Striking a balance between musicality and resolution

By the way you are not alone being completely misunderstood , i am with you here brother...

Most ignorant think that i boasted about my past acoustic room as "a proposed model for all"..

It was not, my dedicated first room  was un-esthetical and impractical for anyone..

 Why did i created it then ?

It was to learn  basic acoustics concepts by hearing them so to speak... it was my laboratory to explore what is completely ignored by most : the power of acoustics controls over sound experience..

I never boasted about my system as such. it was average and good but vintage and low cost..

I never boasted about my room as such . i am not a fool and i never post photos of this "tin foil hat" laboratory of mine completely unesthetical...

If i boasted and in truth i boasted about knowing the extraordinary power of acoustics in the listening experience..

 If you read all my posts articles and books propositions since many years here it is all about acoustics and psycho-acoustics importance in audio...

Others boast about their recorded systems, brand name one, costlier one, some boast about real beautiful room and there is many to see here...

I boasted about the discovery of basic acoustics as a revelation for me and hopefully to others...

 Audio threads are full of gear discussion at most some about room acoustic, almost nothing about fundamental acoustics concepts and experiments ..

This is what interest me...

 I know how to optimize now any system for my own usage and i am satisfied...

i am interested mostly by what matter for all time and must matter  for everyone : acoustics (with an "s" then more than mere room acoustic) ...

By the way i was not interested by Dr. Choueiri DSP filters which i cannot afford and dont want to buy rightnow, unlike you i was interested by his acousticals ideas and understanding... The rabbit hole is not his understanding of acoustics but your own head ...

@mahgister I tried, but you still cannot comprehend. Keep on you way of filling the room with mechanical resonators. You are not alone in not having the capacity to take in and understand my concept. Maybe some can explain it to you in an even simpler way that I was able to put it in, because your comprehension of what I wrote is way off.

Don’t embarrass yourself by using technical terminology you’re clearly not qualified to use, as you’re doing here. What you hear from your stereo system contains all the spatial cue information, but your recording doesn’t even capture proper left and right channels. What exactly did you transfer? Don’t throw around big words you don’t even understand.

A half-full water bottle makes noise, but a bottle full of water is silent. Try filling your bottle with real substance before barking here and throwing insults at intellectuals.

Like many here, I’ve followed this thread with great interest. The dichotomy between "musicality" and "resolution" is a classic audiophile debate, but I believe it often creates a false choice.

I’ve come to the conclusion that we have to accept the decisions made by the recording, mixing, and mastering engineers. We weren’t in the room when the artist directed the mastering engineer toward a specific sonic signature. Was the goal to sound good on a car stereo, or was it optimized for a high-end 2-channel setup? We rarely know.

Because of this, Harry Pearson’s classic definition of "The Absolute Sound"—actual acoustic instruments playing in a real space—is of no practical use for the vast majority of modern recordings. It’s a chasing-your-tail exercise for anything other than purely acoustic, minimalist recordings.

A More Practical "Absolute Sound"

As consumers, I believe a better goal is trying to approach what the final mastering engineer heard in their treated studio. While we can’t know exactly what that sounded like either, we do know the conditions under which they work. We can take clues from professional setups to get closer to the genuine article:

• Room Acoustics: Pros use established concepts like Live-End/Dead-End (LEDE) and heavy bass trapping to remove the room from the equation as much as possible.

• Active DSP & Time Domain: There is a reason many pros use active monitors. They often provide linearized amplitude response and accurate time-domain behavior. Look at the textbook step response of something like a Neumann KH 150—it’s tight, time-coherent, and revealing.

• Controlled Directivity: Using loudspeakers with well-behaved off-axis response (both horizontally and vertically) ensures that the room reflections that do exist don’t tonally color the direct sound.

• Positioning: Adhering rigidly to established standards (equilateral triangle, ears on the acoustic axis, minimizing Speaker Boundary Interference Response).

While most of us don’t want our living rooms to look like Sterling Sound, taking small steps to mimic the electrical and acoustical environment of the pros might be the most honest way to achieve both resolution and musicality—by hearing exactly what the creators intended us to hear, nothing more, nothing less.

@lanx0003 Do a little research and studying so who you can see who is embarrassing themselves. HTRF is not an obscure technical concept. Pretty know, understood, and easy to comprehend.

@dsnyder0cnn How would you verify and validate your proposed concept of attempting to reproduce what the mastering engineer heard when he completed his session? What steps do you take to confirm what any commercial recording should sound like? Further more, what steps do you take to analyze, assess, and determine how close or how far away from the mastering engineer’s sound the sound you hear in your room is? The concept of the “Mastering Engineer’s Absolutely Sound” requires many assumptions, inferences, and great leaps of faith to even begin to consider it as a valid concept, although this is the concept that the majority of audiophiles have adopted.