Yes, I did. It's not to my taste for what I would want from my own system, but I welcome the opportunity to hear a very different sound perspective. It helps making the hobby interesting.
Peter A.’s System: A Perspective on Natural Sound
- Thread starter Al M.
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Yes, I did. It's not to my taste for what I would want from my own system, but I welcome the opportunity to hear a very different sound perspective. It helps making the hobby interesting.
Interestingly, none of Peter's bullet points about "Natural Sound" mentions timbre:
- No aspect of the sound calls attention to itself
- The sound is balanced
- The system sound is absent from the presentation
- Wide listening window: able to enjoy most/all genres of music
- Portrays the character of each recording, nuanced venue information
- Allows a wide range of volume adjustment for what is most appropriate for a particular recording and still be engaged
- Superior information retrieval
- Natural resolution, not “detail”
- Able to scale up and down, large to small
- No “sound”, only music
- Room is energized and music is “alive”
- Enjoyable outside of listening sweet spot
- Images are stable as listener moves around the room
- Draws listener into the music
- Relaxing, zero fatigue
- Open, effortless, and dynamic sound
- No need to crank the volume
- No added or artificial extension
- No analysis of the sound into bits and pieces, music experienced as a whole
- Result is beauty and emotion.
Yes. For me it's a fine line between "unfatiguing" and "unengaging."
From your point of view, and if you have your own definition of natural sound, do you think timbre is a part of it and how significant would it be amongst other attributes
Peaks were 95 dBa (ca. 100 dB) on a lot of music, but not all. I wouldn't want to hear Almeida/Brown that loudly.
The peaks were peaks, I wouldn't want to listen at a constant volume of 95 dBa. I like my ears to have a longer life.
Haven't tested how the system scales through different volume levels.
@bonzo75 I wasn't being funny. It seems like it would be more efficient for Ack to visit than as Al questions.
Getting timbre right was a literal conversion moment for me. My CDP had always been good at it, not so much my TT. Changing to an updated version of my tonearm provided gobsmacking realism on timbre. Jazz LPs w twin horns that were unremarkable and a bit homogenized before suddenly felt like real people playing real instruments.
It was one of those pivotal moments where I felt I'd made real progress to way more realistic sound.
I can't imagine any natural sound checklist not including timbral accuracy.
Thx Al. However, you should consider carefully your initial knee jerk response to hearing the aggressiveness of your system again after Peter’s. There is something important there as a lesson for your system I think.This is a continuation of my report on the experience of listening to Peter A.’s system.
For his system, see:
Natural Sound
I contacted David Karmeli two years ago to discuss what he referred to as Natural Sound. Thus began a series of experiments that resulted over the last two months in the complete replacement of my SME/Pass Labs/Magico based audio system. That system was the context around which I wrote my...www.whatsbestforum.com
In this post, I will try to define, from my perspective, what is a central part of the essence of Peter’s Natural Sound compared to other system sounds that strive to portray a natural sound.
***
When you sit close to musicians and their instruments during a live performance of unamplified music, there is often a more pronounced “leading edge” to the notes, a more pronounced initial transient.
As you move further away in the performance space, the initial transient is less emphasized, and the emphasis shifts to the sustain and decay phase of the notes.
It also works the other way around, when your listening position is fixed, but the performer changes their position from further away to closer to you (or the other way around). I experienced this a few years ago during a memorable, incredibly well played concert by the ensemble Sound Icon of the music of German avantgarde composer Wolfgang Rihm in the German Consulate in Boston, USA (nice performance space with huge ceilings). At a piece for violin and piano, the violinist played next to the pianist whose instrument was a bit further away from the audience (but still considerably closer than in many concert venues). Transients were rounded and less emphatic. This changed for a piece where the piano was not involved, and the violinist came to stand closer to the audience. Transients were more pronounced, with more obvious “leading edge”.
When the violinist later that evening was part of a 4-part ensemble playing String Quartet No. 12 by the composer, she sat very close to my seat, perhaps as close as just 6 feet away, and bowing transients were very pronounced, as was all micro-detail arising from the interaction of bow with strings. Overall, this was the most detailed string quartet sound that I have ever heard in my life. It was pure sonic fireworks.
