Striking a balance between musicality and resolution

In acoustics there is no "taste" as concept...it is called "biases"...

Taste in music exist but must be educated, i educated my taste in music which was only my starting point and i enlarged my tastes from singular to plural...

To tune my room any taste was useless...We must become conscious of our biases and limitations...It is why i did not boasted about my  dedicated room as such which was a success  but about the concepts of acoustics i used  and i posted many times here many acoustics articles even deep books..

To pick my gear pieces synergy matter not so much  taste "per se"  (specs and type of gear, price matter  because i am on a tight budget unlike most here ) ..

Then to optimize my gear pieces,taste also was useless completely, mechanical, electrical and acoustical basics knowledge  was useful...

 To tune my system/room nothing was less useful than given  "tastes" in music or gear brand name or cost...taste is a starting point to begin with thats all... Called it biases which need to be educated by the learning process ..

To tune my system/room i used basic acoustics knowledge and then more sophisticated knowledge about timbre concept, resonator concept, psycho-acoustics concepts etc , this knowledge process increasing  learning curve  implied hearing attention  about the perceived and measured  parameters related to these acoustics concepts...

How do we act on these given parameters measured by REW  or  perceived by ears and correlated together?

We acted not guided by taste but by experiments using specific direction line given in many acoustics articles and books..

There is no taste related to the optimal ratio of absorption/reflection/diffusion function of your listening position related acoustics material content and geometry and dimensions and topology of the room, there is no taste in the way you modify mechanically as i did with resonators or as we can do with sophisticated DSP  only hearing increase learning curve...

Taste is for children or consumers or for music not for acoustics experience where  parameters measured or not are correlated to the  hearing factors implied...

 

 But read me right , tastes exist for me too as biases even in the acoustics process  but once i decided the acoustics process has ended function of my budget, experiments duration, and relative satisfaction i can called it "my taste" at the end of my learning curve...

Taste is a starting point and an end point not the process...

I trusted objective measures and subjective biased hearing in the correlation process learning curve..

Objectivist as subjectivist are gear focus, one group call the gear brand his taste the other group called his specs measurements the "truth"  about hearing qualities, the two groups ignore acoustics basic process and concept.. At best they consider this fundamental  acoustics process secondary , a cherry on their cake tasting... For me acoustics concepts are the cake, the gear is only the ingredients the cherry and the flour we can afford...

 What matter in audio is not the gear we are able to afford, anybody can buy something, but how to optimize it matter the most...

The optimization rules are the same for any system at any price related to specific constraints and specific design and synergy  ratio ...

 I dont trust my taste means i trusted the process by which it is educated at a higher level...

You are gifted, you are able with technological knowledge to modify or create some of your gear pieces. I optimized and modified some too. but i am not an engineer i focused more on acoustics than gear design...But be conscious that acoustics is no icing on a cake but half the job of creating system/ room qualitative experience...

 

 

@mahgister That was an interesting post. You state that you don’t trust your “taste”, which is how it sounds, and you don’t trust measurements, and you rely strictly on knowledge. What feedback mechanism do you use to ensure that your knowledge is correctly applied if you don’t use the sound or the measurements. If by “taste” you don’t mean sound corrected, then what sound are you desiring or targeting that isn’t a “taste”? If your answer is “what it should be”, the what should it be? And how do know that? 

 

 

Dear @carlos269  : It's you who braged the target your target to listen the original MUSIC. How can you validate it? where is the evidence that confirms your words?

Yes, I'm not qualified as you are but I'm only posting an opinion and not pick a fight.

With your post you go out by the tangent. 

I kno and listen more than once the WAMM , Alexx and owned the Watt. I was at Wilson in Utha and I know its stand alone subs too . I own all Wilson recordings even before D,Wilson founded Wilson Audio.

 

R.

A tough balancing act for sure.  In addition to musicality and resolution there's also the issue of tonal balance.  Some products in an effort to be musical or resolute alter the tonal balance.  This can be fun at first but ultilmately you'll grow tired of the improper rendering of instruments.  It's rare for a product to balance all three of these ideals.  Since speakers are the final link in the chain they will tend to make or break this balancing act.  The only speakers I have found to balance all three are the Vivid Audio speakers.  And I've heard essentially all of the contenders.  

who determines which end result is better? More valid? More accurate? More faithful to the original? And how is that confirmed and validated?

It really helps if you were at the recording session to know how things sounded at that time. 

When you are at home and lacking that experience, you can only change the sound, and possibly more pleasing to yourself. But you won't improve on it. Obviously in so doing there is no confirmation or validation. "More accurate" and "More faithful to the original" are the same thing FWIW...

This:

Sorry to tell you that I don’t know and I don’t care about that contribution as the only thing that I care and focus on is the resultant composite sound at the listening chair position.

is in direct contradiction to this:

The correct way to do it is to monitor the output signals of the source with the probes on an oscilloscope and compare those signals to the signals on a second oscilloscope probe connected at the output terminals of the amplifier. At this stage in an ideal outcome the only difference in the signals on the oscilloscope screen should be scales. Beyond the amplifier the speaker serves as an electrical to acoustical transducer and the output of the speakers can be monitored as well with a calibrated microphone to put that signal on the same screen as the other two traces for comparison. That is how accuracy is analyzed, assessed and measured.

It appears that both sides are being played. 

But arguing YouTube as a useful audio diagnostic tool is just silly.

@cleeds Agreed!!

You can't even use it to verify the system playing, since the audio can be added from any source. 

@rauliruegas +1

I couldn’t edit my previous post but my Wilson Audio WAMM subwoofer towers that I use in my WAAR reference system are actually Series VII (7) and made of the “X” composite material, unlike previous series which were made from MDF. 

Here you can see them:

Wilson Audio WAMM Series VII in WAAR reference system

And here you can hear them in action:

Battle of Stalingrad

Bamako

Piggy

St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain

Bass and Drum Intro (Live)

Pink Panther

Rumbero