What does the term musical mean?

[Phelonious Ponk]

I mean to say that it would sound right to the and thus also accurate to them. In other words, I suspect people adjust the sound until it sounds right with the idea that when it sounds right, it also sounds like what they believe is accurate.

I agree. I just think the right terminology for what most people are likely to get to at the end of such a process is something in the neighborhood of "I like it." I would prefer that "accurate" be reserved for something anchored to a standard broader and more reliable than individual taste. It may not matter a bit to the high end, but it is, IMO, critical to the progress toward the goal of high fidelity.

I have always followed a similar path to yours. My first goal is to get all of the signal from the disc, but then I try to get the rest of the system to sound "right." Right, to me is how it "should" sound.

I agree with that. I just think if you're pursuing anything but flat, it's never going to be "right." There will be more than enough unavoidable wild variation in the recordings, transducers and room, if you don't go for boringly accurate between those two points you're just making "right" a much more difficult goal to reach.

However, I have also been to Steve Williams and Grellman's houses. Those guys are all tubes, all the time. I'm sure you could measure enough distortion from their tube gear to fill a notebook, but damn if those systems don't sound amazingly right, too.

I've heard tube systems that sounded really good myself. Given enough headroom, I'm sure a talented designer can make a tube and SS circuit indistinguishable. I had a tube headphone amp here that I seriously doubt I could have differentiated from my solid state amp of the time in a blind test (couldn't in an informal one). But it had gobs of headroom. If I had been able to push it hard enough to strain it at the peaks without blowing out my eardrums, I'm sure I could have heard the harmonic distortion. I rode harmonic distortion like the crest of a wave for decades while driving small Fender tube amps with electric guitars. I know what it sounds like, I've heard it in hifi systems and yes, it is pleasant enough, but I wouldn't want a daily diet of it.

I suspect the key to the "rightness" of tube rigs like Steve's, like that headphone amp, is in headroom, is in minimizing the harmonic distortion. I'd love to hear his rig.

P

 

[JackD201]

That's pretty easy. One important "fingerprint" of a person's voice character - aside from pronunciation and inflection and phrasing etc - is the formant frequencies of their vocal tract.

--Ethan

Nice Ethan! I don't think it's as simple as that though because we can still tell it is ol' Blue even if the tape is off speed. One of the reasons I chose him as an example is that the man had a career that spanned decades. In those decades his tone changed and somewhere in there he damaged his throat. Yet Frank is Frank. Speed deviation, aging, and surgery all alter formant frequencies.

I like Ron's point. I hadn't factored that in. It points to the paramount importance (e.g. survival) of how the brain is wired. Association of a sound with a given environment and a person' hierarchy of priorities appear to play a huge part. Sort of like a mother being able to know her own baby's cry. Particularly interesting is the part about sounds being associated within an environment. The environment could be a physical location or better yet a contextual framework of collective experiences in various locations. This could explain how we are able to fill in the blanks and make determinations despite wildly varying levels of fidelity.

It also partially explains rsbeck's excellent and astute observation about things sounding "right" to a particular individual and how "rightness" can be had in systems (room included of course) that are very different. If a set of sounds fits the contextual framework formed by experience, the easier it is to fill in the blanks. The less blanks that need to be filled, the more "realistic". The commonalities across cultures can also be explained in large part with an assumption that all people form such frameworks similarly but it is their environments that differ. I like it!!!!!! Simple and elegant!!!!!!

So simple I should smack myself on the backside of my head. When mixing behind a board, I do construct an imaginary place in which to situate the performances in the track. I pick out where they are supposed to be and add the effects to simulate the size of the space. I even judiciously manipulate frequency to place the artist forward or back in the stage. Now that I think of it. I construct an imaginary venue every time I play a track based on the size of the group and where I'd expect to hear a group of that size. It's just so automatic in both cases, I never really thought about it.

Thanks folks! I now have a theory! Now if only it could be proven..............

As it relates to musicality, I'm not quite there yet.

Again rsbeck makes a point I agree with. If a piece of equipment by virtue of misuse or intrinsic quality (total performance parameters distortion included) distracts or detracts away from the framework, would that not qualify as amisical?

Here is where the flames might start up. Since I personally am out to recreate the illusion of being someplace else, how much license do I allow myself? I'd love to say none, but there are real world constraints. That's where the trade-offs come in.