After hearing my system a few days before I heard his again, Peter told me that, compared to the MM cartridge, I would like the vdH cartridge better, with its slight emphasis on leading edge and high energy. That was a very good observation. Not only was it true, it also set me up for thinking about his Natural Sound in terms of leading edge of transients, especially after I listened to my system again afterwards. Peter also had characterized the vdH cartridge in his comment to me as having “a more aggressive and forward presentation”.
When I listened to my system again a day after hearing Peter’s, I was shocked. It sounded very aggressive to me in comparison, and that was because of a much more emphasized leading edge of transients. Of course, under normal circumstances I don’t find my system aggressive, and the impression faded quickly. I also do not find it necessarily more “aggressive” than close-up unamplified live music, which can sound pretty “aggressive” as well. As they say, it’s all relative.
Yet at that point it clicked, and I realized what a central part is of the essence of Peter’s Natural Sound: a de-emphasis of the leading edge, as you would experience more like from a mid-hall or otherwise less close perspective relative to the performing musicians. I have outlined some of this above.
In other words, Peter’s system offers a perspective on reproduced live sound that in its characteristics seems to be somewhat more mid-hall as it were. This is different from what I sometimes hear from systems, a sound that is a bit more distanced from the listener but which still carries the characteristics of close-up sound, which includes a pronounced leading edge. No, Peter’s sound has the sound characteristics of a more mid-hall sound, with less leading edge.
As far as sound experience in Peter’s room goes, the distance perspective relative to that type of sound is natural: it is in general not particularly close-up either.
Thus, Peter’s Natural Sound is one very particular perspective on what natural sound can be, a more mid-hall perspective with the sound characteristics that come with that, including a de-emphasized leading edge of transients. It is a unique take. A more close-up perspective with a more pronounced transient leading edge is of course not necessarily less “natural”, it may just reflect the sound characteristics of more close-up live music. Ddk also says that Natural Sound is a unique sound, although I am not sure if he means by that what I hear in Peter’s system.
Certainly, systems that emphasize a leading edge more, as mine does, should not always do so either. Mine doesn’t in fact; with less close-miked sounds I get a perspective on distance and transient behavior that is closer in sound to Peter’s system.
Frequently, more emphasized transients are associated with more “speed” of a system’s sound. Yet does the sound of a live performance of unamplified music have less “speed” when sitting mid-hall, where transients are less pronounced, than when sitting close to the performers? Of course not, it is still the natural speed of the instrument’s sound, uninhibited by electronic artifacts that could “slow it down” in system reproduction. It is just a different sound perspective, not a “slower” one.
Therefore, it would seem fallacious to characterize Peter’s sound with less emphasis on transients as “slower”. Certainly, if you associate dynamics with “speed”, as I do, in some cases that was exemplary. The guitar on Kenny Burrell’s “Midnight Blue” was explosively dynamic, with each note leaping out of the speakers with immense power. Yet despite the dynamics, compared to reproduction in my system every note still had less leading edge.
So there seems no obvious reason of associating less leading edge with a “slow” sound. In fact, sound with unnaturally etched transients can be the slow one. For example, the etched transients from early digital did not come from the fact that it had more “speed”, but because it was slow. As I see it, earlier digital simply did not have the computer power to process signal through D/A conversion and filtering in a sufficiently fast manner (lousy analog opamp output stages may not have helped either), and thus the sound was “hanging on to” the leading edge of transients for too long, dragging it out, and through this lack of speed emphasized them in an unnatural manner, making them “etched”. Of course, you can get “etched” transients in home production through other factors as well. For example, I could not believe how much more nimble and nuanced (i.e., “fast”) transients in string quartet playing became when I exchanged a smaller rug around my listening seat with a larger one that had a basket-weave pattern (aiding diffusion) and covered the wood floor in that area completely. Uncontrolled room reflections prior to that change had blurred the sound, this blurring had made it “slower”, and as a result transients had been more “etched”. That's the advantage of concert venues; short-distance, early reflections are not gleefully at the ready to ruin the sound at any time, as they are in many home settings with their much smaller acoustics.
