But you still are dodging my initial question: what the hell does accurate mean? Accurate to what?
Not dodging, but it isn't a simple answer. It is pretty simple with electronics, but transducers are much more difficult, as your follow-up questions reveal...
Accurate tonally?...Accurate frequency wise?
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume these are the same thing. And they're a good start. Speakers that have even and pretty flat FR on, and reasonably far off axis, almost always sound better when the recordings sound better.
This one doesn't exist; it's the achilles' heel. The speaker/room interface is going to create it's own space. Period. And it if is anything like the performance space, hell, that's just luck. Imagining that you're there, in the concert hall, is just that - imagining. It's fun, though.
Accurate to a real instrument?
No, of course not. The recording almost alway changes the sound of the real instrument, at least subtly, sometimes radically. That begins with the microphone and progresses further from the instrument with each additional step. It would be completely ridiculous to expect a playback system to know more than the recording. That is its entire reality until it hits your room.
The master tape? The digital recording?
Assuming that the disc or file you have is an accurate representation, yes, the master, of course. What else?
I hate to tell you but few recordings are accurate reproductions of the original work tape or bits put down on the computer.
Of course not. There is an entire stage of processing between the work tape and reproduction. The aforementioned master.
And why is it that accurate and musical are mutually exclusive.
They're not mutually exclusive, but they're not directly related, either. One has to do with the emotional content in a performance, the other has to do with the technical fidelity of a reproduction system. Unless you're talking about the conceit that is the common audiophile misuse of the term "musical," which loosely translates into "my personal preference is mysteriously superior to that which I do not prefer, in spite of the fact that it is measurably, verifiably, and objectively less faithful to the recording."
You write as if all manufacturers purposely color their equipment.
No, just some. Though often the ones that are more "musical."
About the only (ex)-reviewers qualified to judge whether a component was accurate were David Wilson or the late JGH who used their own recordings to review with and was there at the original recording session.
I doubt that their aural memories were even close to good enough for that. With electronics, good measurements and A/B listening against a benchmark can get us a really good idea of how transparent a component is. It's really difficult with speakers, no doubt.
Tim
