My pet peeve: "revealing" speakers


The one word that bugs me the most in all of the audiophile world is "revealing." 

It's plenty descriptive but it's also biased.  What I mean is that speakers that are revealing are also usually quite colored. They don't unveil a recording, they focus your attention by suppressing some tones and enhancing others. The reviewer who suddenly discovers hearing things he has never heard before and now goes through his entire library has fallen for this trap hook line and sinker.

This is not always true, as some speakers are revealing by ignoring the room.  They can remain tonally neutral but give you a headphone like experience.  I'm not talking about them.  I'm talking about the others.  I  wish we had a better word for it.

Mind you, I believe you should buy speakers based on your personal preferences.  Revealing, warm, neutral, whatever.  I'm just saying this word is deceptive, as if there were no down side when there is. 

Best,

Erik
erik_squires
It seems nobody understand what i speak about distinguishing "revealing" and "resolving"...

Speakers are in an audio chain linked with multiple electronic components, they NEVER exist ideally and "generically" only, they comes from the sky of "generic" design on the earth of your "specific" room, and then they are + or - resolving in relation to the recording source and reveal all that plays against or for a better S.Q. coming from their link to other electronic components, coming also from the mechanical, electrical. and acoustical embeddings...We listen to, not only to a recording, not only to some speakers, not only to our gear, but to our room and house....

Then speaking of different speakers brand name properties had a limit: your house is not mine and any speakers will resolve differently the same files or cd and will reveal in his own way the difference between these 2 houses...

There is differences ,and big one, between different speakers branded name, but not one sound the same in different house and embeddings...

Then, is an absolute perfect resolving of the files or cd possible? No, and it is not desirable at all...

What is revealed by speakers? The " colored" different ways in which they manifest a resolving power in different environments and linked with different gear, rightly embed or not....

Then there is always a trade-off between resolving and revealing....Even if the speakers is specifically designed to be resolving, his embeddings and link with other gear, will manifest this in variable degrees or colors...

The "living" quality of a set of speakers is the result of this trade-off.. Trade-off between his "generic" properties and the "specific" manifested one...

I hope this was clear because this is my experience.... :)

Confusing "resolving" and "revealing" put us in the marketing discourse that sells products and makes no sense at all...

If i say that my Mission speakers are more resolving than your speakers, my discourse made no sense, except advocating for my favorite brand name... Even if this is true by the measured virtues of the "generic" design and conception, this is a half truth, because a less resolving designed speakers will resolve better in a better embedding sometimes, than a more resolving designed speakers in a bad embeddings...

:)

In a last word, "resolving" is only one of the properties of a good speaker, his "revealing" flexibility and adaptability relatively to any embeddings is another one, and a more "musical" one....
Resolving the information encoded in a cd and revealing it "in some way" through a room for example, is not the same thing when we speak about speakers....

The speakers has a designed resolving power, but it cannot manifest it in the heaven of idea, he must be in a specific house...In this sense the speakers is able to resolve something coming from the amp and dac, but it will manifest and be revealed through the mechanical structural properties of the speakers in a specific room ....

The 2 are linked but we must distinguish them to understand something beyond small talk....

Distinguishing something without separating it, this is call thinking ....

« Better a jam audio than a jam brain»-Groucho Marx :)