Yet again, if transients are pronounced, but “fast” enough as to resemble sounds from live music close up, there is nothing wrong and unnatural with such transient emphasis on close-miked recordings. It is all a matter of sound perspective.
In fact, sometimes transients cannot be pronounced enough in a close-up perspective of system reproduction. For example, in the above mentioned concert of Rihm’s music in the German Consulate in Boston, the piano, while being a bit further away from the audience, was still much closer than you would experience even in most other smaller venues. As a result, and as a characteristic of Rihm’s avantgarde music, transients could be outright brutal (the fact that this came from the excellent playing of a petite Asian woman showed that it was more about technique than about sheer physical power). The pianist was sometimes hammering single, spaced apart, dry staccato chords at fortissimo or even ffff volume, and while I found the reproduction of a similar piece by the composer at home satisfactory, the transients were clearly somewhat slower, more blurred. In the meantime, I have much better, “faster”, speakers, and my room acoustics are less blurring, so I am confident that now the sound comes much closer to what I then heard live.
(cont.)
Even up close live does not have the same kind of leading edge attack that aggressive hifi systems have...it is simply something completely different and obvious to hear the difference. My daughter can blatt her trumpet right by my ear and it is STILL not got that synthetic leading edge bite that indicates agresssion. IMO, you are hearing pentode based distortion and SS DAC artifacts. Peter’s system is totally absent those components.
Yep it is the distortion that hurts. Highs have to be distortion free they don't hurt, and they don't hurt in concert halls either
Sure, Brad, you don't like my Octave amplification, I know that. If you would hear my system you would be shocked, and maybe even fall off your chair. It would not at all sound as you think -- dare I say, much more natural. With much better timbre than you think (I believe I can safely deduce this from your previous posts on the subject).
I did carefully consider my reaction, and came to the conclusions I always have. There is nothing wrong with the system, except a few distortions that I have already very much reduced with my more recent changes in set-up, but which I cannot completely eliminate. I am pretty sure these remaining distortions have little to do with my amplification or DAC (which I both have heard elsewhere too), and more with room and perhaps the speakers (even though these are also much more capable than I had anticipated initially), and perhaps with in-wall electrical wiring which I intend to have changed at some point. I did apply a very slight bit more speaker toe-out after hearing Peter's system.
Nothing is perfect, and overall I still like my version of "natural" the best for my own tastes. I hear distortions in every system, by the way, including in Peter's.
They don't hurt in concert halls since there are minimal short-distance, early reflections.
I cannot count the many times where I have blamed HF distortions on the gear and instead it had been the room and reflections from the gear (which I now have moved away from the speakers as far as possible in my current configuration). It's room, room, room and set-up in the room -- too many people don't pay sufficient attention to that.
Every time I took more care of room and set-up issues, HF distortion was reduced, to a point where it is now dramatically down from where it had been a few years ago. All the time it was not the gear.
You have wise words, Brad. I just returned from 4 days at my mum and dads. I heard my dad playing around 1.5hrs each day - various stuff including Bach, Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin and Ravel. Anyway - never did I hear any of the leading edge that draws attention to itself or hurts in any way. Just not there at all. This was sat around 10 feet from his Mason & Hamlin grand. Yes it is nimble and quick with no overhang unless he is using the pedal. One area that stuck out for me was the total absence of box colour in the lower register but with big juicy tonal colour and weight.
C weighted Is how it’s usually measured for audio as far as I know. It measures about 20 db higher!
Piano now is no problem at all on my system (after all the acoustic and set-up changes, see above). No transient edge that "hurts", nothing, even when played loudly. "The total absence of box colour in the lower register but with big juicy tonal colour and weight". Yes, I get that too. The latter not like live, no system does, but to a large extent (box color is practically non-existent).
Strings can be more problematic sometimes -- when played loudly --, but that has improved dramatically as well.
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