twoleftears,
Agreed.
That quality of differentiating timbre as you describe it is something I really value in a speaker.
I think mono recordings can really be a test of timbre differentiation in that regard, because in a mono recording, say of a jazz quartet and some singers, the instruments and voices are piled behind one another in a central location on the soundstage. Whereas in stereo sources it’s much easier to be able to pay attention to each instrument individually, because they are separated spatially in the stereo imaging.
A speaker that is really great with timbre can make it much more effortless to untangle one mono instrument from another, be it two voices on top of one another, a guitar and a banjo playing simultaneously, vibes and piano, or whatever. When the timbral harmonics are coming through accurately, it’s easy to hear out one instrument/voice from another almost as if they were spatially delineated.
This is one reason I’ve been really interested in Joseph Audio speakers because to my ears they do this like few other speaker brands I’ve encountered. (I also found the old Hales Transcendence speakers were great for this, and many others).
Beware those who are bored easily, here comes a mini-essay concerning my further thoughts on this issue:
There is, to my mind, a difference between really getting the timbral character of an instrument exact, and giving enough information to let you know what instrument you are hearing. That may seem a weird distinction but I’d explain it this way:
Take the analogy of photographs. Imagine a BLACK AND WHITE photograph of 3 different string instruments: viola, violin, cello. Imagine it’s really blurry (.e.g poor resolution in the system) to the point of being hard to tell which instrument is which. As you in increase resolution, the instruments will come in to focus and you will at some point easily be able to say "that’s a viola, that’s a violin, that’s the cello." If you increase resolution even more, you may even end up seeing enough detail to discern the type of each instrument: "Ah, I can see that’s a stradivarius...or a Gotting...or whatever..."
But though the increase in resolution has allowed you to make some very fine differentiations between the instruments, and even identify tell-tale signs for specific instruments...the instruments still don’t in fact look fully real and accurate. Because the photo is in BLACK AND WHITE.
Adding accurate color is when the instrument takes another full step to what it looks like in real life.
A similar analogy is for instance the fact we can all easily recognize differences between voices on our phones, we can know "that’s my mother on the end of the line" but the fact we have been given enough sonic information to *recognize* one person from another on the phone doesn’t entail that the voice on the phone is just how it actually sounds from the person in real life in front of you. There’s a difference between the experience of recognizing your mother’s voice on the phone and what your mother’s voice actually sounds like in real life, without the technological intervention.
I suggest that many "high resolution" sound systems mimic this problem insofar as they seem like they can provide high levels of detail that differentiate instruments and voices *within the confines of the music piece being played* or within *the confines of music generally played on that system*. They can give plenty of detail in a "black and white photograph" sense to allow you to finely identify certain characteristics of singers and instruments, while still withholding the actual "color" or full timbral realism. I remember this experience really hitting me hard when, in the late 90’s or so I finally heard a massive Infinity IRS speaker system. Playing an orchestral piece, for the first time closing my eyes I had the sensation of something like a full symphony orchestra playing in front of me. Except....the "color" was missing from the picture. That is, though I could easily identify all the solo instruments or sections, timbrally speaking they seemed made of the "wrong" stuff, like plasticized/electronic/metallic versions homogenizing everything. It just missed the effortless timbral rainbows that I hear from the real thing.
That really impressed upon me the problem of timbral believability, and the value any speaker would have that can increase timbral variety and believability for me.
And we all bring to a system our particular personal template of how we have perceived real life sounds of voices and instruments we care about.
So on this view, when I hear or read someone saying things like "the resolution of this system allowed me to differentiate between X and Y singer or instruments" that is a good sign....but it doesn’t tell me whether the instruments actually sound like the real instruments. Whether the timbrally true color is there.
I used to have recordings of instruments I play, that my sons played, my wife’s voice etc, that I’d play on speakers I owned or auditioned to look for this timbrally-true quality. On many high resolution speakers I could certainly tell "yes, that’s my guitar being played." But they didn’t actually *sound* like my guitar REALLY being played in front of me, because it was the wrong timbral "color/tone." It was some other electronic confection. Only on some speakers has my guitar recording sounds not just detailed, but *as it does timbrally* when I’m playing that guitar. There’s an inherent "Yes, that’s it" sensation when this happens.
It’s depressingly rare, though.