 

[Gregadd]

Allright you guys can take it form here.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Allright you guys can take it form here.

Chicken.



P

 

[Ethan Winer]

Interesting. How would one go about doing that?

Accuracy can be assessed technically in various ways. One is to measure the frequency response and see the extent of all deviations within the audible band. For distortion you compare the original signal to the output having the added distortion, and use dB values to state the level of distortion. Another way is with a null test, where you obtain all differences between an input and an output at once, which again can be expressed as some number of dB difference. So the main "math" results generally come out as dB differences. The device with the lowest difference is the one that's most accurate.

Suppose I trust that if you measure enough aspects of a speaker's performance and get it to match another speaker so closely that you could not distinguish them from one another, wouldn't you most likely simply have another identical speaker?

Yes! Here's an anecdote that you can take for whatever you think it's worth:

Last year I brought one of my Mackie 624s to the studio of well-known mastering engineer Alan Silverman in New York City. I wanted to measure my Mackie, which I know is very flat, and compare it to a near-field measurement of one of his Revel Ultima Studio 2s which also claims to be flat. I had heard his Revel speakers a month before and was blown away. They were unbelievable. I just had to learn what was different, and how two flat speakers could sound so different!

Well, it turns out they do not sound very different at all. It was just the situation, Alan's different and much larger room, expectation, etc. When both speakers were placed side by side with their tweeters at the same height there were small differences in the response as measured and heard. But the differences were very small! Alan switched back and forth a bunch of times while I listened. At one point I thought I was hearing the Revel but it was actually my Mackie! The test was not blind, and it wasn't even a test. Alan did the switching and at one point I simply lost track of which was which. When he asked which speaker I thought was playing I guessed wrong. So I no longer lust after the Revels, though they are excellent, and probably a tiny bit better than my Mackies. But at $16k per pair versus under $1k for two Mackies, I no longer have speaker envy.

My anecdotal evidence tells me that when I take a trip to my audio boutique, all of the speakers sound pretty markedly different from one another.

Many of the high-end audio rooms I see have different sets of speakers in different parts of their untreated rooms, so that alone will make them sound different. Of course different speakers can and do sound very different! Not all speakers even aim for flat. Many have intentional dips in the "harshness" treble range to make them sound smoother and less "fatiguing."

I don't see any consensus around any set of speakers wether from objectivists or subjectivists that any one set of speakers represents 100% fidelity to the signal.

100 percent fidelity is achieved with any device when the frequency response is very flat and the distortion is very low.

This leads me to believe that everybody, no matter the philosophical stance, chooses the "colors" that sound like "accuracy" and it is (almost) always based on a subjective listening test.

Sure. But accuracy is definitely a metric, versus what someone finds subjectively pleasing. I mentioned above speakers that have an intentional dip in the harshness range. I've had people argue with me vehemently that their speaker, which I knew is 8 dB down at 3 KHz, is amazingly "accurate" simply because they like the sound.

--Ethan

 

[Ethan Winer]

Nice Ethan! I don't think it's as simple as that though because we can still tell it is ol' Blue even if the tape is off speed. One of the reasons I chose him as an example is that the man had a career that spanned decades. In those decades his tone changed and somewhere in there he damaged his throat. Yet Frank is Frank. Speed deviation, aging, and surgery all alter formant frequencies.

Again, it's not only formant frequencies, but inflection and phrasing etc. It has to be something concrete and measurable. It's not magic or unknowable!

Tape and LP speed might vary a few cents here or there, but a half-step would be pretty huge. And it's not only the absolute formant frequencies but also their relation to the other formant frequencies. My partner Doug sometimes sings on his studio customer's pop tunes. He once played me a track he sang on, and it sounded nicer and much "sweeter" than I expected. It didn't really even sound like him. He told me he slowed the track down one semi-tone while he sang, which raised the final vocal track one semi-tone.

--Ethan

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

I think we have a moving target here. Depending on where I sit at a live unamplified concert, depending on what the area around the band is set up as (the bandshell), the recording released to us to hear is really a perspective, just one perspective. Accurate to what I do not know!

