Why do audiophiles shun feedback in amplifiers?

If I may chime in here on the "tight" bass issue. Atmasphere's description of the string bass is a good one - no orchestral bassist would want to be told that he sounds "tight." I am sorry to say that Kijanki's post in response makes almost no sense from this standpoint. No truly great sounding instrument sounds "tight," though one with a problem, or a bad quality one might. This would be considered a very negative description.

Charles1dad makes a good point: "there are audiophile qualities/expectations that appear to vary from the reality of live acoustic instruments. If some audiophiles were blind folded and heard peter`s bass playing(but told they`re hearing a system and judge it) they might say it lacked tightness and was too warm and round.People like what they like,but many audio components tend to thin and make the sound leaner(tighter?) than real life presentations i.e. fuller tone and body with weight and presence."

To this point, I would add that we also need to distinguish between amplified and unamplified acoustic bass - as soon as amplification is used, as it almost always is in live jazz, for instance, this results in an artificially boosted bass, and a very different sound from the unamplified string bass.

There are a great many audiophiles who do not listen to classical music even on recordings, let alone live, and therefore really don't have any idea what an un-amplified string bass actually sounds like live. Their concept of how bass is supposed to sound is therefore entirely based on either electronically produced or at least amplified acoustic bass. This is the biggest reason why there is so much debate about this in the audiophile community - there are two VERY different references going on. When orchestral musicians use the term "tight," they are never describing timbre. You simply would never hear someone say "He sounds tight!" Instead this term is used to describe how rhythmically together the group is playing - as in tight or loose ensemble.

Hi Kijanki - yes I realize this is semantics; I do now understand what you were talking about - however, your use of terms is very bizarre to an orchestral musician. Orchestral string players do not speak of the length of their strings as "scales" (and neither do they use the term "tight" to describe their sound, as I explained in my earlier post). The use of the term "scale" in the way you do must be a guitar thing. Probably because the length of the string on an orchestral instrument is always the same, whereas in a guitar it would not necessarily be.

I also fully understand the way in which some audiophiles use the term "tight" - I just disagree that it is a good term. I could see the term applied to an amplified string bass or acoustic guitar sound, but this would be because of the amplification, not because of the instrument itself. The term is simply not used in describing live, un-amplified, acoustically produced music (certainly not in the classical world, anyway), and therefore doesn't really have anything to do with Harry Pearson's "absolute sound" concept, if one agrees that that should be the standard for what a system should ideally sound like. If one doesn't agree, then by all means use the term. Dracule's definition of the common audiophile way of using it is as good as any, though I have never heard a pianist use it. Drummers, yes. Even timpanists, though they generally use the term to describe the tightness of their drumheads and the effect this has on the sound, which is somewhat different, I think, from Dracule's description.

Charles1dad, I agree with your post in response to mine completely.

Hi Kijanki - thanks for the link. I am going to have to ask one of my viola colleagues about this tomorrow! As far as I knew, the string lengths of all the instruments in the orchestra string family were approximately the same length (with the obvious exceptions of harp and piano), but that article claims this is not necessarily true of the viola. I am now wondering if this is a typically sloppy Wikipedia reference to viols, used in early music groups, which are of many different sizes, or if it does indeed apply to orchestral violas, which I tend to doubt. I will report back.

@Dracule - yes, audiophiles use quite a few terms somewhat differently than musicians do. My personal pet peeve is "neutral," LOL! But there are others, even such seemingly self-explanatory words as "mid-range." This is a very misleading term to a musician unfamiliar with how audiophiles use it, as it turns out that the vast majority of frequencies produced by acoustic instruments fall well within what most audiophiles call the midrange, though audiophiles will often disagree on exactly what constitutes the midrange. Other obvious candidates are "pace" and "timing." I have seen some very bizarre discussion of those two terms in particular on audiophile boards.

Hi Atmasphere - yes, I am of course familiar with 3/4 and 1/2 size instruments in the string world, I had just never heard the term "scale" applied to them, being purely a classical orchestral horn player. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you again for all your highly informative posts I have read on this board over the last several years. You have a way of putting very technical subjects into layman's terms that is unequaled in my experience.