Sublime Sound

[Folsom]

I disagree that you can cover up artifacts, especially electronic based ones. You can pile other distortions on top of the existing distortions and you usually end up with something just as bad or even worse than what you started with. A good example was some early chinese DACs that wanted to cash in on being "tube" DACs. They would simply slap a cathode follower stage on the end of a bog standard SS stage, usually with multiple opamps. The result was some tube syrup (from a poorly designed tube stage) added onto the synthetic sounding opamp output stage.

This is what a lot of people try to do as well with a tube preamp and a SS amp. They think the tube stage will add some "sweetness " to their analytical sounding SS amp. What you really get typically is something of the worst of both worlds. That is not to say that two really good stages that are different tech can't be designed to work well together and complement each other, but unless designed together you are playing hit and miss. Far better to have a pre and amp that are natural in their lack of audible artifacts than one with flaws that you are trying to compensate for with other, opposite flaws.

Define artifact please... Everyone is slanging that term around like it actually applies. Unless a stereo is broken then anything you hear is on the recording (barring uncleaned LPs). Literally every bit of it. The problem is stereos cause aberrations to the music, so something benign suddenly sounds totally out of place, or all wrong. They don’t add noises of their own unless broken. Even a poorly setup cartridge ringing like crazy, is still changing the sound of the record, not just throwing a new noise into the mix because it only rings when it is excited by certain frequencies. At most I’d say some people hate there being a trace of the studio - the irony being if you remove it the music usually sounds dull.

As far as covering up, I have no idea how you think that’s not possible. Given that what audiophiles often call distortions in the music isn’t actual distortion, it’s really not appropriate to say you can’t cover up something with distortion or consistent aberration. I would call kitty litter boxes a consistent aberration. And also it seems like a fair amount of equipment would prefer to limit the dynamic headroom otherwise you notice a glaring flaw when it can’t deliver at some peak moment.

I’d even go as far to say people like consistent aberrations enough that there are plenty that make it into the “natural” camp, and ultimately help to reduce undesirable sound that’s included with the music, or simply homogenize it so you don’t detect anything. It may sound right, but only conveniently coincidentally discovered to assist in avoid a flaw from the music production process.

The major mistake is believing everything good to the ears is derived from objectively good for measurements and ethos of the stereo equipment. It just is not so. Natural or HiFi, it isn’t a line in the sand for what is objectively better with the equipment in any way. One just sounds better to one person but maybe not another. And it will always be that way until some out of this world technology radically changes everything we to be true about the process of recording and delivering to a medium.

Think about it, do you consider floppy-ass boxes used with vintage speakers to be objectively good? No, no one actually thinks that. But those wise enough to listen might be using $130k Lamm amps on a garage sale find, perfectly content. So maybe what you think you know isn’t true how you think it is, or maybe certain aberrations that are consistent in the right way are simply more pleasurable. Those floppy box speakers could measure well or poor, either way they offend every inkling every audio mind has about what’s “better”. It’s not a surprise since so few audiophiles understand some common things when it boils down to actual physics or electronics - and it’s not necessary anyways but somehow forums are full of people going in circles about everything.

 

[PeterA]

Dusty knew the audiophile's struggle....

 

[the sound of Tao]

Dusty knew the audiophile's struggle....

Wonderful

 

[morricab]

People do not always have the resources to know everything and have the budget to buy the right component at the time of purchase. As they have moved through their hobby, various constraints at different times means they will have imperfect gear every now and then. So to think you will have the perfect neutral colorless system without artefacts won't happen, and whatever your final goal is, you might at various points be away from it. That is not the issue.

The issue is to accept what you have and be honest to yourself about it, rather than thinking you have that dream system everyone on the forum wants that will wow visitors. If someone says they want hifi imaging, they should. But if they indeed want natural sound for classical, and end up with the stereotypical audio show system that sounds good on Diana Krall, Stockfish, and stuff, then there is a problem. Same for fixing artefacts. Not everyone will be able to fix the problems they inherit when they buy components separately in compromised rooms, thing is to realize what one has and what one doesn't, and be at peace with it.

