Mabokov, the idea isn't to wince when playing the system, that is called tuning. However, the point I was trying to convey is that there are some people who like systems which when we talk about being musical may not mean balanced, but deliberately rolled off.
So in our minds and system tunning we are trying to capture the energy and liveness of music with realistic treble.
There are good speakers that have shelved treble response, if you remember the Spica TC 50, it was so listenable, huge soundstage great imaging.
We had a totally different response to the Quad's then JHillis, we had Quad ESL 63 US Monitors which we were using with dual Entec subs.
The Quads were very musical but never had the dynamic impact of the Wilson Watt Puppy 5 which proceeded the Quads.
Long story short the Wilson's captured the energy and excitement of live music while the Quads just sounded "beautiful" just not realitic.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ |
How many on here listen to their music in pure mode? I can’t stand that sound. I have auditioned some speakers and the pre-amps that were being used had NO tone controls.! That’s the first thing I head for, is the thump and the sizzle. And nothing blaring in the middle. I guess that’s why I never use audyssey for music . It converts everything to flat. Flat sounds .....flat. But I bet lots of folk on here like it that way .. |
@timlub +1 If I listened to both of them on a system without knowing them so well, how would that translate in front of my in my system. Can you get the same emotion and feel from these 2 very different performances? To me, That explains musical. |
I appreciate the discussion. Some observations to share: - After a few decades of demonstration, I have no doubt there can be a strong left-brain/right-brain difference among listeners, and some listeners are in the middle, who eventually make emotional and physical connections to their music- their wives certainly did, right away! All this does assume the system is musical in the first place.
- When I was in high school, the left-brained ran the A/V dept, getting out the film projectors, running them for class. A few years later, that became TVs and VCRs. I observed that none could or would dance. None played instruments, sang, nor was interested in any of the arts. No one can deny that many of these technical fellows became audio designers (and reviewers, and magazine editors).
- I have watched countless individuals, including reviewers, clearly not hear when one system at a show was exceedingly musical compared to many other systems nearby.
- Most reviews start off with observations on 'detail', 'imaging', 'impact', and so on. Few begin with 'musicality' and 'engagement' or 'involvement'. Perhaps this is reflective of those reviewers and even of how poorly their room is setup, more so than the gear. But if some piece of kit was truly musical by a large margin, you'd think an experienced reviewer would hear this right away and report on it. So, I take this to mean that most gear is not musical. Which has been my experience.
- Regular CDs can be extraordinarily musical yet lacking no details, even on solid-state systems. The trouble seems to be with playback, not with their recording, and I have the recording background to back up this observation.
But I have only ever heard this four times since the advent of the CD, and neither system complexity nor price were necessarily why.
- How do we know what to hear from a recording when we were not in the studio? We know it when we hear it, again, assuming we are wired to respond to musicality. As those are who also sing, play instruments, dance, and appreciate the arts.
- I have heard several times some gear combinations come together in their flaws to become truly musical, while still lacking many details of the recordings. Best to leave this as fortuitous luck!
Roy Johnson Green Mountain Audio |
Roy,
The problem I have with your use of the term "musical," and the use of that term in general, is that it is so subjective as to be essentially uninformative.
One person's sterile/analytical is another person's "musical." One person's rich and rolled off system is "musical"and to another "boring and un-engaging."
We've all gone through plenty of systems/speakers that at first were "musical" to us, but which we later abandoned.
There have been many polls along the lines of "what speaker got you off the merry-go-round/which speaker is your life-time speaker?" and the answers for the speaker that finally gave musical satisfaction are all over the map, representing every design approach. Some people find Wilson the bees-knees, others have thought them the antithesis of what they are looking for in music reproduction.
So when you tell me you find something "musical" all I can gather is that you like it. The fact some other people didn't "recognize" something as musical like yourself isn't an objective failing on their part, anymore as your failure to find their choice to be musical.
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