There is accuracy in playing back that moving target as measured by instruments, then there is accuracy to what each of us thinks is the sound we heard at that venue, from our perspective.
(that is why I think binaural recording, despite its own inaccuracies, is more accurate than convetional stereo techniques...but given the lack of binaural recordings no need to go there)

I would hazard that a truly accurate reconstruction of the one perspective recording, due to simply the known limitations of stereo and a couple of speakers (no matter how much they cost) and the complexities of our ear/brain and emotional interface will not even sound the same from day to day because we are never the same from day to day. You know, when you are sick as a dog, even if you do fire up your big rig, how long do you want to listen to the thing?

In my opinon, despite all this, a small table top radio speaker, of good quality, will sound in a tolerable way all day long, just because it can not put out the huge amount of sound a fine big rig can, and therefore put out the weirdness (enhancement due to audiophile volume playing levels) of stereo to start with.

Stereo is an illusion and we might want to keep that in perspective as well. It is despite what tricks we can do with recording, reverbing, panning, frequency enhancement, digital cleaning up the signal, etc., still a strange facsimilie of just a perspective of the live event.

Those of you with pre audiophile approved gear may have mono switches on your gear, engage them and listen for an hour, then disengage them and listen to immdeiately hear the "stereo" effect and it sounds just like you put some kind of "sound processor" into the signal, not necessarily a bad thing, but the effect of stereo becomes readily apparent.

Yes, we can enjoy it, but I think there are just so many variables involved, that even if your reproducing gear were perfect, your human sides vagaries would cause you to try to manipulate the sound from any stereo set up, just because stereo itself is flawed. Maybe not every song, or all the time, but we are creatures of variations and moods, and throwing that into the mix really makes this hobby so variable.

There are some, I suspect, that could live with a perfect reproduction chain, putting out a very specific perspective of each song, and not touch a thing. Some..not many of them audiophiles in my estimation!!

In my world, if I could have my way for once in my life (haha), then I would want a perfect playback system, but with the tone control device of my choice.

Perhaps even better yet, let me be the record/mix engineer and be done with it. Maybe in the future, we will have access to the individual mike feeds and be able to do just that....way cool....good way to occupy those retirement years we all hope to get to.

Tom

I agree with all of that whole-heartedly, Tom, and it functions as a pretty good explanation of why I consider the source signal the reference and why I've tried to assemble, within the limits of my space, a system that is as faithful to that source as I can get it, and use eq when the source sucks. Works for me, YMMV, etc.

One question though: Other than the symphony, where are you guys finding these un-amplified acoustic concerts? In 40 years or so of attending and playing them, I don't think I've ever seen one. I've heard of private house concerts. I've participated in plenty of acoustic jams, song circles and un-amplified rehearsals. But pure acoustic public concerts? I don't know where those are going on...

P

 

[JackD201]

I'm starting to think you and I live on different planets Ethan. Our experiences are just too different. You espouse Fletcher-Munson which is a model of human perception yet cling to flat like a sailor at sea clings to a life raft. You KNOW what measures flat is not perceived as flat not even until dangerous and permanently damaging levels. The mental picture I'm starting to form of you is that it's almost like you want to get rid of all or at t least as much LF reverberation in pursuit of midrange clarity. Just to be clear, is totally flat in-room response your target?

 

[JackD201]

P

Europe in the spring is fabulous! A few years ago in Karlstad, Sweden you could find a Kornet ensemble on one corner, a jazz duo on another and little kids dancing flamenco on yet another. No wonder there was nary a stereo in sight. It made me want to live there, then the thought of 60+% personal income tax and 5 months of winter woke me up

Jack

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

p

europe in the spring is fabulous! A few years ago in karlstad, sweden you could find a kornet ensemble on one corner, a jazz duo on another and little kids dancing flamenco on yet another. No wonder there was nary a stereo in sight. It made me want to live there, then the thought of 60+% personal income tax and 5 months of winter woke me up

jack

p

 

[rsbeck]

Accuracy can be assessed technically in various ways. One is to measure the frequency response and see the extent of all deviations within the audible band. For distortion you compare the original signal to the output having the added distortion, and use dB values to state the level of distortion.

Do you measure these (and other) things in the room at the listening position?

Last year I brought one of my Mackie 624s to the studio of well-known mastering engineer

No fair bringing Mackies into the discussion. I also have a pair and love them.

Well, it turns out they do not sound very different at all.

Well....okay. And I am a Mackie owner, too, so I have every reason to believe, but.......this is very anecdotal and it could prove something very different from what you intended. It could only prove that it takes more differences than you experienced to make a Just Noticeable Difference. Could mean -- gasp! -- that our ears are not as sensitive to some of these differences as we might think.

