Top two most important sound qualities

@gladmo

Thanks for that. Those were my 2 points when at my low point in hi-end audio.

Currently. . . . how to describe? I like a system which lets me connect to the emotional and musical content of the song. Auditioning, I put in a song and don’t really listen for anything. It plays tunes, nothing stands out, and I don’t think about the system. The 2 things I aim for are:

 

1) Top to bottom even.

- Flat frequency response.

- The more full range the better. No sound below 70Hz is not "even".

- No integration problems between drivers.

- Meaning well designed crossover (better yet none)

- No change in sound quality between drivers.

- Potential problems like: Metal tweeter and poly woofer / Ribbon tweeter vs. cone midrange.

- No change in tone going from low volumes to high volumes.

- Harmonically correct. This again relates to even sound with higher level harmonic in balance with the fundamental. Resulting in instruments and vocals sound like themselves.

 

2) Immediacy - means the music’s is "there" and you can feel what the musicians are trying to convey. What they are thinking when they play. Achieved by, IMHO- minimal crossover components, clean power, not trying to fix one problem component with another, and minimal system components in general. This encompasses:

- Transparency.

- Clarity.

- PRAT.

- Soundstaging.

- Dynamics / lack of compression.

- Black background.

 

It’s all about choosing where to compromise and no system can do it all. The more differences between songs the better. Also better spatially means the system is dong something more right.

 

Looking at this list, I come up with something like Quads or single driver speaker run with a chip amp or SET? Maybe horn speakers or omni like MBL / Ohm / 3D mutli speakwr systems.

immersion

micro-dynamics

@larsman No, of course you can’t. Just as you can’t fool youself into thinking you’re sitting front row in the Concertgebouw Amsterdam (to give an example I’m familiar with) hearing a performance of Mahler 6 (or any other large scale orchestral score). But every once in a while you sit in front of your speakers and your usual disbelief gets suspended for a moment and you almost feel teleported to the venue. That’s when the ’gestalt’ of the live music event is somehow faithfully reproduced in your own space. When this happens your brain gets tricked into thinking it’s hearing the real thing. It’s those moments when even your cat takes notice and this experience is what any audiophile aspires to. These are usually few and far between, but a well balanced system can get you there more often.

@cdc ’immediacy’ is an even better word for the kind of realism I was trying to describe. One could say immediacy is what distinguishes the real thing from a recording. Just think of street musicians. Even from a distance and without visual contact you simply ’know’ when they’re playing live. Whether they use amplification doesn’t matter. It will sound completely different from recorded sound, even when it comes from speakers outside the adjacent store just a few feet away, no matter how loud they go.

This would seem to suggest that ’live immediacy’ already gets lost during the recording process. So any playback system, no matter how good, is at the mercy of the recording quality.

Indeed - the best you can possibly get is what the producer and other tech people can put on the source. And of course the 'source' can sound very different even in the same venue and performance depending on where you are. But yeah, that's great when you can get transported that way!