music?

it is not about your taste in front of your system...

Hold on, wait one second, I’m judging my system again... Yep, still sounds GREAT to me, and I’m listening to amplified rock music. But at least it’s socially conscious amplified rock music... this time.

You confuse acoustic with your taste....


The OP question is not asked to some dude about their fad....

The OP question is a serious one implicating facts in psycho-acoustic...

What is a timbre?

For example... And recognizing a timbre is the hallmark of any good audio system...You cannot judge this with heavy processed heavy metal ONLY sorry...

If the meaning of the OP question was what you say it is, this thread will be trivial : do you love your system and are you able to say that it is a good audio system for Rock music? Off course it is....I created it for my rock music....


Do you catch it?

Here’s the thing… if an instrument or voice is recorded, it’s processed. Period.

You also MISS the point...

Everything is processed in a way or in another,yes, but some music is TOTALLY processed...

If everything is processed to some degree,  ANYWAY  we know how must sound a natural  voice and a noremal  piano ALREADY in our memory....

We have an imprinted distinctive  physionomy of the sound in our brain...

Acoustic science is not taste or fad. Period.

Judging an audio system ask for an archetypal model to go with, human voices and natural non electrified instrument timbre are these phenomena acoustician or musician use.... Not Moog synthetiser or electrical guitar....Or too much processed voice....

It's pretty simple. Listen to some highly processed, non acoustic music. Judge it. I'm doing it right now. My judgement? It sounds good...

Feel free to judge your system playing minimally processed acoustic music.

It seems you confuse taste with acoustic science here...

You dont get the point: our brain are linked to recognise voice TIMBRE for million years and a natural piano timbre we know already what it is for all our life, we can separate here the artefact aspect of the sound and his natural aspect ... But how are we supposed to  know how would be the sound of any ELECTRICALLY processsed instrument? Where do you separate the "artefact" from the  "natural"  in the  timbre of an electronical instrument?

 A moog synthetiser...A theramin.... An electrical guitar....It is way more difficult here to separate what pertain to an artefact and what pertain to the natural....The border between the 2 dont absolutely exist....

We all are free, happily...

But the fact that any audio journey is a free journey dont make it a meaningful one for all of us in the same way....

Capricious taste or habits, or sound obsession, are not acoustic and psycho-acoustic science....

Then underlining our freedom is not an argument against the  recognition of NATURAL instrument timbre here in acoustic and musical judgement nor against the importance of this recognition in musical and acoustic experience....

This the point of the OP argument ...






«Sometimes when you go one step further you are no more free, except like in free fall, this is why informed freedom is the way»-Anonymus Smith

«Even Spartacus informed himself that he was a slave before rebelling»-Groucho Marx 🤓

You are dead right...

People dont know that music is not physical  sound but  sounds recognized  and fully interprated to be "music"  by our brain...

Musical or voices timbre with the less processing possible  are the ONLY way to judge a system...

Most people judge gear in a non acoustically treated room, but each room  must be treated for each specific system anyway to be a valid environment and a fair one, able to translate the S.Q. potential of the gear in  "musical" recognizable voices and timbre instrument in this specific room ..