2. speakers
  3. 1221383247

The focus and air lie

There always have been some kind of fashion in the way a system sounds and since a few years it seems that more and more people are looking for details, air and pinpoint focus / soundstaging.
There's a lot of components, accessories and speakers designed to fill full that demand... Halcro, dCS, Esoteric, Nordost, BW, GamuT are some examples.

This sound does NOT exist in real life, when you're at a concert the sound is full not airy, the soundstage exist of course but it's definitely not as focused as many of the systems you can hear in the hifi shops, it just fill the room.

To get that focus and air hifi components cheats, it's all in the meds and high meds, a bit less meds, a bit more high meds and you get the details, the air, the focus BUT you loose timbral accuracy, fullness.
It's evident for someone accustomed to unamplified concert that a lot of systems are lean and far from sounding real.

Those systems are also very picky about recordings : good recordings will be ok but everything else will be more difficult...
That's a shame because a hifi system should be able to trasmit music soul even on bad recording.
In 2008 this is a very rare quality.

So why does this happened ?

Did audiophiles stopped to listen unamplified music and lost contact with the real thing ?

Is it easier for shops to sell components that sounds so "detailled and impressive" during their 30mins or 1 hour demo ?
ndeslions

Showing 2 responses by sineburst

sineburst
2 posts
 
I attend over 50 acoustic concerts a year and I hear harpsichord and piano played in my house. I agree there is something wrong with the audio ecology. I rarely "image" when listening to speakers and when I do it is flat - that is, the emphasis on left-right illusion reduces the height illusion.

OTOH I have heard remarkable timbral accuracy from reproduction and I think it does correlate to "air" in systems like Gamut, Thiel, Earthworks and Lipinsky - tweeters with "ultrasonic" capability, but no metal resonance. Further, when I am impressed with reproduction a lot of my peers consider it "harsh".

To me there are few recordings with accurate spatiality and timbre. Most of what I listen to is either European boutique classical labels (BIS, AliaVox, Harmonia Mundi, etc.), audiophile like Chesky, Mapleshade and Jon Marks or select jazz producers like Carl Jefferson and Manfred Eicher. The recording quality comes through on mediocre systems - my living room for example is set up with plastic cabinet B&W DM305 and B&K AV2500, a chip based "contractor" amp!

Recording technique - I prefer near-coincident pair - seems to matter more to suspension of dis-belief than listening to, for example, a Rudy van Gelder production on my Ayre AX-7 driving Tag-McLaren Calliopes.
sineburst
2 posts
 
First row balcony - this sounds like a reasonable choice in a tall but not too deep hall with 1500-2500 seats listening to 19th Century compositions. Tchaikovsky in Carnegie, for example. In Fisher Hall the balcony is mushy, but then the whole hall sounds like steamy oatmeal. Even in narrow but deep Boston the balcony has less articulation than my preferred seats which are usually 10th row center.

I mainly go to smaller venues because of the intimacy and clarity. I also prefer Baroque sized orchestras - five to twenty five players. Try Jordan Hall during the Boston Early Music Festival, chamber music in Weill Auditorium or Zankel Hall. The latter does not have a mediocre seat in the house. Just leave if they use speakers - halls that have reverberation designed for acoustic music sound awful with reinforcement.

This is how I like recordings too - definition and subtle detail in reproduction. Pinpoint imaging? No! That is an exaggeration of any live situation and always has bad trade-offs.

I adore crispness in the direct sound, spatial accuracy and proper roll-off in the echoes (air absorbs high frequencies) from a good impulse response - is that a quantifiable attribute that resembles "focus and air"?

I seek sonic intimacy as defined by Beranek but I have yet to hear anything resembling "warm" or "fat" that was not a distorted impediment between myself and the musicians. Most tube amps sound veiled or muddy, as do most halls. This euphonia is the lie to me.
More to discover