@carlsbad2 Wait, are you serious? Hahaha I think they would be so useful and easy. You just click a button and get views. Rapid engagement with easily delineated subject matter and instantaneous statistics. Why vote against that?
Top two most important sound qualities
In case you didn't know, it's 2023 and this website still hasn't implemented a polling feature, so I can't define a selection of sound qualities to choose from and see results in a grouped, organized fashion. Boo hoo!
If you had to pick two of the typically referenced sound qualities that are most important to you to optimizing the enjoyment of your system, what are they? You know what I mean, right? Could be a certain frequency range and some particular quality that you for in it, or any quality that applies across all frequencies, etc.
(Note: "Sound qualities" mentioned here do not include anything that refers to physical attributes of your system or listening room, such as acoustical treatments, types of components, types of source material, physical tweaks, etc. It's only a reference to subjectively appreciated qualities.)
Showing 23 responses by gladmo
@grislybutter Just how I like my women |
@ghdprentice Two selections being limited is the whole point here. 🙂I know you see that, given your whole response and the experiential learning involved. Listing a third or fourth quality without indicating priority is fine, but it's dilutive because it's that much closer to listing all the attractive qualities one can think of. |
Something magical happens when tonality is just right, from top to bottom. Not easily achieved. Not easy at all, especially when trying to improve on multiple other qualities at the same time. In a related point, I got tone wrong in the first sentence of the original post, but I can’t edit it out now. It was meant lightheartedly, but it sounds whiney. Sorry about that guys. I’ll be adjusting my own tone. 🙂 |
True. And not to criticize or disagree, but to me, choosing "realism" is almost like cheating lol. Isn't it almost like choosing "perfection" or "the ideal sound" as a single sound quality? Maybe not. I've always been aiming for realism for my sound because it is necessarily a composite of getting so many essential sound qualities to a very refined state. |
@bdp24 Agreed. Also, "What is this?!? Image sizes for ants?" 🤣 |
In an earlier comment, I said "clarity and tonality". It just occurred to me that there’s an overlap of the two together which I could call harmonic completeness. Subtle overtones can’t be heard without clarity, and these make music seem lively and realistic. An imbalanced tonality will also affect the ability to hear them. Without refined tonality, sound reproduction will be less full or pleasant to me. The way I am using tonality, I mean the totality of the degree of the presence of all potential tones across the audible range in relationship to each other. |
@grislybutter Imaging is interesting to me because the way I think about it, it’s a complex thing. It can be discussed in much more detail than simple H/W/D for a soundstage. One thing I’m interested in, for example, is image regularity. For example, in the horizontal dimension, you can have a wide soundstage, but the image can warp and become too wide or two narrow at the outer edges of the SS. A cymbal there can seem twice as wide as the same cymbal positioned near center stage, while at the same time the center image can be squished so that the singer seems like a stick figure. That’s what I’m calling irregularity. Or there can be vertical irregularity. On speakers that stack their drivers’ frequency response from low to high, bottom to top, a piano will often sound like it’s dropping downwards vertically as lower keys/pitches are played. This type of vertical inaccuracy can sound like the whole piano is titled at a significant angle, but different cymbals and toms may still be at or near the proper heights. Image definition can be thought of as the capacity to be located ever more accurately in space and have the sense of the precise boundaries of the shape of each thing which is producing sound in the recording. So in the example of tilted piano issue, with very good image definition there could even be a slightly different locatable vertical+horizontal position in space for every single key. Vertical irregularity can also be a result of good definition in the upper frequencies, but poor definition in the bass and mids. Then you have something like defined, floating heads and cymbals, and a more fuzziness and lack of definition near the bottom half of the stage. Tonality plays into this stuff, especially in speakers with stacked drivers because, for example, when there is image definition but inaccurate tonal balance, cymbals can seem vertically compressed when they are lacking a full expression of all of their frequencies. Acoustics are also a big part of how a system can image, of course. |
@rauliruegas Yes, I chose tonality + clarity, and clarity is primarily a consequence of minimized distortion. Cheers |
I understand what is meant when people talk about an emotional vs cerebral type of listening, and I have two points to make about that, which you may find interesting.
1) It’s never either/or. No person is 100% one or the other. That’s not how human brains work. We all have our unique configurations, leaning more one way than the other, but both emotions and abstract thinking are regularly involved in the human experience.
2) Why do people like to physically attend a live show? Sure, they like the natural sound, the social engagement, the sensory stimulation, the thrill, and the feeling of doing something special. But they also go to *watch* the musicians perform in a 3D space, and not *just* to listen to the sound. Even a blind person at a live music event can perceive, probably with extraordinary accuracy, the sense of space within which the performance is happening, as well as the locations of the sounds inside that space. This is one of the reasons why I prefer smaller, intimate venues over gigantic productions. When we listen to recorded music on 2 channel systems at home, all this talk about "imaging" and "soundstaging" is important to people precisely for the same reason. The experience desired is that of being "as if" we are actually watching it, in addition to listening to it. People live in three dimensions, we experience life in three dimensions, and so we naturally want to have an inner sense of space and dimensionality when we listen to and feel the music that we love. |
@rauliruegas Appreciated. I’ve been looking into it lately after this was brought up by someone else recently. My sub does have a single ended HPF 80hz output, so I plan to try this today and listen for the difference. |
@rauliruegas Perhaps you misunderstood what I said. My sub has a line level output with passive HPF at 80hz. Good enough for me. Noticably less distortion in the woofers and better imaging using that route to the amp. |