Striking a balance between musicality and resolution


As my years and experience in this hobby continue to grow I notice a divergence between those seeking extreme resolution and detail from their music reproduction systems and those in search of maximum musicality.

In theory, high-end audio systems should provide more than garden variety stereo systems. In my view that means more detail and information should be heard from a high-end music reproduction system than one hears from ordinary HiFi stereo systems set ups. BUT is there such thing as too much resolution and detail in a stereo system’s sound presentation?

Some people feel that a less detailed presentation that is easier for your brain to process has better flow and provides more enjoyable listening.

So there is the dichotomy. Should one pay more to hear less? Can a frequency response performance that is curtailed at both frequency extremes be desired and praised?

Those that seek a “more musical” presentation usually point to their belief that that is how they hear live un-amplified acoustic music in the real world. In nature, high frequencies attenuate and decay with distance from the source and sound waves get absorbed, diffracted, reflected, and diffused by the environmental factors and landscapes; so they are not wrong in stating that in the real world the sound of music is less detailed and extended. The issue is that when we listen to our music reproduction systems at home we are not listening to live un-amplified music in a concert venue, but rather professionally produced audio recordings typically recorded with close-microphones techniques.

So the question is, do we want our systems to reproduce the sound on the commercial audio recordings accurately or does one want hear the sound the way one thinks that it should sound?

Lucky for me, I have enough systems at home that I have been able to design, set up, and tune them for different targeted resultant sound, sound presentation, and sound qualities. For instance, my OKTAN6 ultimate horn system is a dissecting microscope, my Pinnacle horn system aims at extreme musicality, and my WAAR reference system is a chameleon, which can be adjusted to sound exactly how you want it to sound in real-time.

My “test-bed” system takes on the sound character and sound qualities of the components in use and it is excellent for evaluating what new components have to offer or bring to the table in terms of sound qualities. But with the Acapella TW-1S ION plasma super-tweeters extending the high frequencies, the TBI Emperor subwoofers extending the low frequencies, and the highly detailed & nuanced Digital Audio Denmark AX24 DSD dac streaming HQPLAYER as the source, the “Test Bed” system is a highly resolving system.

As with everything else in life, is there a happy medium or compromise that gives you the best of those worlds? I believe that there is and that great music reproduction systems can be tuned to strike a balance between musicality and resolution. If one listens to the evolution of my OKTAN6 ultimate horn system for instance you can hear that the fine tuning is driving the sound in that direction.

So during last night’s listening session I adjusted the sound of my “Test Bed” system to a more musical sound presentation. The “Test Bed” system is always in flux so it allows me to experiment, explore, tweak, tune, and have fun with it.

Here is an audio recording from last night’s listening session that captures the revised sound presentation and conveys the sound qualities that exemplify a more organic sound versus a more delineated & resolved sound presentation:
 

The Way It Goes

 

carlos269

Creating a hi-fi system is like building a gallery in which to hang paintings. People who restore paintings work under scientific flat lighting in labs, but no person on earth has ever wanted to view or create paintings under those conditions. Instead we view art in museums with combination of lighting, such as warm halogen or skylights, so we can admire the luminance of the oil in a Rembrandt and have an emotional experience. Technically, we aren’t seeing the painting as correctly as in a lab. We also don’t perform or listen to live music in an anechoic chamber, even though it the only way you'll hear the instrument correctly. 

If we each had enough wealth to build a physical gallery to hang our favorite paintings, we each would do it a different way. Same as hi-fi. Its about transparency, but to a point.

Mapman distills this discussion into two statements that are logically correct. 
My translation: if you don't prefer high fidelity sound [literally, the faithful rendering of an electronic signal as sound], just accept your logical disconnect and buy whatever biased sound reproduction you prefer. 

@mihorn  Wear a headphone or earbud and listen to both tracks of lady in red you forwarded again.  What did you hear?  Like I said, you were able to capture left and right, which is better than Op's recording but the low ends are gone.

@carlos269  Record the same track, i.e., lady in red, and listen it with your headphone or earbud.  Is there left and right?

Again, when you try to make pitch about presenting your system over YT, enhance the quality of your recording.  The burden of proof is on you. You could learn something from these guys Alpha Audio.  Tune in 1:00:00 and, AGAIN, listen with headphone / earbud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NELvyX822IU&t=2839s

 

@mahgister I’m going to try to explain this as simply as possible, in layman’s language. Failure is what happens when one loses sight of the goal. You cannot see the forest for the trees. You do not seem to understand that the room acoustics and psychoacoustics that you are so concerned about all form part of what one hears at the listing chair. The sound that is heard by our ears and perceived by our brain is the resultant sound. The resultant sound is the composite sound that is the net result of all the contributions from all the elements that impact and effect the sound heard, at the listening position.

People like yourself get hung up on trying to optimize and address each of those contributors to the resultant sound, such as yourself trying to optimize room acoustics and others for instance trying to optimize the electrical power delivery and how clean it is and so on. A person with go nuts trying to optimize each of these individual contributors to the resultant sound as they are many times a function of each other and as one adjust one item it inadvertently effects something else. There are so many variables that contribute to the resultant sound, at the listening chair position.

Most audiophiles do the same thing you are doing and focus on one or more of the contributors and attempt to address and optimize them.

Then there is me, I simply accept all of these individual contributors as they are and accept them “as is”, for what they are, “the given”. I simply ignore ALL of these individual contributions that make up the “composite” resultant sound, at the listening share position, and instead I focus ALL of my energy on ONLY addressing the “composite” resultant sound that I hear at the listening chair. I then make real-time adjustments to the sound until the “composite” resultant sound that I hear matches the sound that I want to hear, the “target sound”.

Again, I do not care to get bogged down on addressing the contributing elements because at the end of the day, THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS THE COMPOSITE RESULTANT SOUND THAT ONE HEARS AT THE LISTENING CHAIR POSITION!!!!!!!!!! It is all baked into the sound heard by the ears and perceived by the brain when seated at the listening chair.
 

I developed my approach as “There is a smarter way” of getting things done in audio. I’m always looking at doing things in a smarter way and find the whole audiophile approach pretty silly and lacking intelligence so I developed my own way of executing adjustments to get the sound that I’m after from ANY “capable” system.

It may seem like I just shared my secret and unique technical development but the real intelligence and knowledge required is about its implementation and in order to achieve success you MUST have a clear understanding of all the elements at play and what adjustments to make to achieve the desired result, that will yield the target “composite” sound that is heard at the listening chair position.

I am the only one in the world doing this, and I’m able to implement my approach in various ways and approaches to achieve the desired end-results. I simply refuse to do things the way others do and ALWAYS try to come up with a SMARTER way for everything.

Are you able to comprehend what I just stated above? Or are you still stuck on room acoustics and psychoacoustics?

@lanx0003 What you wrote and the people you reference disqualify you as a credible source. When one listens to audio recordings of home stereo systems recorded from the listening chair position over headphones or earbuds, one omits one of the most important aspects of hearing and sound perception; and that is the Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF), which is unique to each of us.

The whole point of making the audio recordings from the listening chair position is based on the fact that we can apply our own HRTF to hear what we would hear if we were seated in the listening chair.

Some times what is obvious to me isn’t so obvious to others.