This tells me you misunderstand at least some of the purpose for going to shows...it is to gain exposure to gear you do not previously know or can afford to try at home. Of course it can also be for window shopping and lead maybe to a future purchase. Also, if you have a good technical understanding for gear and WHY a designer has made certain choices and which kinds of electronic topologies give consistently good sound or rarely good sound it allows you to start to weed out undesirable mistakes.

There is no such thing as a colorless system...but not all colorations are so destructive to allowing a natural sound. This is why the topology and not just the execution of the device matters. Different topologies generate different distortion patterns that are more or less "synthetic" psychoacoustically and this has a huge impact on the perception of realism.

Your currently desired super speaker (Altec with double 15s in a short front loaded horn) has plenty of coloration that does not necessarily destroy believability once you adapt to the colorations...but colored it most ceratinly is...the question is how is that relevant to realistic, natural or believable sound (take your pick on the adjectives).

 

[bonzo75]

This tells me you misunderstand at least some of the purpose for going to shows...it is to gain exposure to gear you do not previously know or can afford to try at home. Of course it can also be for window shopping and lead maybe to a future purchase. Also, if you have a good technical understanding for gear and WHY a designer has made certain choices and which kinds of electronic topologies give consistently good sound or rarely good sound it allows you to start to weed out undesirable mistakes.

If I follow this advice, based on Munich, I will weed out too many, and some unfairly so. And then it will be a further injustice to my forum friends to report negatively on those components based on Munich experiences. I go to Munich for fun, because of addiction, to meet people, and to listen to the WE

Your currently desired super speaker (Altec with double 15s in a short front loaded horn) has plenty of coloration that does not necessarily destroy believability once you adapt to the colorations...but colored it most ceratinly is...the question is how is that relevant to realistic, natural or believable sound (take your pick on the adjectives).

Altec is more desirable for its midbass woofers and the dual FLH design (which can also be done with JBL, GIP, and others). The Altec upper midrange is colored, but can be changed to TAD or Radian beryllium for a very different sound, neutral, nuanced, and detailed which is what I am planning. But to the point of your post, yes, I will choose the Altec midrange driver or a Tannoy, which I can see are more colored than say Magico, but overall with the speaker have a more real and natural sound. I like the TAD and Radian midrange and up better than Altec but I like the 817 I heard overall better than Universum and Tang's despite more color, as overall realism is higher to more uniform linearity and coherence that flows from the integration of the midbass. So there is part color, part rest of the design

 

[morricab]

"Unless a stereo is broken then anything you hear is on the recording (barring uncleaned LPs). Literally every bit of it."

This is patently untrue. All distortions are CREATED by the electronics and transducers (cartridge and speakers) and are sounds you can hear that are not on the recording. These precisely what I am talking about as potentially being destructive to natural sound. Also, they are what I am referring to as "artifacts". You can add other distortions such as jitter (digital) or speed variations (analog) as artifacts of reprorduction as well...and they are certainly audible. Noise through the power would also be artifacts not on the recordings...I am frankly surprised at this comment by you...you should know better.


"As far as covering up, I have no idea how you think that’s not possible. Given that what audiophiles often call distortions in the music isn’t actual distortion, it’s really not appropriate to say you can’t cover up something with distortion or consistent aberration."

My experience is that you may mask it a bit but listen for a while and that original offensive distortion is still there and still audible. It might take longer to perceive it but once you have heard it again you will not unhear it and now you have additional distortions in the mix. I have found that with constant aberrations (like from speakers) you can often adapt to them to where you basically stop hearing them...until you go away and come back again to listen. I have hear this with a lot of vintage speakers where upon first listen you are stunned by the level of coloration but after awhile you stop noticing the issues so much and hear what they do really well like dynamics and presence. Then you go away and hear some live music and then come back and hear the coloration again for a while. Some speaker colorations you don't get used to because depending on the level and frequency they are constantly changing and this is the problem also with many electronic colorations...they are constantly changing with the music and so your brain doesn't mask them.


