Solving the "complex music problem"?

What @kota1 said ✅️

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@wolf_garcia ..”Wanna hear the result of "room acoustics?" Go listen to a live symphony. A good system in any reasonable room (with a good recording) can easily reproduce either a solo instrument OR a symphony brilliantly, they’ve been able to do that for decades.”

+1. Very important .

I have been attending a live symphony for ten years religiously. It changed the direction of my audio system upgrades completely.

I have spend time simply listening to the ambiance… the reflections from walls and ceiling. Also, individual instruments, then as they are used en mass… purposefully to create a wall of undifferentiatable sound. Sometimes starting on the stage right with the basses, violas and cellos and migrating to stage left causing a cascading wave of sound roaring across the auditorium. This sounds like a tube of a crashing wave.

Among the many reasons great classical composers remain popular is the skill they exhibit at all levels of using an orchestra to create incredible sonic experiences. Also, allowing conductors to mold the pieces into different experiences.

One of the most fundamental tools is the individual instrument versus the massed undifferentiated sound wave… the character of this sound wave they control in the amount of bass, midrange, treble and location. Symphonic orchestras are among the most amazing and complex creation of man.

I like air or vacuum capacitors, electrostatic speakers, air bearings in 3D, and Koetsu’s. None of these are cheap, and some are DIY only. But each makes its contribution, as does the room.

Digital literally gives me pain. YMMV

@ahuvia

Looking only at the speaker, what you are describing is intermodulation distortion. It’s intermodulation distortion in components too, but unless you have poor or poorly set up vinyl (or listening to inner groove songs) , or highly distorting tube gear the rest of your component aren’t contributing much to this (always rare exceptions).

The rest of the issue and probably dominant is your speakers and room as a system. Too strong of first reflections off walls, floor and ceiling, too much back wall reflection energy, front was reinforcement and suckout, and reverberation in general. *Add in that all these reflections in combination with the speaker dispersion can have vastly different effect depending on frequency. That’s why some component changes can appear to help the problem by changing tonal balance but at that point you are painting the pig.*

What can you do?

• Get your speakers away from walls if you can
• Toe the speakers more in towards the listening position
• Treat the first reflections points and front and back walls
• Fix bass nodes issues
• Use advanced room correction
• Use speakers with better (and consistent) directivity control. Speakers with waveguides, well designed horns, etc. Floor to ceiling line sources can be good too but can introduce new problems if you don’t implement properly.

Multichannel has advantages as the direct sound will be louder in the intended direction towards your ears, but you still need to address the room. It is not a magic bullet.

I agree with many points in this thread - how to improve the playback system, and not least, the integration with the room. Yet I think many problems of ’complex music’ are inherent in the recording. You can reduce them in the playback but they don’t go away.

I would rather think of the problem like this:

recording problems x format limits x playback limits

Meaning that whatever problem is there in the recording, will be accenuated with a poor format and playback system (even if ’masked’ by low resolution etc).

We could use + rather than x, in this formula. But in my experience, the problems tend to interact. So if the recording is medium but the format and playback poor, they will appear larger. The sound will be even worse.

Maybe we should put x2 for the recording factor. It means a lot. With high dynamic and complex music, recording can become very difficult. Witness, from way back when, Procol Harum: In Concert With The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, a pioneer effort from 1972. And we still hear recording problems, e g when The National plus guests try to redo the grand Grateful Dead song Terrapin Station, sounding noticeably worse than most of the more simple tracks on this Day of the dead 10xLP box, 2016.

Why? Recording a lot of instruments and voices together, each sounding their best, is hard to do. Integrating them into coherent sound is difficult. A notable "problem area", just mentioned, is integrating a band and a symphony orchestra, pioneered by prog rock bands like Procol Harum, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd. The best recordings succeeded, like Dark Side of the Moon, but then again, this was due to heavy production - we dont hear a lot of individual players.

My best-sounding recent LPs are less complex music. Like Bhatt and Cooder: A meeting by the river. Two string instruments. Or piano and voice, like D Krall or P Barber. My less-complex music sounds great, the problem is the complex music.

For a problem case, compare the Danish group Mew. I like them a lot, and have heard them live, plus on cd, and on lp. They switch from soft (simple) to strong (complex) passages, and the sound is clearly better on the soft parts. We heard the same thing from Mew live, some years ago. The sound on the strong parts was too loud. (cf Mew: No more stories... LP 2009)