Detailed sound? Real?


I have read about many audiophiles wanting more detail and air around the instruments to improve realism. usually, when i hear a system with these qualities, the sound is almost always thin and fatiguing. When I hear live music, it never sounds like air around the instruments and detailed. Most detailed systems sound way too detailed. When i hear live music, there is a sense of air, but not around the instruments. Actually, many times it sounds natural and mono. It seems to me that detailed systems are probably the most unrealistic in audio. Yesterday I heard a live performance of a piano and sax. The piano was so muffled sounding, much more so than on any system I have recently heard. The sax sounded more detailed, but still not like the stereos portray it. I think the secret to listening is to find something that sounds good and that you can listen to without fatigue. Natural Timbre, color and good bass, not overblown but good, gets you closer to the real thing IMHO
tzh21y
If by "Absolute SOund" we mean a single kind of optimal sound that can always be achieved, then I agree that this is an unrealistic goal.

A realistic "absolute sound" to achieve is one where the basic nature of most any kind of recorded music of interest is delivered in a particular listening room in a manner that the listener almost always finds satisfying.
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Amplified music requires one transducer to convert soundwaves into electrical current, another transducer to convert the electrical current back into soundwaves and an intervening system of electrical device(s) to relay the electrical signal between the two transducers. At our current level of technology, microphones do not pick up soundwaves the way the human ear/brain system does and loudspeakers don't radiate soundwaves the way instruments produce them. From this I conclude that amplified sound is fundamentally differ than unamplified sound. My point holds even if the original instrument is an electric instrument used with an amplifier.

Several people have mentioned that unless you were at the recording venue during the performance that you really can't say what the recording should sound like. I would take it farther and say you would have to have been at the mastering session where the engineer, artist and producer finalized the recording's sound to have an accurate reference for how your home system should sound. Clearly this raises the additional issue of whether the recording is accurate to the sound of the original performance.

The main flaw with the pursuit of the absolute sound as detailed in the magazine of the same name is how they minimize the effect of the recording process. No matter what you do on the home reproduction side, you can never compensate for the inherently destructive nature of the recording process. Which is not to say that you can't have high quality, good fidelity, pleasant sounding home audio reproduction.
I have a shirt I picked up at a technical training session that says something like:

"Insanity: Doing the same thing that didn't work before over and over again and expecting different results"

We audio kooks wouldn't ever be guilty of anything like that, would we?
Well guys, I have my own thoughts on this. I believe the recording and playback is an art form of it's own. It cannot be compared to live music in any way. I've never be fooled into thinking I'm sitting in front of a full symphony orchestra. That's OK because I enjoy my system for what it is, a recorded music playback system, nothing more.

Thanx, Russ