100 percent fidelity is achieved with any device when the frequency response is very flat and the distortion is very low.

I'm assuming you mean in the room at the listening position. If that's the case, which is the only case that matters, IMO, how many systems can achieve 100% accuracy in the room at the listening position? Who owns them?

Sure. But accuracy is definitely a metric

What happens if the listener's ear is not 100% accurate? Wouldn't you need to go outside of "accuracy" in order to account for the inaccuracy of the listener's ears? Just like tuning for a room?

versus what someone finds subjectively pleasing. I mentioned above speakers that have an intentional dip in the harshness range. I've had people argue with me vehemently that their speaker, which I knew is 8 dB down at 3 KHz, is amazingly "accurate" simply because they like the sound.

Well.....you're guessing with that conclusion. It could just as easily be that the listener's ears are insensitive to frequencies above 3 KHz, in which case he would not notice the dip. It's also in the upper frequencies where ears tend to be less sensitive anyway and where irregularities in frequency response are more easily masked during playback of mixed tones such as music.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Sure. But accuracy is definitely a metric

What happens if the listener's ear is not 100% accurate? Wouldn't you need to go outside of "accuracy" in order to account for the inaccuracy of the listener's ears? Just like tuning for a room?

A great use for eq...

It could just as easily be that the listener's ears are insensitive to frequencies above 3 KHz, in which case he would not notice the dip. It's also in the upper frequencies where ears tend to be less sensitive anyway and where irregularities in frequency response are more easily masked during playback of mixed tones such as music.

...and even if you have hearing deficits, while ears vary, accuracy is still a metric. Got a huge dip in sensitivity above 3k? Compensate for it any way that suits you. But that would call for a response something like...

"I love my old horns. Even though they appear to be cracking the foundation of my neighbor's house, they sound great to me!"

Not the typical audiophile response...

"Measurements clearly can't tell you anything useful...sniff...my vintage Victoria Pretendors don't measure all that well, but they are the most natural and musical speakers I've ever heard, and I've heard them all. Speakers that do measure well sound antiseptic, lifeless. Measurements clearly fail to capture the breath of life that makes music music and brings the performers (from their multiple multi-tracked locations around the world) into the room. There's no surprise in that. My ears (the ones with the huge dip above 3k) are a better measurement tool than anything devised by man.

Edgy? Not since I upgraded my preamp to the Luxour Ultimatum Millenial 4000 and connected the Victorias via the Transparency Technology Swiss-Numbered Transducer Transporters. Synergy is everything, my good man."



Joking aside, natural, musical, lifeless...in this context these are terms that are soft and fuzzy enough that we can have a thread trying to define them and still not agree on a shared meaning. Accurate? High Fidelity? Not semantics, a metric and a goal that have clear meanings that are important to recording and reproduction and need to be kept alive, if it's not too late.

P

 

[rsbeck]

I agree that Audiophiles often talk funny and the ways they (we) go about achieving what sounds right are often very unscientific. All you have to do is go to an audio site like Audiogon and read the very common threads where posters write in asking which wire or cable will give a "warm" sound, which one will bring out more detail, etc. It's pretty clear to me that the desire is to use wire and cable as a tone control. Wire and cable are pretty well studied so we know it is within the realm of possibility that an oddly (poorly) constructed cable could act have an effect on the tone of one's system, but my question is always; how are you going to find this cable when the manufacturer tells you so little about it and anecdotal customer reviews are so contradictory? There is also an interesting dose of not just unscientific, but what seems to me like magical thinking going on.

To me, this is one the things I find so interesting about this hobby. You've got very classic struggles between human and machine, magic and science, myth and fact, etc.

I also agree that some might benefit from a more scientific approach, maybe even -- gasp! -- an equalizer -- to get some real control of what many would (probably unknowingly) like to control. But, I suspect this would take the magic and mystery out of the hobby for some and this is what attracts them in the first place.

In the end, it still supports my belief that most people whether objectivist or subjectivist are trying to construct a system, which includes speakers, room and individual set of ears, that sounds right. Right meaning accurate to them. To me, it all boils down to different strokes for different folks and I still believe that what can be annoying is the way people of various stripes will take whatever approach he or she favors and attach the air of superiority around it.

