Top two most important sound qualities

@kota1

Thanks for showing up. I was trying to explain your system "immersion" concept when making suggestion on how to achieve.

@edgewear

Even from a distance and without visual contact you simply ’know’ when they’re playing live.

Well said.

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.

Pretty much. You can do things like go with metal drivers to compensate, But on another recording it may be "too much of a good thing". Reducing components, clean power supply, or going with horns is a systemic way to reduce the loss.

True be told, I came up with these two when recently auditioning mini-systems for work. Maybe partly cos they mix songs to sound good on a boom box??? The home stereo (typical set-up we all use) obscures those qualities. Distractions due to:

1) Produces too much detail

2) Room effects

If I stick my head directly between the mini-system speakers, I get the same "detailed" effect as listening at home. So I know is a feature of setup.

My epiphany came when, as @tubeking1 said about emotions. I was just working, listening to LCD Soundsystem, not really thinking about the music when OMG it just hit me. I could feel the coldness, the emotion, the poignant beauty or whatever they were trying to express.

1. Clarity

2. Imaging

Tone & Texture

Tone is the most important aspect in my system.

Having spent most of my life 20’s and 30’s in night clubs in New York and seen/heard most of the bands of that era, when I listen to music, my musical/aural emotions draws from those experiences.

I’m not trying to recreate the live performance experience of my past since my aural memory is dim but bring out the emotional experience from my memory when I first heard that song.

The right tone is the only aspect of the music that brings back those emotions, not soundstage, clarity, detail, etc.

skc

@skchun 

Me too.

For me instrumental tone/ timbre/ textures is both 1 and 2.

Everything else ie dynamic range, transient speed, lack of sibilance, lack of overhang, full range bandwidth, image depth are all of far lesser importance.

That's why I can sometimes prefer a $40 portable speaker which has a vivid tonal palette to a $4000+ Hi-Fi that doesn't.

Seriously, it's inexplicable to me just how so many of these so called 'High End' systems fail miserably in this regard.

Getting the most accurate instrumental tone would always be my first priority as a manufacturer.

This is a good question and one of crucial importance in determining the relevance of the various responses we often read here.

I tend to skip any published review that does not offer a few words about tone. Strange as it seems, it would appear that, for far too many people, precise instrumental tonality seems to have little or no relevance, whilst to a few others it's almost everything.