Striking a balance between musicality and resolution

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.

I have been attending live music concerts for more years than I care to count. The first one my parents took me to, Harry Belefonte at the Greek Theater. I have gone to small clubs, large venues like the Hollywood bowl, and larger venues that are unamped, like Disney Hall. 

Large venues that are amped like the Hollywoo Bowl have a different sound than the unamped L.A. Phil at Disney Hall. Whether music is coming through speakers or through the natural air, in my experience, one thing they all share is that I am listening to a mix of music. In other words, it is often difficult to know which instrument the music is coming from, unless of course there is a solo instrument.

I will concentrate on the L.A. Phil to make my point. I sit above the orchestra on seats that are up maybe thirty feet. I can see the orchestra clearly and which musician is playing their instrument. Yet most of the time I cannot tell where music is coming from. If a horn is playing I scan the horn section, looking for the musician who is being highlighted. As I said, music is a mix. If suddenly each instrument were pinpointed in space, it would be a very strange experience.

When I listen to live jazz, there are fewer instruments and I know that I am listening to the bass or piano. But if I closed my eyes and didn't know where the instruments were, I would hear a mix of instruments and would not be able to point to where each instrument is located in space. So, I find overly analytical systems that pinpoint instruments in space to be an artifact of a stereo system. Its sound does not at all reflect the live music I have listened to.

What live music shares is first a wide and deep sounstage. Pretty much a wall-to-wall soundstage. My listening room limits any systems ability to stretch out the way the L.A. Phil does in huge Disney hall. But I can develop what sounds like a big and deep soundstage if let my imagination run free.

The second thing live music offers is that the instruments sound the way they should. If you know the sound of a French horn, a good audio system will project the natural sound of a French horn. And, of course, pianos which are so difficult to reproduce will have the full sound (vibrating wood and all) in a good system.

I won't list all the attributes of live music, but I think you get the point. So, although I don't have the resources of Carlos, over the years I have been able to buy a mix of new and used equipment and put together the best system I can afford, and with which I find the music authentic and pleasing. 

I am about to trade-in my ARC PH-7 phono preamp. I love the soundstage it throws and its sheer "musicality." That will be the last of my tube gear. But all of my solid state gear has a softer tube sound that throws a wide and deep soundstage. 

So, I'm not an analytical system guy. I love tubes, but I'm tired of messing with them. So, I have chosen solid state that sounds like tubes, and throws a fantastic soundstage and has a natural (to my ears) tube sound.