 

[rsbeck]

To be fair, on many audio sites, I also notice a fair amount of pseudo or half science being put forth from the so-called objectivist camp. I see conclusions being stated based on the application of some credible science combined with assumptions that are not based on credible scientific investigation.

Because in so many instances, when it comes to this hobby, it is just plain unwieldy to conduct air tight credible scientific study in order to get concrete knowledge.

For example, in the case of this thread, we don't have any facts about the state of the ears possessed by the various listeners being discussed, the speakers being considered, the rooms interactions being dealt with, etc. etc.

I have seen people on AVS talking about how accurate their systems are based on the THD numbers attached to their amplifiers, but who have no idea how much distortion is being caused by their speakers and room. One guy in particular, whose name I won't mention, was famous for touting the accuracy of his system based on these types of numbers and then when he posted pictures of his gear, I noticed his untreated listening room with very obvious problems all over the place; banks of windows, etc. Had he ever had his room measured for accuracy? He had to answer, "no."

 

[rsbeck]

An accurate system takes our individual hearing response out of the equation for all practical purposes.

That's not altogether true, either. If the desire is for accuracy, it stands to reason, the individual listener would hear both the source and the reproduction as inaccurate. Telling this listener he or she cannot adjust for his or her individual hearing response in order to achieve accuracy would be very ironic.

Apply to to another area -- the room. It is probably true that if one were to listen to the source as well as the reproduction in a room with problems, the room remains a constant so in one sense you could say the room has been removed from the equation, but it still remains that the room is not accurate and I assume we would all grant that it is completely scientific in the quest for accuracy to treat one's room.

In fact, if you look at Ponk's posts above, he says that when he finds the "source" lacking, he feels free to use his equalizer to remedy the situation.

I assume this is all done by ear.

 

[RUR]

That's not altogether true, either. If the desire is for accuracy, it stands to reason, the individual listener would hear both the source and the reproduction as inaccurate.

Wish Kal would chime in... From what I've read, people with hearing loss hear everything in the context of that loss - live and reproduced. The result is that what sounds "natural" to them is a frequency spectrum different from that for someone with no loss. If one were to EQ that loss out in the reproduction chain, they'd find it harsh and decidedly unnatural.

 

[rsbeck]

I'd like to see the study from which that conclusion was drawn because my own experience contradicts this. Like most men, as I've aged, I have lost some sensitivity to higher frequencies. If I use an equalizer to boost the higher frequencies, it certainly does not sound harsh and unnatural.

 

[rsbeck]

Also doesn't account for speakers and room interactions. It assumes that various listeners have never heard accurate sound and have no mental audio "picture" with which to compare. Assumes a whole bunch of things we cannot know.

 

[rsbeck]

Here are the problems, as I see it;

1) Any music reproduction system is a chain that includes speakers, room, and a human in the listening position.

2) I still want to know who has a system that measures audibly accurate at the listening position. In other words, not enough deviation from flat and not enough distortion to be audible.

3) We don't know whether people are tuning their systems in order to correct for individual speaker, room, or hearing differences.

4) Even Ponk, if you read his posts above, says he has an equalizer in order to adjust his system when he finds the source wanting, so even he does not feel bound to maintain fidelity to the "accuracy" of the source. How does he judge whether the source is lacking? Is this done scientifically? I assume it is done based on his ear and based on achieving a sound that sounds more accurate according to his mental audio "picture" since accuracy is his goal.

5) I see no reason to believe that this is not the exact same protocol everyone else is using albeit with possibly less control than that achieved with an equalizer.

 

[Ron Party]

An accurate system takes our individual hearing response out of the equation for all practical purposes.

Tom

That's not altogether true, either. If the desire is for accuracy, it stands to reason, the individual listener would hear both the source and the reproduction as inaccurate.

Rob, we know that human hearing is anything but accurate. Tom is correct. At the end of the day, accuracy is determined by means far more *accurate* than any individual's hearing.

Telling this listener he or she cannot adjust for his or her individual hearing response in order to achieve accuracy would be very ironic.

Ironic? Not IMO because your premise begs the question. One always can adjust for one's hearing response, but be clear about it, in doing so one is adjusting for one's own taste. Whatever the sound is which comes out of a system, it comes whether or not an individual is in the room. It's the same as the riddle of "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

How we go about achieving accuracy is a matter separate and apart from taste.