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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
audiotroy
jon_5912
611 posts
 
This is illustrating why I'm in camp one.  I don't have the patience for all of the navel gazing and tail chasing that goes into trying to come up with my own personal definition of musical.  It's obviously subjective.  It's the perfect amount of HF roll-off the, perfect amount of even order harmonic distortion, the perfect frequency response that has the preferred inaccuracies.  

I have no problem with people having a preferred flavor but when they start to use their personal taste as a tool to belittle people who have different tastes they need to be called out on it.  Anybody who uses the phrase "truly musical" should be dismissed entirely. 
ctsooner's avatar
ctsooner
2,480 posts
 
Does the music make your toes tap?  There are different flavors in the high end.  Components certainly have a 'house sound' to them.  We all know what we like and don't like, but all too often we listen to dealers or even friends who are with us, thinking they know more and we should like what they do. 

This thread has made me wonder, what if you were to go into a rooms with different sounding systems set up and you didn't know the price, couldn't see anything.  What would you pick?  No personal contact with anyone while in teh room and not until you have chosen your system.  What would you chose?  I have often gone to dealers and asked ahead of time to have them set up their three best systems in three different rooms (if they had three) and not tell me the cost.  It's a fun test and it tells you a lot as to what made my toes tap, thats for sure.

jayctoy's avatar
jayctoy
4,397 posts
 
Audiotroy, actually I prefer both , musicality and liveness,  in the stereo set up , Liveness is not hard to accomplish but putting musicality and liveness in the system is not easy, but it can be done, good train ears is needed, familiarity in matching gears and cables as well. Audio reviewers usually they are able to achieve both easily, because they have good train ears, they listen a lot, and years of experience...
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audiotroy's avatar
audiotroy OP
3,933 posts
 
D2girls nothing wrong here. Many brass instruments can have an aggressive sound, do trumpets played in an open space sound melodic vs a harp

How about cymbols, high hats?


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