"I’d even go as far to say people like consistent aberrations enough that there are plenty that make it into the “natural” camp, and ultimately help to reduce undesirable sound that’s included with the music, or simply homogenize it so you don’t detect anything."

Yes, consistent aberrations can be largely ignored and may not necessarily impact on a natural sound. It is not perceived as negatively "synthetic"; however, most electronic distortion patterns simply do no happen in nature so our ear/brain has not evolved to understand this sound other than that it is not natural. This, therefore, cannot be "gotten used to". It is far easier with speakers because ultimately they are mostly mechanical machines pumping air...like real sounds in nature. Therefore, a lot of their distortions are of simple order that the ear/brain is used to working with and it is possible then to adapt to a given sound.

"The major mistake is believing everything good to the ears is derived from objectively good for measurements and ethos of the stereo equipment. It just is not so."

I have never made this mistake so I don't think you are referring to me. Otherwise, I would likely not have SET amps and horn speakers. I believe in what is psychoacoustically correct...that to me is true objectivity in audio.


"Think about it, do you consider floppy-ass boxes used with vintage speakers to be objectively good? No, no one actually thinks that. But those wise enough to listen might be using $130k Lamm amps on a garage sale find, perfectly content. So maybe what you think you know isn’t true how you think it is, or maybe certain aberrations that are consistent in the right way are simply more pleasurable"

It is hard to say how good they are objectively...have you measured them? Psychoacoustically, some of them are very good...probably because they were largely designed by people who could hear well and not by computer. The compression drivers were very good and at home listening levels have very low distortion...the horns used were diffraction types that are probably more colored than today's horns but they still were pretty effective sounding. Bass was probably the weakest part of old speakers and perhaps we have learned a thing or two there. Not sure what your point is about Lamm amps...they are quite good sounding I find but maybe not worth the asking price.

I think in general the reduction of aberrations (distortions) that are audible is a good thing and leads to more natural sound. Some distortions are clearly worse than others...but absence is best. Since no electronics or speakers are truly absent of distortions then to choose the less psychoacoustically damaging path is for me the best we can do in the hear and now...maybe someday a truly linear amplification device will exist and truly coloration free speakers with unlimited dynamics will exist but I am not holding my breath.

 

[tima]

So even though realism had increased, at the same time the sound had in a sense also become less 'natural' due the greater prominence of artifacts. If I would have gone the 'natural' route, I might have opted to again go for a less 'offensive' sound, and sold off the new components. That, however, would have been a HUGE mistake.

Instead I chose to stick to the new level of realism that the new system provided and to work on reducing the artifacts, in the confidence that there was nothing inherently wrong with my gear choices, but that I had to work on the acoustic environment instead. Later the introduction of a preamp from the same manufacturer as of my amp finally let all the pieces fall together, eventually also aided by further improvements in speaker setup. The result was, BOTH in terms of realism AND naturalness (in the sense described), vastly better than before. The holistic sound experience is in my view also much better than before.

I let realism be my primary guide, and from that vantage point I was addressing remaining artifacts. Had I chosen a 'natural' sound, in terms of lack of distracting artifacts, as my primary guide instead, this would have been a grave mistake and the final result would not have been of the high and thoroughly engaging quality that I enjoy now.

my emphasis

This post isn't directly written to you, Al. However, some of what you wrote triggered (oh my) me to think about how we're describing sound & music in this thread. As usual I'm interested in the vocabulary. In this case more so than the actual experience because some (many?) of us know "natural sound" fairly well and that knowledge will not help us go foward in codifying or dis-ambigufying (!) the words we use when talking about sound.

My first reaction to your post was that you are differentiating between "Realism" and "Natural". Are you?

