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
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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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?


audiotroy,

I think it depends on what we mean by "aggressive." Certainly trumpets have a lot of acoustic power and can play in the high frequencies. In that sense they can sound aggressive. But when it comes to hi fi reproduction, "aggressive" tends to mean overbearing upper/high frequencies, usually an unnaturally sharpened effect.

The effect can make our ears want to "scrunch down" even though the sound level being played back is not particularly loud, and not even approaching the volume of a real brass instrument.

I recently listened to a marching band (was in London, watching changing of the guard) and I was struck by how beautiful and smooth the tone of the horns were - loud yet "relaxed and smooth toned" - the exact opposite of "aggressive" in the hi fi sense.

I have my system dialed in to get a similar presentation for horns, trumpets etc: brilliance, balls, but smooth without the feeling of hi-fi artifice and wanting to "shut down my ears" when they play aggressively - like in real life.
Many brass instruments can have an aggressive sound, do trumpets played in an open space sound melodic vs a harp

That aggressive sound could be from a hifi with too much treble energy. However, it could also be due to age related hearing loss. 

Basically, as sounds get louder, they abruptly go from being inaudible to painfully loud.