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The sound of speakers is distortion.

Stated by an experienced editor/reviewer recently, in his introductory remarks to a speaker review. In other words, the sound of a speaker is defined by its sins of omission and commission, as regards things like frequency response, frequency range, tone, dynamics, etc.  This implies that there exists some sort of gold standard; a mythical distortion-free speaker. This strikes me as naive. Thoughts?
psag
royj's avatar
royj
151 posts
 
Good points, josh358
psag OP
517 posts
 
Some great points here. I used to think that a distortion-free speaker would theoretically let the listener hear precisely what the mastering engineer heard on his studio monitors.  But, clearly there are playback systems that will make that recording sound far better and more lifelike than anything the mastering engineer heard when he created the recording.  Should we call this ‘good’ distortion? Of course not.

On the other hand many of us have heard speaker systems that blow us away on first listen, but we do not own these speakers, because we suspect that they would produce fatigue with extended listening. Perhaps this is something that we could label ‘bad’ distortion, or ‘mixed bag’ distortion...not!

Hence my conclusion that the idea of distortion as applied to loudspeakers is simplistic and naive.
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wolf_garcia
6,591 posts
 
Nelson Pass made a gizmo that does exactly that (adds a "little sloppy"  "even ordered" distortion to the amp). He sent amps to people with an undescribed knob and they all liked the "little sloppy" knob turned up, so he gave a pile of the gizmos away at a Burning Amp thing. What a guy.
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