Is it harder to tune, the better it gets.

Kingrex

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Feb 3, 2019
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As equipment get better and better, gear that is close to the live sound, more true and natural, does it actually get harder to extract good sound and tune the system. When you have a very resolving system, is it showing you more that may create adverse problems if the setup is wrong. When you start getting more resolving, are you actually getting near the fatigue point, while staying out of it. If the setup is then wrong, is it easier to push over the top and go bad?? Thoughts??????
 
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sbnx

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Mar 28, 2017
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Yes. I believe this is true. The closer you get to perfection the more slight imperfections stand out. This is why I also think that some gear has a wide margin of latitude in achieving good sound and others require very precise matching and setup to sound good but can move on to great if the time and effort is invested.

Here is a graph from a really old issue of Stereophile. The y-axis they call "goose bump factor" or how good it can get and the X-axis is how precise the position needs to be. They compare two speakers. One can way outclass the other but only in a very narrow window. The other one achieve good results with a lot of latitude. Of course this is not a real graph but just used to illustrate the point.

~Todd
 

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Atmasphere

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As equipment get better and better, gear that is close to the live sound, more true and natural, does it actually get harder to extract good sound and tune the system. When you have a very resolving system, is it showing you more that may create adverse problems if the setup is wrong. When you start getting more resolving, are you actually getting near the fatigue point, while staying out of it. If the setup is then wrong, is it easier to push over the top and go bad?? Thoughts??????
I don't encounter this at all! IME if I have really good equipment, it 'want's to work and if I get it set up close it works pretty well. In the case of tonearms though setting up the cartridge correctly is pretty important so I don't skimp there but I will on speaker placement as getting a good center image is a breeze. Good equipment does not editorialize regardless of the signal.
 

Folsom

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I don’t think so. Some things will matter less, but for other stuff way more character will come through.

Considering the things you are “approaching” are probably largely artificial (I say this because of the word *live*), it’s impossible to be arriving at an “unchangeable truth”.

Also I think that stereophile picture is good humor.
 
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Alrainbow

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Rex I think being happy is paramount to all. To pursue better is fine but to know when it is remains difficult. an example is if you don’t have a reference as in live events and even better is you record them is needed. If not what you may do is a possible fix of last weeks mistakes. for me being digital for many years. It was not until i got back to analog tape and vinyl did it occur to me the corrections were more wondering around. an old TT and new 350 cart with more old phono stages showed me a direction with clarity. it also showed me there is a lot more good sounding music then I thought in the past. Getting your system balanced makes this happen. but to get there tools are needed. live music is one and an analog ref is too. I hope this makes sense if not oh well I tried.
 
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stehno

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As equipment get better and better, gear that is close to the live sound, more true and natural, does it actually get harder to extract good sound and tune the system.

Shouldn't "good sound" and less tuning be the result of better equipment?

When you have a very resolving system, is it showing you more that may create adverse problems if the setup is wrong.

Again, shouldn't a more musical playback presentation be the end result of a "very resolving system"? Though the journey never ends, shoudn't a "very resolving system" create fewer adverse problems rather than more even if the setup is wrong (whatever that means)?

When you start getting more resolving, are you actually getting near the fatigue point, while staying out of it.

Remember that more resolving really implies hearing more detail already embedded in the recording and generally that only happens when our playback systems' much raised noise floors are lowered with every legitimate improvement. That said, theoretically the answer should be no. Ear fatiuge is almost always the derivitive of both audible and inaudible distortions. There are audible distortions like digital noise that when amplifed thru the processing chain can be rather unpleasant.

But there are also inaudible distortions that result in less music info heard at the speaker than what was read from the recording and proceessed - again we're talking a raised noise floor (resulting from all distortions) where the higher the playback system's noise floor, the less music info that remains audible at the speaker. The inverse being the lower the playback system's noise floor, the more music info read from the recording and processed will remain audible at the speaker.

Think percentages of music info remaining audible at the speaker compared to that quantity of music info read from the recording. And this can be broken down to the single note of a single instrument as well. For example. Take the sharp strike of a closely mic'd piano's upper register keys. Without going into detail, when played back at or near live performance volume levels, this should cause ear bleed as well as anything for the simple reason that what we hear at our ears from the speakers is mostly the direct info from keys to the mic with little or no ambient info (the first music info to become inaudible from a raised noise floor). So in essense we hear the piano's sharp upper registers almost as if it's a laser beam headed straight for our ears. Terms likely used here are breakup or flattening out.

If the setup is then wrong, is it easier to push over the top and go bad?? Thoughts??????

I've no clue what you mean by setup is all wrong. Push over the top? Impossible because there's no such thing as detail greater than 100%. Not in a live performance nor in a recording. A live performance contains exactly 100% detail whatever your listening perspective may be. No more and no less. A recording contains exactly 100% detail of whatever the recording mic's captured and has been embedded within. No more and no less. So if we can only strive toward hearing 100% (not 101%) of the music info read and remaining audible at the speaker, how is it possible to go over the top?

The only time this can seem to happen is when a new improvement is made where the system becomes more resolving or more detailed. But the more detail or more resolving presentation due to the improvement also exposes more distortions Remember a truly resolving improvement cannot discern between music and distortions. Since legitimate improvements do not discriminate between music and distortions, it is not uncommon for one to exclaim, "this product is too detailed" and then they remove the product like it was some kind of evil. When in fact, the new more detailed product was simply exposing distortions somewhere in the playback chain that still need to be addressed. And yes, this can happen frequently but there's nothing pushed over the top. It's just a matter of exposing more unaddressed distortions while simultaneously exposing (keeping audible) more music info at the speaker.
 

DSkip

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I'll share my thoughts on your situation. For me, I find there is detail, and then there is texture. Detail seems to be fatiguing as it is commonly created by that hi-fi hump in the upper midrange. Texture, on the other hand, is not fatiguing and basically provides clarity at all frequencies. When you get texture, you start to get closer to the performance. A 'detailed' system fails miserably at that aspect.

Obviously there are many ways to view the terms, but in my dealings with clients who are approaching higher end levels, this has been the best way to present the different system building approaches in a way that they collectively 'get it'.
 
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Kingrex

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Maybe what I mean is, with good gear you can hear every footer, every cable. You can hear it all. When you have the wrong footer under something, it dulls the sound and/or blurs it, or the bass goes away. But what piece is it that has the wrong footer? When you have the right footer it snaps into focus and shows details you never heard. That is a small example of what I am alluding too. If I have basic low quality equipment, I can't hear audio tweaks. Who needs a $100 fuse in an amp that is so veiled and clouded you can hardly hear the difference between 10 awg feeding it or 14 awg. As the gear gets better, the attention to detail to extract its potential can seem complex. There are pages of audio tweaks. People getting more from what they have. It seems to me, the better it is, the more tweaks may influence the sound in one direction or the other. I don't think anyone can expect to plop a very nice vinyl setup onto a table and get 100% of what it has to give. Does a speaker want to be spiked or floating.

I though I had my basic setup pretty well tuned. My friend Ultrafast came over with some Stillpoints. He put them under my preamp and it was immediately apparent with them was better than without. I was leaving a lot of performance on the table. My gear was better than how I had it set up. It wasn't tuned correct.
 
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