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Two Type of sound and listener preference are there more?

In our thirty years of professional audio system design and setup, we keep on running into two distinctly different types of sound and listeners.

Type One: Detail, clarity, soundstage, the high resolution/accuracy camp. People who fall into this camp are trying to reproduce the absolute sound and use live music as their guide.

Type Two: Musicality camp, who favors tone and listenability over the high resolution camp. Dynamics, spl capabilty, soundstaging are less important. The ability for a system to sound real is less important than the overall sound reproduced "sounds good."

Are there more then this as two distincly different camps?

We favor the real is good and not real is not good philosophy.

Some people who talk about Musicaility complain when a sytem sounds bright with bright music.

In our viewpoint if for example you go to a Wedding with a Live band full of brass instruments like horns, trumpts etc it hurts your ears, shouldn’t you want your system to sound like a mirror of what is really there? Isn’t the idea to bring you back to the recording itself?

Please discuss, you can cite examples of products or systems but keep to the topic of sound and nothing else.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ
128x128audiotroy
kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,428 posts
 
Dave, It gets worse.  According to John Siau, technical director of Benchmark Media, overly warm sounding gear can make instruments with complex harmonic structure, like piano, to sound like out of tune.

Many people find natural sounding amps fatiguing, driving speaker with harsh metal dome tweeter.  They seek warm/dull sounding amp to fix it.

Believe it or not, somebody asked on this forum how to make sound warmer with less detail.  I recommended thick blanket over speakers.

Another person stated that the sound of the Benchmark DAC is too detailed - meaning each instruments can be identified.  He preferred all instrument together like sound blob.  We like what we got used to.  
seanheis1
627 posts
 
Believe it or not, somebody asked on this forum how to make sound warmer with less detail. I recommended thick blanket over speakers.

If I hear a speaker that is putting out so much detail that I'm hearing things that I've never noticed before and that shouldn't be audible in the mix, it tells me that the speaker is doing something wrong...it's typically due to a boost in the area that I'm hearing too much of and a dip in other frequencies. 

Another person stated that the sound of the Benchmark DAC is too detailed - meaning each instruments can be identified. He preferred all instrument together like sound blob. We like what we got used to.

If you strip away the natural harmonics of music, you get a lean and very detailed sound. Some like it, some don't. To each their own.     
prof
3,474 posts
 
audiotroy,

I have no problems with your take on dialing in audio systems.  We all have our own approach.

But why do you continue to cling to obviously fallacious arguments like this:

Of course these products work companies like Cardas, Wireworld, Nordost, and many others wouldn't be able to grow to the size they are if these products were not effective and din't produce real results
.
That is far from obvious!  Astrologists, homeopaths, faith healers etc thrive with millions of subscribers to those and plenty of other dubious claims.   The fact there is a market for something in no way established the truth of the pheneomenon in question.

Its clear many people will never familiarize themselves with the facts about the power of suggestion and bias, and just keep falling back on “but a lot of us swear it works!” arguments, spinning their epistemological wheels.

roberjerman
4,319 posts
 
"Musicality" is the refuge of the willfully ignorant!
jon_5912
605 posts
 
@Prof I think your point combined with "do you think we are investing thousands and thousands of dollars in matching equipment to make the Personas especially the 9H's sound great if it wasn't necessary?" demonstrates to all reasonable people that the audio doctor is only interested in extracting money from the gullible.  He's here to show us the one true way and that way just happens to require all our money.  How convenient.  
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