Last year I started writing about what I call one's basis of preference and divied the audiophile world into two broad camps: those that adopt the sound of live acoustic music as their reference for guiding and assessing their systems and those that choose what they like or prefer to hear, what sounds best to them as their guide. The latter is capable of shifting over time as one's 'sounds best' can evolve. The former is impossible to achieve. I labeled the former as Naturalists and the latter as Synthesists. (cf. post #27 in thread "What's Best? The Absolute Sound or today's High End Systems?)

Several people (maybe yourself or Folsom) did not care for the name Synthesist. It was the best I could come up with at the time, and, while I defended it as such, I was never wholly satisfied with the term. Your post injected the word "realism" into the current discussion of natural. That leads me now to rename the Synthesist perspective as New Realism which lacks the synthetic (artificial) association, is more forward leaning and perhaps more acceptable as a group name. Fwiw, I suggest there is neither positive nor negative connotation associated to these bases of preference - we don't get to say "your preference is wrong."

Which leads me to this talk of 'distortion and artifacts' (whatever those are.) More or less of these are not the special provence of either camp and both will prefer to increase, reduce or remove them as brings them closer to their goal.

Now for the hard part ....

Of "Natural" David (@ddk) wrote: "it is how much the system disappears and gets out of the way of music." "Natural" is when the emotional along with artistic conent of music conveyed with as little electronic and mechanical presence as possible to the point that it gets beyond reproduction and becomes real to our many senses."

That account is close to what I (and perhaps Graham) describe as the limbic-level experience.
Is that experience - where the system goes away leaving only music - unique to either the Naturalist or the New Realist?

 

[the sound of Tao]

On the contrary in the right settings my (musical)epiphanies are rather short lived Like Ron i prefer “Girl with guitar “ situations

I struggle to resist, Milan I know you are not one for sermons whether on or off the mount but girl with guitar is not completely you!! Too highly strung!!!

 

[morricab]

If I follow this advice, based on Munich, I will weed out too many, and some unfairly so. And then it will be a further injustice to my forum friends to report negatively on those components based on Munich experiences. I go to Munich for fun, because of addiction, to meet people, and to listen to the WE



Altec is more desirable for its midbass woofers and the dual FLH design (which can also be done with JBL, GIP, and others). The Altec upper midrange is colored, but can be changed to TAD or Radian beryllium for a very different sound, neutral, nuanced, and detailed which is what I am planning. But to the point of your post, yes, I will choose the Altec midrange driver or a Tannoy, which I can see are more colored than say Magico, but overall with the speaker have a more real and natural sound. I like the TAD and Radian midrange and up better than Altec but I like the 817 I heard overall better than Universum and Tang's despite more color, as overall realism is higher to more uniform linearity and coherence that flows from the integration of the midbass. So there is part color, part rest of the design

So you weed out a few that don't deserve...so what? Most electronics, IMO, suck anyway...surprisingly less speakers suck I think.

Altec horns will color the sound regardless of the driver...sure you will hear differences in drivers but the old diffraction style horns have their own sound.

 

[bonzo75]

Lagonda this is "naturalist". Note the L

 

[tima]

Too highly strung!!!

Who? The girl, the guitar, or Lagonda?

 

[bonzo75]

So you weed out a few that don't deserve...so what? Most electronics, IMO, suck anyway...surprisingly less speakers suck I think.

Altec horns will color the sound regardless of the driver...sure you will hear differences in drivers but the old diffraction style horns have their own sound.

Oh you are talking about the multicell horn. To start with, many Altec guys are not using the old metal multicell. There is a much more modern wooden replica without the resonance issues of the old. And you can use JMLC or radial if you choose.

 

[the sound of Tao]

my emphasis

This post isn't directly written to you, Al. However, some of what you wrote triggered (oh my) me to think about how we're describing sound & music in this thread. As usual I'm interested in the vocabulary. In this case more so than the actual experience because some (many?) of us know "natural sound" fairly well and that knowledge will not help us go foward in codifying or dis-ambigufying (!) the words we use when talking about sound.

