Real or Surreal. Do you throw accuracy out the window for "better" sound?

@snilf 

Super real will do I suppose. In the case of the system I mentioned, very pretty, but not realistic. Female voices and violins are not sibilant in person. Drummers do not set up their kit so the cymbals are 10 feet in front of the snare. 

Obviously, this takes a proper live recording. I find it amusing that engineers of yor  do a better job of getting this right. 

This system is not beyond help at all. Just a steady roll off from 1 kHz at 1 dB/oct would result is less super-realism, but more accurate sound.  Because this system is point source, images will alway be smaller, as if you are seated in the back of the venue. The system has very accurate bass down to about 50 Hz where it starts to lose power. He really needs two 15" subwoofers, another rabbit hole. 

Sounding correct in terms of timbre is relatively easy. It is just a matter of correct amplitude response given a loudspeaker with a well designed crossover and phase response.  Casting an image is the hard part. You can't know what you are missing until you experience it. It was about 10 years as an audiophile until I heard a system image correctly and another 10 before I could reliably replicate it. 

In short, IMHO, it does not have to be perfectly accurate, it just has to be convincing.

hilde45: Like the pragmatism, but not so sure about Pierce (despite mahgister's fondness). And I don't see how we can do away with the ding an sich! The "I'm not a nominalist either" remark was a response to mahgister's opening line.

Mahgister: "It is the strangest claim in the world—raised sometimes, but never lived up to even by those who raise it—that one should present experiences without any theoretical link between them, and leave it to the reader, or the pupil, to form his own convictions.  But the mere looking at a thing gradually merges into contemplation, contemplation into thinking, thinking into establishing connections, and thus it is possible to say that every attentive glance which we cast on the world is an act of theorizing.  This, however, ought to be done with consciousness, self-criticism, freedom, and, to use a daring word, with irony…."  "Theorizing is inherent in all human experience, and the highest intellectual achievement would be to comprehend that everything factual is already theory."  Goethe, in a translation by my former teacher Erich Heller.

(Listening now to Mozart's "Linz" symphony in the superlative performance by Berlin and Abbado in a great 20-bit Sony recording.)

Thanks for the beautiful Quote snilf ...

Like the pragmatism, but not so sure about Pierce (despite mahgister’s fondness). And I don’t see how we can do away with the ding an sich! The "I’m not a nominalist either" remark was a response to mahgister’s opening line.

The thing- in- itself idea came from the brain-in-itself idea ...

And Kant decided to fix for himself the task to explain how is it possible that we can know something in spite of the thing-in -itself, or with it...He suppose a brain-in-itself facing a thing-in-itself to do the job via active schematizing imagination ......

Peirce was a reeducated and a recuperating Kantian ,because he was also a polymath scientist, a more pragmatic man and then he created pragmatism to face and cure Kantism , because he never bought the thing-in-itself nor the brain-in-itself double ideas ...Peirce is nearer to Goethe IMPLICIT phenomenology and semiotic in his scientific books than to Kant ... Contemporary science had quit pure materialism since 1925 and any Cartesian claims of dualism is void now...

My best philosopher of science right now is an Indian genius , who discovered how the microtubules work on each neuron at another frequencies scale and in a quantum way... All the universe is based on musical synchronization in a way...The synchronization tool clocks are time crystals arranged geometrically by the prime number distribution...

His ideas are so novel creative and complex i can only refer people to his book ; nanobrain... All other A.I. scientist resemble each other mathematically compared to this new innovative and completely different genius on a level of creativity of his own with a new information theory and a new concept of Artificial consciousness ...

But beware he spoke the most horrible english possible, be patient...

Here two short conferences :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNKRbujzSok&list=PLnQJF3Qi_4_ANsyFHeEjTVNyZ-OWWoY9Q&index=3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5YyxHzT6QI&list=PLnQJF3Qi_4_ANsyFHeEjTVNyZ-OWWoY9Q&index=1

His twitter account :

https://twitter.com/anirbanbandyo/status/1696414403531264483

Anirban work with Penrose and Hameroff, on the microtubules physics but his own ideas are independant and totally revolutionary by themselves...

Here Hameroff in a short take on microtubules physics :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDgFFvu-0Z8&list=PLnQJF3Qi_4_ANsyFHeEjTVNyZ-OWWoY9Q&index=2

mijostyn,

You mentioned a "bright" system imaging the cymbals "10 feet in front of the snare." Well, there are more egregious imaging manipulations, especially with drums, that are a deliberate artifact of the original mastering. The drums on Tool’s "Fear Inoculum," for instance. The drum set seems HUGE, spanning the entire width of the (reproduced) soundstage and even indulging in moving back and forth across the breath of the stereo image! It has been remarked on this forum before that, in a jazz ensemble, the drums "should" be in the center rear, as they would actually be on stage, and they should STAY there. But that exaggerated effect with Tool is undeniably exciting—and not at all uncommon in rock, where a simulacrum of a live club performance is not what the engineers were going for. Think of the drums (again, just for instance!) on any Rush album. During the instrumental section of "Tom Sawyer," the drums start on the left and move across the "stage." This is NOT "realistic," but it is kind of thrilling.

All I’m saying is that, although I also go for "realistic" audio reproduction, and consider the "real" sound of acoustic instruments a kind of benchmark (given the many remarks in this thread already about the questionable status of "the real"), heavily produced music is obviously not bound by this principle. And that doesn’t make such music somehow a failure.

None of which is meant to suggest that you’re not right to want to restrain the frequency response of your system so that a not-intended effect of foregrounding certain frequencies is defeated as much as possible.

In my opinion you are right...

All I’m saying is that, although I also go for "realistic" audio reproduction, and consider the "real" sound of acoustic instruments a kind of benchmark

Add to that all the information lost in stereo system by crosstalk , about spatial aspects of sound... A subject very well studied by Edgar Choueiri...

For me "realistic" dont refer to the gear but to acoustic and psycho-acoustic controls about real acoustic instrument in a real acoustic space... Heavily processed music is not the benchmark with which we can judge a system ... We speak about acoustic here not about taste in music or taste in gear ...😊