Striking a balance between musicality and resolution

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.

Dear @carlos269  : " THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS THE COMPOSITE RESULTANT SOUND THAT ONE HEARS AT THE LISTENING CHAIR POSITION!!!!!!!!!! "

That's an unequivocal statement and agree with.

""  I simply refuse to do things the way others do and ALWAYS try to come up with a SMARTER way for everything. ""

Yes, to fulfill each one of us home MUSIC/audio whole source reproduction. IN my case I really don't know if my way is the smarter for other gentlemans but for me it's the way that today permits my maximum MUSIC enjoyment as never before and this is all for me. Could be "land " for an improvement?, maybe but as I posted today I'm entilted to listen sessions and enjoy MUSIC.It seems tome that I already took tomuch time/years improving my room/audio system performance quality levels and I'm satisfied with.Life is to short for human beings.

Btw, how are you dealing with the HF range using horns that are a little limited in that frequency range when MUSIC goes normally at higher frequencies that hornsnormally handled.

R.