My first reaction to your post was that you are differentiating between "Realism" and "Natural". Are you?

Last year I started writing about what I call one's basis of preference and divied the audiophile world into two broad camps: those that adopt the sound of live acoustic music as their reference for guiding and assessing their systems and those that choose what they like or prefer to hear, what sounds best to them as their guide. The latter is capable of shifting over time as one's 'sounds best' can evolve. The former is impossible to achieve. I labeled the former as Naturalists and the latter as Synthesists. (cf. post #27 in thread "What's Best? The Absolute Sound or today's High End Systems?)

Several people (maybe yourself or Folsom) did not care for the name Synthesist. It was the best I could come up with at the time, and, while I defended it as such, I was never wholly satisfied with the term. Your post injected the word "realism" into the current discussion of natural. That leads me now to rename the Synthesist perspective as New Realism which lacks the synthetic (artificial) association, is more forward leaning and perhaps more acceptable as a group name. Fwiw, I suggest there is neither positive nor negative connotation associated to these bases of preference - we don't get to say "your preference is wrong."

Which leads me to this talk of 'distortion and artifacts' (whatever those are.) More or less of these are not the special provence of either camp and both will prefer to increase, reduce or remove them as brings them closer to their goal.

Now for the hard part ....

Of "Natural" David (@ddk) wrote: "it is how much the system disappears and gets out of the way of music." "Natural" is when the emotional along with artistic conent of music conveyed with as little electronic and mechanical presence as possible to the point that it gets beyond reproduction and becomes real to our many senses."

That account is close to what I (and perhaps Graham) describe as the limbic-level experience.
Is that experience - where the system goes away leaving only music - unique to either the Naturalist or the New Realist?

I very much aligned with your synthesist notion Tim. I felt it very apt. It’s fine to create a personal bridge to connect to music but for some of us a segue through the realm of what feels and seems and sounds natural is a grounding benchmark.

Nature provides us with our most essential reference. Music was the first language, it assures us a deeply bound connection to those around us, it is not just an idea, it is a core resonance that reaches into us and reminds us of what it is to be human, to be vulnerable, to feel. It stops us from being abstracts. That is the issue with synthesis... it is remote and filtered and is a break from the real. It is too easy to hide in that mindset.

 

[the sound of Tao]

Who? The girl, the guitar, or Lagonda?

Lol

 

[morricab]

Oh you are talking about the multicell horn. To start with, many Altec guys are not using the old metal multicell. There is a much more modern wooden replica without the resonance issues of the old. And you can use JMLC or radial if you choose.

Wooden replica has the same basic issues but might sound better due to material change. Modern horns such as JMLC or the IWATA that I have are clearly less colored and what would be preferrable, IMO.

 

[bonzo75]

Wooden replica has the same basic issues but might sound better due to material change. Modern horns such as JMLC or the IWATA that I have are clearly less colored and what would be preferrable, IMO.

You haven't heard the wooden multicell. Either way what I am saying it doesn't matter, one can use either. They were not the reason for going or not going Altec anyway.

 

[the sound of Tao]

Wooden replica has the same basic issues but might sound better due to material change. Modern horns such as JMLC or the IWATA that I have are clearly less colored and what would be preferrable, IMO.

Also very much looking forward to Duke’s new horn CD exploration.

 

[bonzo75]

Also very much looking forward to Duke’s new horn exploration.

He is using constant directivity horn.

Guys, one day Peter will wake up and turn his thread into a horn thread, but I don't think we should turn it into one before he wakes up today

 

[the sound of Tao]

He is using constant directivity horn.

Guys, one day Peter will wake up and turn his thread into a horn thread, but I don't think we should turn it into one before he wakes up today

Wise words. Yes back on topic... apologies on that segue Peter.

 

[morricab]

You haven't heard the wooden multicell. Either way what I am saying it doesn't matter, one can use either. They were not the reason for going or not going Altec anyway.

Yes, I have at some French guy's house. You shouldn't assume what has or has not been heard.